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Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.

Jamie Quatro: What is the line between, you know, mental illness and spiritual ecstasy? It's a really good question. I mean, going all the way back to the medieval women mystics, this visionary modality of apprehending. spiritual reality is pretty common. Is it madness? Is it genius? Right? That's a question we hold intention.

And I finally, I think it was sacramental theology that I was after all along. And it made sense of what I was doing as a fiction writer, the incarnation sanctified matter forever. And that the fiction writer is very much engaged in matter, the body, the senses. And it was coming out of those other traditions was hard to reconcile, you know, spirit is, is good and, and, and body is bad in this sort of Neoplatonic way.

And how wrong that thinking is that heaven and earth are intersected, interlocked at every point. And that Christianity, isn't this some like pie in the sky, someday we all get out of our bodies and go to heaven. What Christ, the resurrected Christ means is. embodiment. And that I feel like that's that's the project of fiction is sanctifying matter and staying at that realm of matter because that is in fact where heaven is.

But for me, it was kind of where I came to rest as a fiction writer that I can stay in the realm of bodies and sweat and sexual desire and a whorl of wood in an oak table. And the Scent of garlic on the fingertips. You know, the, the clean spectacles pushed back on a bald head to invoke Seamus Haney. But that is where the fiction writer lives, and that is where God lives.

Evan Rosa: This is for the life of the world, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. 

Macie Bridge: I'm Macy Bridge with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. As

the prophet stood, the movie screen dropped in front of him. It's bottom edge hovering an inch above his wife's body. It was always the first thing he saw when the visions cut in on him. Unscrolling fabric, clean sheet white, five feet square. On the screen was a planet Earth, sketched in colored pencil.

Flat and messy, the way a child might draw it. Loose screen shapes on a blue circle. Inside the Earth, something was squirming around. A crack appeared at the equator, snaked down through the continent of Africa, and the planet split open like an egg. Knuckles, forearm, elbow, a fist and arm punching its way out.

The fist came all the way down off the screen and rested on his sleeping wife's belly. The hand opened. The prophet looked. The palm cradled a curled up fetus, sticky with blood. A cord twisted out from its middle, metallic silver, like the pull chain on a lamp. The fetus gave off a high pitched electric buzz.

The skin was wax paper, see through, with blue marbled veins like the Twisted up vines inside. A faint light pulsed in its bald head. He saw the feeble, quivering heart. Spirit housed in meat, the prophet heard his own voice say. Eternity sealed up in clay jars. The hand closed, squeezing the fetus tight. The prophet waited for it to pull back inside the earth, but it punched into his wife's belly the same way it had punched itself out of the planet.

His wife made a sound the prophet recognized, an animal dying or in heat. Out of rags, riches, another voice, thousands of voices, the sound of a mighty waterfall. And then the hand was pulling back, the earth was closing around the fist, the screen rolled up and disappeared, and there was his wife. With her eyes wide and all her teeth showing.

The prophet saw his own hand was resting on her stomach. Please take your hand off me. She said.

Now mystics and prophets have reported receiving visions from the divine for centuries, thus sayeth the Lord Hildegard of binge in's, mystical visions recorded in her sc are some of my favorites. But we have many recorded from others like Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola, Catherine of Siena, or Julian of Norwich.

So, historically speaking, visions are not the most abnormal way for God to show up in someone's life. But what would you think if you met a seer of visions in the present day? Maybe some of you have. What about a prophet whose visions came like a movie screen unfurled before him? The images grotesque and vivid, all in the unsuspecting backwoods setting of Lookout Mountain, deep in the south of Tennessee.

Would you believe it? Would you believe him? Well, I'd never quite imagined this before, but this is the beauty of fiction. As readers, we get to ask the question alongside the author. What if? That's exactly what Jamie Quatro has allowed us to do in her newest work of literary fiction, Two Step Devil. What if an earnest and wildly misunderstood Christian is left alone on Lookout Mountain?

