Jamie Quatro is the author of the story collection I Want To Show You More (Grove, 2013) and the forthcoming novel Fire Sermon (Grove/Picador, 2018). She lives in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. An excerpt from her story “Dirt Man” can be found here. It appears in the Mar/Apr 2018 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Dirt Man”?
Our house is actually built on a privy that dates back to the Civil War. The kids and I used to spend hours after school digging in a particular spot in our backyard. Now we have a nice collection of late-1800s snake oil medicine bottles. I take them out in the spring and line them up on a kitchen window ledge as bud vases for daffodils and tulips. One spring a few years ago we heard that a beloved woman in our community—one of those locally famous wealthy families known and admired for their overwhelming generosity—was diagnosed with ALS. I started thinking about what it would be like to watch someone suffer in that way. I was also re-reading Augustine’s Confessions and thinking about modes of confession. Medicine bottles, ALS, confession—I suppose those three elements collided, and combusted.
The Dirt Man makes a storybook sort of bargain with the protagonist: the two can be friends so long as she never digs above his mouth. This makes the protagonist’s desire run wild. Are there other stories you admire that employ a high-stakes rule like this one early on? Are there other authors writing in this vein you’d especially recommend?
Funny, I never noticed that idea in Dirt Man—the notion that prohibition creates desire. That’s central to my new novel, Fire Sermon. It’s also in my linked stories in the first collection. I suppose it’s one of my “themes.” Though I dislike using that word, because it implies that writers “intend” them in some way. I think thematic resonance within a piece, and within a body of work, comes from a deep place in the writer’s personality or psyche, some unknown and probably unknowable source. It isn’t helpful to probe that source too deeply, or to even think about what my stories are “about.” When I’m drafting, if I start thinking about anything other than the flesh & blood reality of my characters and their world, I’m sunk.
As for other writers . . . Kafka comes to mind, of course. The Trial, where Josef K is arrested for breaking some inscrutable set of rules. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, where Vladimir and Estragon must wait in a certain spot by the tree—for whom and for how long, they don’t know. Come to think of it, Godot is mentioned in “Dirt Man.” Among contemporary writers, George Saunders does the rules-heightens-desire thing better than anyone. “Return to Spiderhead” is a great example, and the title story in Pastoralia. Characters trapped in surreal situations with rules they must either live with, or break at their own peril.
From the early digging to the neurological surgeon who came back from the dead, there is a dynamic relationship between the physical world (blood, dirt) and the spiritual world. Our understanding of this deepens as we learn about Harry. How did dirt come into focus at the center of your story?
When I was young I desperately wanted to be a Catholic. My best friend was Catholic, and so were my cousins. I envied them their medals and saints, their incense and holy water, their rituals and plaid uniform skirts. We went to the Church of Christ, which had nothing: no artwork or stained glass or even instruments. I used to sneak into this church near our house—it was Episcopalian but used to be a Catholic monastery—because it had a confessional in the basement. I’d go inside the little wooden phone booth and kneel down and it was dark and utterly quiet. Confession felt like an interior, underground experience. In “Dirt Man,” the woman, too, goes underground to find her confessor.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
Anything I do that puts me in the moment—where I’m in my body, not my head—is good for my writing. Running, yoga, going to the dog park, hiking, traveling. I recently went to Barcelona and spent an entire day with a glass artisan, learning the copper foil technique for making stained glass. Those hours flew by. I couldn’t wait to write when I got back to the hotel.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
Best: trust your reader.
Worst: write what you know. The longer I write, the more I want to write about everything I don’t know.