JAMIE QUATRO
Jamie Quatro travels due south to Mobile for a reading at the Stokes Center for Creative Writing. It is her first venture into the Lower Alabama landscape— during Mardi Gras, no less.
My student host, Amy, picks me up in a cherry-red Cooper Mini—a borrowed ride, it turns out.
“My own car has a massive ant problem,” she tells me. I don’t press for details.
Satori Coffee House. It’s February 12. Mardi Gras is still a few weeks away but everyone is decorating. People keep reminding me that the festival originated in Mobile, not in New Orleans. Mobile’s Mardi Gras festival, I’m told, is the oldest annual Carnival celebration in the country.
Amy’s husband Matthew is a glass-blowing instructor at the University; the story I’ve planned to read at the event tonight is narrated by a glass-blowing assistant. It’s too spooky a coincidence to ignore. We cancel our brunch plans and go to Matthew’s studio.
Prior to the invention of the blowpipe, Matthew tells us, glassware was expensive. It had to be mold-poured, clipped, and dug out. “Then the blow pipe comes along during the Roman Empire, and suddenly it’s affordable,” he says. “All because of this…bubble.”
Roki assists in the studio, wearing an orange jacket for visibility.
It’s started to drizzle, but we stop at the swamp near the Mobile Museum of Art. Amy’s a birder. She points out an Anhinga (“It means devil bird,” she says, “or snake bird”) and an Osprey. She tells me the Osprey has something like opposable thumbs on its talons, and that it flies carrying captured fish in its feet, orienting the fish head-first to ease wind resistance.
After guest lecturing in a fiction workshop, I go back to my hotel and realize I’ve lost my scarf. It’s not an expensive scarf, but it was presented to me by a Tibetan Buddhist monk in India. I text Amy, who promises to look for it. (A student finds it under my chair, after workshop; eventually the scarf makes its way back to Amy, who puts it in her car and mails it to me after the Mardi Gras festival is over. I love the thought of my Tibetan Buddhist scarf riding out the Mardi Gras festivities in a car with a massive ant problem.)
The evening reading goes well. It’s a big turnout for a rainy Tuesday. I read a very short story (not the glassblowing narrator, as planned), followed by an essay in which I mention my bout of post-partum depression. It’s the first time I’ve ever read non-fiction publicly.
For the rest of the evening—during the Q&A, signing, and the after-party at Charlotte’s house—the depression is what everyone wants to talk about. Thank you for your bravery, thank you for your vulnerability. People want to share their own stories of depression with me. One woman tells me she didn’t leave her house for a year.
I decide I should read nonfiction more often.
Jamie Quatro's debut novel, Fire Sermon, published in 2018 with Grove Press (U.S.), Picador (U.K.), and Anansi International (Canada). Selected as one of the Top Seven Novels of 2018 by The Economist, and named a Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle, Bloomberg, LitHub, and Times Literary Supplement, Fire Sermon is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers book, an Indie Next pick, and a New York Times Editors' Choice. The novel is forthcoming in translation in The Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Poland.
Quatro's debut collection, I Want To Show You More, was a New York Times Notable Book, an NPR Best Book of 2013, and was chosen as a favorite book of 2013 by James Wood in The New Yorker and Dwight Garner in the New York Times. The collection was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Georgia Townsend Fiction Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize.
A contributing editor at Oxford American, Quatro’s work has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. Her stories are anthologized in the O.Henry Prize Stories 2013, The Story and Its Writer, and the 2018 Pushcart Prize Anthology. She holds an MA in English from the College of William and Mary and an MFA in Fiction from the Bennington College Writing Seminars, and lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
https://www.kenyonreview.org/journal/mar-apr-2018/selections/