What if the receiver of visions makes art that reaches a girl who's stuck in the darkest grip of a fraught world? What if the devil really did sit in the corner of the kitchen wearing a cowboy hat? And what if he got to tell his own side of the biblical story? On today's episode, Jamie shares about her own relationship to the theological exploration within Two Step Devil, her experience of being a Christian and a writer.

But not a Christian writer, and how the trinity of main characters in this novel speak to and open up her own deepest concerns about the state of our country and the world we inhabit. Jamie is the New York Times notable author of I Want to Show You More and Fire Sermon. Two Step Devil is her latest work and is the winner of the 2024 Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing.

And it's also been named a New York Times Editor's Choice, among other accolades. Jamie teaches in the Suwannee School of Letters MFA program. Fair warning, this episode does contain substantial spoilers to the novel's plot. So if you'd like to read it for yourself, this is your chance to pause the episode and hop on over to your local bookstore.

But for those of you continuing on with me and novelist Jamie Quatro, I think you're in for a treat. Thank you for listening today. Jamie, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. Thank you for having me. So I'm just thrilled to be diving into the world of contemporary fiction as a whole with you, the theological perspectives that you bring to the art form, and also to be discussing your masterpiece of a new novel, Two Step Devil, which is just bursting with your own theological work and so many heavy social issues and Not only religious language, but you're pulling on the Bible and some biblical literature.

I'm thrilled to be diving into it with you. I think for the benefit of our listeners, I would love if you could offer us a brief synopsis of the novel before we dive into how you got there. Yeah, I'll help you to do so. Fuse 

Jamie Quatro: of Devil, which it came out last year in September, is set in 2014. And the main character is a character, his name's Winston, but he's known as the prophet.

He lives off grid in the backwoods of Lookout Mountain, Alabama. And he's kind of plagued with, or blessed with, depending on your take, visions, apocalyptic visions. He has these kind of epic cosmic battles and he believes that they're visions of the end. Of the world that he is meant to take to the White House to Washington, D.

C. To President Obama. So this is the Obama era second term, and he believes because he's getting sick and he's unable to take them himself. Now that he's older, he believes a big fish is coming who will take these visions to the White House. One day he's scrounging for materials in the local junkyard And he happens to see a car with no plates pull up to an abandoned gas station across the way.

And in the back seat is a young adolescent girl with zip ties on her wrists. And he comes to believe two things that she is being trafficked, which is in fact, is true. And that he is Met to rescue her because she's the big fish that he's been waiting for. Kind of an angel sent from God to take these visions to the White House.

So what follows is a dramatic rescue scene. And then something kind of unexpected, which is a tender, almost grandfather, granddaughter relationship that grows up between these two. There's a third character in this novel, um, the titular character, two step devil, who throughout the prophets section taunts.

A prophet, and we can get more into him as we talk, but an actual character is the figment of the prophet's imagination. So that triptych or that triad trio of characters is the major. Those are the major players in the novel. 

Macie Bridge: They're so fascinating. Jamie, before we dive into the. theological and religious work that is going on in this novel.

I've heard you say before that you reject the label of a Christian writer. And so for our listeners who may be coming to a podcast about a fiction novel that is engaged with these themes and assuming that you are a Christian writer, what is your response to that label? How do you deal with that? 

Jamie Quatro: Right.

Macie Bridge: I'm a 

Jamie Quatro: Christian. And I'm a writer. As soon as those two things get smashed together, I, I begin to grow uncomfortable simply because. The word Christian means a lot of different things to a lot of different people in this country alone, not to mention worldwide. And secondly, I'm not, it kind of connotes this idea that I'm writing fiction that might proselytize or be sharing the gospel in some way, which is absolutely not what I'm trying to do or ever would want to do.

I also wouldn't go to a surgeon and say, are you a Christian surgeon or. It doesn't matter to me whether the artist behind the work is a Christian or not. If the work is true and beautiful and excellent, by default, in my view, it is Christian work. But that also doesn't mean, it could have nothing to do whatsoever with the Bible or Christianity, and it could still be.

God's work because I believe anything beautiful and true as a Christian, I would believe anything beautiful and true. The art takes on a life of its own, right? Beauty and truth are all that matter. And the writer's identity does not matter. One of the reasons I, I bristle is I think it just loads people's expectations coming to the work of what they might be expecting to find.

It cheapens both words. It makes. The act of writing seemed like a didactic or a proselytizing maneuver that, you know, while you're only a writer, if you are going to be kind of a shoehorning in Christian ideas, and if you're a Christian writer, your work by default will The approach in these Christian topics, and there's no denying that my work is filled with the Bible, theology, all of those things, but if the label Christian writers slapped on it or Christian fiction or whatever slapped on it, that presupposes a certain way of approaching the Bible and approaching material, which my characters may be using the Bible in subversive ways, they may be heretical, they may be, in fact, they may be the devil who retelling the gospel and You know, is the devil telling the devil's version of the gospel Christian fiction?

I don't think so. So I definitely resist that label. I don't think that the author's identity or theology or religious practice should matter. That the work itself is what matters. Whether it's written by a Christian, an atheist, an agnostic, a Hindu, whatever.

Macie Bridge: They're so fascinating. So, so how did this novel open up for you? Where did you find your way in? Was it one of the characters in particular, or was it one of these issues that you really needed to get into? Tell me how it opened up for you. 

Jamie Quatro: Yes. Most of my work, in fact, all of it always starts in the physical realm, not with ideas or issues or theological concepts.

It's always some image or line of dialogue or something tactile, something material. So in the case of this novel, Well, I'll just tell you the Genesis story of how this book came to be. My daughter was 15, my oldest daughter, she was learning to drive, just gotten her permit and we lived on lookout mountain.

And if you know anything about lookout mountain, it's a terrible place to teach a 15 year old to drive because the roads they're windy, they're up and down. You just don't want to be in the passenger seat with a new driver. But if you got the back of the mountain where the plateau kind of lengthens out to Alabama, the roads are straight.

So I said, honey, let's go out there. We'll get up some speed. You can practice. We got lost and came upon this shack on the side of the road that had pumpkins and gourds and things laid out for sale. It was October. I thought as long as we're out here, we'll buy our pumpkins. Old man came out of this cabin.

introduced himself and asked if I would like to come inside and see his prophecy paintings. And I knew, of course, my daughter's like, mom, don't get out of the car. I'm a writer. I had to get out of the car. She waited in the car. I went inside and that began a 15 year friendship with this man. Ralph was very much the inspiration for the character of Winston, the prophet.

Now the situation in the novel, rescuing the girl, kidnapping, really all of that is a fabrication. But the characters based on this real man straight out of his Flannery O'Connor territory. It's Georgia, it's rural, south, and not just topographic Flannery O'Connor territory, but really spiritually too. I felt myself very much in that locus.

So I knew I had a character and eventually after a few years, I said, Ralph, would you, how would you feel if you were the inspiration for a character in one of my books? And of course he was thrilled. And then every time I would go visit him, he would, he'd say, you've got your camera out, you've got your notebook and go.

And he would just talk. And share his artwork, which is really stunning. And I would, I would love to possibly if we, if I can't share some of it with you, I don't know if there's a way to share that with listeners, but it really is stunning, stunning artwork. And 

Macie Bridge: it really is, especially in light of the very original and personal and quote unquote, outsider nature of Ralph's work work that likely would have stayed up on lookout mountain rather than make it into the public eye, let alone a gallery space, or as.

inspiration for a novel. If you'd like to see some of Ralph's provocative art, along with a picture of Jamie with him, check out the show notes for a link to the photos. And the piece we're about to discuss is the featured image for this episode.

It's fascinating. I was not expecting the character to be rooted in a real. Person. So since these are based on real pieces of art from a real artist that you've connected with, take me into these pieces of artwork. Will you offer our audience a description of one that particularly speaks to maybe Winston's character for us?

Jamie Quatro: Absolutely. One of the very first paintings I encountered, which is actually still hanging on the outside of his cabin, depicts this giant sheep with its mouth It kind of there's a hook around its upper teeth with this hand. It almost looks like a six fingered hand holding the mouth open or prying the mouth open.

And then a very small ram being. Shoved inside of this hooked open mouth and there is text written on all of his art, which is common kind of across all outsider artists and we can talk more to you about the research I did into into outsider artists, but the text says feed my sheep and then to the right of that, there's a holy Bible with another Lamb figure splayed across the pages of the Bible with three crosses above it.

There's all kinds of red that I think is meant to depict the blood of Christ, the words of Jesus Christ across the top of this painting. And then behind this giant sheep is the planet earth. And you'll see throughout the novel that the prophet is obsessed with images of planet earth. Maybe he has these cosmic visions and they always take the form of something happening on physical depiction of the planet, whether it's donkeys dancing on the earth or flying around the earth.

So yeah, so this is one of the very first paintings that I encountered of his. And of course, I think in Ralph's mind, the meaning of this painting Is that the world, the giant sheep needs to feast on Christ, the lamb of God. But as the prophet in the book is looking at this painting that he's made, he's thinking to himself, why would a sheep be eating a lamb eating one of its own?

And that he comes to see this painting as Indicating the traffickers and the men who are buying this young girl as assuming not just her, but all of the young women who are being abused in this way. So, so in the, in the, in real life, he has this one thing, but in the novel, the prophet in Winston comes to see it in an entirely different way than I think the real Ralph would intend.

Yes. 

Macie Bridge: And I think one of the beautiful things of doing a bit of a process, like what you've done here is that you're able to bring the reader into kind of the, Maybe thought process and difficulty of reconciling and grappling with these images, then maybe if somebody just encountered as, I mean, you encountered very generously this artwork in real life, the medium of encountering it in the novel allows the reader to really go deep into the thought process and experience of holding this image in the way that the vision was received.

But tell me what, I haven't heard the term outsider art before. So unpack that for us. 

Jamie Quatro: Let's talk a little bit about that term because first of all, my, my daughter who works in the art world in New York City has said actually outside art is no longer the correct term for this kind of art, but folk art or self taught actually is the.

term. These are artists that exist, but they haven't had formal training and yet they're producing massive amounts of art. So I don't know if you've heard of Howard Finster in Georgia. He's one of them. There's a very long tradition of these folk artists off the grid working and Particularly in the American South, Nellie Mae Rowe, Modesty West, Norbert Cox, William Thomas Thompson.

These are just some names that are all in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina. And they're characterized by an obsessive or fixation on not the image itself, but what the image is meant to communicate. Usually about Something future some prophecy. Um, also very much obsessed with the government, Washington, D.

C. Things that almost a prophetic warning to the government. This is common across across a lot of outsider art. It's a symbolic representation of a spiritual reality for most of these artists. 

Macie Bridge: I is Gathered the sense from encountering that in Winston's character that there's almost an element of a question of mental health.

It almost seems it appears from the outside and I think he encounters the rest of the world as misunderstood and kind of the crazy man on the mountain to the outside world. How does that come into play as you're imagining his character and his? religiosity because there's an earnest, there's a real earnest depth to his religious experience in the novel.

His visions are not dismissed as just a mental health issue. 

Jamie Quatro: What is the line between You know, mental illness and spiritual ecstasy is a really good question. I mean, going all the way back to the medieval women mystics and beat out a lot of this kind of visionary, you read Julian of Norwich or Matthew of Manberg, this visionary modality of apprehending spiritual reality is pretty common.

So is it madness? Is it genius? Right? That's a question we hold in tension. There is, there is some indication that just might be Perhaps schizophrenia. I'm sure certain readers would come to the book and come away thinking this is a schizophrenic. I think it's a question I held in abeyance. I think when I first met Ralph, that was my first impulse was to think along those lines.

But after 15 years of knowing him, I thought, no, this is not helpful. It's not helpful to put labels on whether or not this is a project of mental illness or this is actually something legitimate or somewhere in between the it. I grew to, I've kind of grown to love, to love Ralph as a friend and just to kind of take him at face value and take what he says at face value and he lives a pretty robust life, but I've never seen an, he's like 86 and I've never seen such a productive.

86 year old. So yeah, I mean, if that is mental illness, I kind of wish I could partake a little bit and that's the result of it. So yeah, I hope readers likewise, because right, this is the kind of character who could so easily be a caricature. And I think it's partly why it took me so long to write this book is that I had to get to a place of love and understanding and get past those preconceived ideas of what do we think of when we think of madness?

What do we think of? We think of genius and just get into his world and inhabit it long enough that those questions stopped mattering to me.

Macie Bridge: How did the character, the two step devil help you inhabit that mental space? 

Jamie Quatro: Right. Why even is there this character? I think is the question I had to ask myself. And interestingly. I think a lot of writers would say this when you're drafting, you don't often know why or how, why did this voice manifest itself at this little dancing level?

When he does, that devil shows up, he shows up as a cowboy with his thumbs hooked through his belt loops, boots on cowboy hat, tips his hat and does a little dance to performer. This devil. Why? I don't know. I think that to ask at the drafting level why things are happening is the road to ruin. Sometimes you just have to let things emerge and trust the process and trust whatever voices you're working with.

Trust your characters and really trust the book to teach you what it wants to be. I do see the artist's work as the work of a servant to something beyond. The self kind of an act of obedience or a bowing of the knee to what this thing wants to be an, and a listening. So I was listening and there's a double character showed up and really threw me for a loop.

I did not anticipate writing the doubles. voice into this novel. Um, but once I, it's kind of like Chekhov's gun. Once you've introduced it, you have to let it go off. So the devil is there taunting the prophets. And when the devil is in the prophets section, which is told in his close third person point of view, he speaks in the vernacular.

So he has that Southern accent and that Southern way of communicating you done gone and ruined her that kind of way when the devil shows up in his own section, gospel, we can talk about the biblical structure of novel, but he's really, he's retelling, he's narrating the gospel story on his own terms.

Once I'd written the prophet and I'd written Michael section, Michael's the girl, her first person. I thought, right, this needs to be a Trinity. I came to an awareness that I was mapping onto the Holy Trinity in this kind of subversive way and that I needed to round out that triptych. 

Macie Bridge: I want to push deeper into this gospel section because as a reader it felt very C.

S. Lewis screw tape letters kind of take over and you're doing some real intellectual theological work there. Two step is doing that work. And I would love for you to take us into how did writing this section inform your own thinking around the odyssey, the issue of evil or vice versa. I think writing this stuff is probably a two way street.

If there's a particular section that takes you there, I'd love for you to read that for us. Yeah, but 

Jamie Quatro: me, I've never read from that section. Maybe I'll talk into the process of writing this section a little bit and then. Maybe I'll suggestions. So when I first came to drafting the double section. I did it as the devil's diatribe and it was a 40 page soliloquy, basically 40 page single spaced soliloquy.

And the impulse, now that I'm looking back at it, I think the impulse was that I have these two characters who were so marginalized, who were so far outside the bounds of what we would consider like a privileged American existence, isolated, Suffering deeply and connecting with each other, but both deep in their suffering, their individual sufferings, Ralph with his health and the loss of his son has rejected all of his religious teachings and has gone off to Nashville to become a Johnny Cash performer.

And then my girl, you know, her own particular suffering, which, which we can get into at some point, she's been trafficked and she has found out that she's also pregnant. And so she is going to Washington, DC for an entirely different reason, which is. To seek an abortion because Washington, D. C. is the closest place that she can get a no questions asked abortion in 2014.

So we have these two characters and I felt like there was this impulse in me to blow the lid off, blow the lid off and look down at them from the cosmic level of what does all of this mean, all of this suffering and this love that emerges out of suffering. What does that all mean? Why that cat in the devil's voice?

Is still a question. I'm asking myself. It may be a way that allowed me to approach it instead of, you know, talking about my own Christianity, my own ideas about the nature of suffering in the universe. So, yes, this long double diatribe, which was an inversion, you know, the narrative, a narrative of inversion.

And I sent it to my editor. And of course she was like, Oh my God, this is just, we can't do this. She said, we're just, your readers are going to be turning pages to get back to this story. And she, and she was right. It was too by intended it to be connected to the stories of the prophet and the girl, but it was too disconnected.

So I tried rewriting it as a question and answer session between. The prophet and the devil, um, he does these really lovely question answer stories, but it was also headless disembodied, which is talking heads. My editor didn't think that worked either. I then tried it as a screenplay. And the reason I chose a screenplay is because when Winston, the prophet has versions, it's a movie screen.

that drops down in front of him, like a five by five film screen. So that the idea of having a film to watch or a movie was already embedded in the novel. And then I, so then I started reading screenplays and they're really awful to read. There's no stage direction. Directors prefer that you leave a lot of that description for actors to fill in.

So I scrapped that. Went to Yaddo and feeling really despondent, like, I'm not going to have this trinity. And then came across a book of one act plays and started reading those and realized that it was the perfect form because it was shorter and the stage metaphor was already seeded throughout the novel when he shows up.

The devil shows up performing when Michael envisions herself or when she's being trafficked, she floats up out of her body and envisions herself as if she's watching someone on a stage when the prophets imagines himself in hand to hand combat with the devil. He imagines himself up on a stage.

Encountering the devil and kind of carving this X in the air to defeat him. So I think that the theater was already a part of it. And then I just found that form, thankfully. So that's how the play came into being the one act play. As far as the theodicy, I need to have this caveat in here. I've never taken a theology course.

I've never even taken a course in the Bible. One wouldn't know. All my own reading and 

Macie Bridge: thinking and processing. So let's open up. Two step as a character. The selection that stands out to me is this little description of the problem of evil that the devil offers in this back and forth between. Two step and the prophet.

I'm wondering if you might read that and then yeah, characterize a little bit for us how you see this devil figure in two step fitting into the literary tradition of devil figures and then also I'm very curious. How a selection like this fits into your own thinking around this portion of your theology, right?

Right. 

Jamie Quatro: Sure Well, I'll just begin with that where two steps slams the table. Yeah Two step slams table spotlight I object Satan the original Hebrew takes an article ha Satan The Adversary. A title, not a proper name. Consider the prosecution and opposition in a legal case. No one accuses the lawyers of the crimes.

They are merely carrying out their roles on behalf of their clients. I, too, am a hireling, at the mercy of creator's directives. Same with my sad sack younger brother, but we'll get to him later. Or consider the book of Job. Creator was incapable of tempting humans to sin, so he needed a scapegoat. Please, sir, may I have permission to tempt the upright man?

Permission granted, mon fils. What a wretched story. Had Job been a real person, I would have felt sorry for him. Who hardened Pharaoh's heart? Sent the opposer to enter King Saul and Judas Iscariot. Creator. I am consigned to obedience. Don't shoot the messenger. Lights fade to black.

Macie Bridge: It's almost an apology for the devil's manipulation and interception into our human experience. 

Jamie Quatro: Right. If Milton was writing to justify the ways of God to man, this is Satan writing to justify the ways of Satan to, to humans. I mean, bringing up Milton, I mean, of course there's a long tradition. of devil depictions in literature.

We've got Milton's heroic Lucifer rising up from the lake of fallen angels to amass his army. And you've got the Faust narratives. You've got Macfield of Magdeburg, the flowing light of a Godhead. She has some of the most stunning. Devil imagery, and that's kind of contrapasso where the punishment fits.

The crime is built in like before Dante even, but then, of course, you have Dante's Inferno. You have, you know, Virgil and Dante climbing down Satan's body in the ninth circle of hell to get to his nether parts. It's like the earth's gravitational center. And they have to pass through his, well, I think it's his anus to get to.

It's crazy. Um, we've got Blake's marriage of heaven and hell in which the voice of the devil, the proverbs of hell or energy is eternal delight. Everything that we would think of is what God would say the novel is saying the opposite is true. We have the brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky. Everyone thinks of the Grand Inquisitor as sort of the greatest devil's apology.

But I love The Ivan's Nightmare chapter, where the devil shows up as a sort of shabby gentleman who is just a little bit out of date with his style, and he appears as this much maligned figure that really his Complaints is that he's been misunderstood and he really loves humans, but he wishes he could go to church and light a candle.

He wishes he could be incarnate as a merchant's wife, a slightly overweight merchant's wife, and just, you know, he could eat and, and join him. And I do think it might have been Dostoevsky's. Devil figure in the Ivan's Nightmare chapter that was most influential on my, I've just been misunderstood. I am actually God's messenger.

I, no goodness can exist without its opposite. Therefore, I had to exist. And the devil's telling Jesus was just a side character who I just wanted to come to earth as an experiment to see what it would be like to be a human. But then the real actors in the space of history were God and the devil, which, you know, gets into a little bit of Manichaean.

way of looking at the world. I, you know, my own theology, I'm a Christian. I certainly do not buy into the devil's narrative here. My answers would all be along the line of orthodoxy if I was going to get into my own stance, but that's really not as interesting to me as what the devil is saying. Yeah. 

Macie Bridge: Yeah.

Well, it's fascinating that you're able to tune yourself to this imaginative rabbit hole coming at it from the place of your own convictions and then seeing where the imaginative world will take you there. 

Jamie Quatro: One thing I will say that I do agree with that the devil says, and it's something that Thomas Merton says as well, is that the importance of the individual and the scope of cosmic history.

Oh, there's this wonderful Merton quote about, um, let me see if I can find it. Something about that the world is an image of what individual souls have made of themselves. And so that one saint in prayer or like this group of the Cistercian monks on their knees have enough force cosmically to undo and tell, you know, that this idea is something that devil's coming with it.

Nobody understands the importance of these two characters on the margins of society, that the profit of cosmic significance because of this act of love. And because of this belief that he's maintaining in love. So that is one way I think that the devil's theology and my theology might 

Macie Bridge: align. Well, following that thread, I'd love for you to take us to this speech that the prophet offers that you read, if you'd be willing to read a selection.

Jamie Quatro: Sure. Another one of the prophets ideas is that, you know, America's on the brink. Downfall, and it's tied to his feeling and where he gets these ideas of it's almost an American kind of American Christian Zionism, but the Israel in America, the America is God's new Israel. He articulates this in his America speech, and I think he's getting that because his wife listened to Christian radio in the 80s.

kind of ideas. So he had originally envisioned himself giving this speech to the president. This is why you need to listen to me. So his first America speech. Begins America, we got all this power, see power and money and the feeling we got to use it because we think we've been given it by God Nations founders said America was God's new Israel brought forth out of slavery to a foreign government, just like the Israelites across the sea, just like they done.

But the Israelites didn't have money or power, only a real innocence. America's got money and power and the lie of innocence. We think God is on our side and whatever we do with our money and power to the people in them countries across the ocean, God will bless it because we're his chosen nation. But I seen different.

Our defeat is coming. It's coming from a military. No one's laid eyes upon that'll make all the armies of the earth look like a wasp nest. You could knock off the underside of a porch rail warfare and angels. That's what's a coming 10, 000 times, 10, 000 stars dropping from the sky to fight an ancient evil coming up from beneath.

And then he has to stop to revise because he realizes that it's Michael who needs to hear this speech. So he ultimately gets to an, a version of this speech that ends like this. Jesus said to watch for the signs of the end. Like you've watched a fig tree coming into bloom. You're one of the signs, Michael, you asked why I brought you here.

Well, I got some information about America, and I believe you've been chosen to take it to the president, but there's another reason. Hosea rescued Gomer from her way of life and took care of her. Them two made a picture for everyone to see the way God loved his people. It's you and me, Michael. We're the remnant.

A picture of God's faithfulness to an adulterous nation. And, uh, And then he decides that's how he'll, that's how he'll tell her that he has this mission for her.

Macie Bridge: How do you see his adaptation of the speech to transitioning from all of America, reaching the president to deciding it's just for Michael as interplaying with his relationship with her, his relationship becomes his work. Right. I feel like these are such human impulses he is working against and then leaning into.

Jamie Quatro: There is a movement there from this idea that he has, his mission is, it is prophetic. It is to call out the government. I mean, it really fits with a lot of what we're seeing today. Yeah. It's uncannily. Timely for what we're witnessing with some of the kind of neoimperialism that's happening and the nationalism rise are especially rich in nationalism right now.

So, yes, he starts out there in his speech and he morphs his speech to this very interior. relationship. Just the two of them. It's you and me. We're a picture. And that's I think the movement writ large that he makes in his ideas of why Michael has come and what her role is. So when she first comes, she's just a means to an end.

She's going to be the one who gets to Washington for this larger purpose. And by the time that he is to send her off, I can just go ahead and say that she sneaks away to go to a store to buy a pregnancy test. She also buys him a cake mix because it's his birthday. And when he realizes that she's taken his car and has done this, he realizes she needs to go because there were likely cameras and that somebody would come looking for her.

And by the time he reaches that point, he no longer wants her to go. He no longer cares about this national mission or this, this cosmic mission that we feel he just wants this girl stay. And he just wants to take care of her and have her take care of him because he is dying. He's very close to the end.

So there is that progression and that 

Macie Bridge: movement. It's beautiful. It unlocks this sort of deep irony in this story of at the same time as he's sending her off to, to go bring his visions to D. C., she's actually taking the chance to go to D. C. as well. Bring me into Michael's character a little bit more. We haven't.

Touched on her too much and the way that you approached the entire ending of this story and her many possible futures is the real experiment of the imagination, I think, 

Jamie Quatro: right? I'll talk about Michael first. And then, yeah, let's talk about that ending. I love talking about the ending because it really took me by surprise.

And in fact, most of this novel took me by surprise, which is a really wonderful thing as an artist. I truly believe that if you're not surprised when you're writing that your readers won't. Be surprised. So, so Michael emerged separate from the prophet. I just had this idea, just kind of an image of a young girl with zip ties in her wrist on the backseat of a car.

I had no idea how this image would be connected to the prophet. I wrote into both characters to find out how they were connected. Once I realized that he was going to rescue her, which, you know, let's call it spade a spade, kidnap her, yeah. and take her back. Then I was just writing to find out, okay, what's he going to do?

How is she going to react to being in his space and being in this cabin among all of these paintings? What will their relationship be? So it was really an act of discovery to create her character. When I realized she was being trafficked, that this girl with the zip ties was actually a trafficking victim.

Then I had to pause and do research. I actually interviewed survivors. Read a number of books, this region of the country in particular in 2014, there was a really dire kind of situation going on with traffickers using the backwards off the highways between Nashville, Birmingham. And Chattanooga and Atlanta.

I think the FBI is has named it one of the top 10 worst sex trafficking of minors in the country. So there was a campaign launched called George is not buying it for all the massage parlors and the flying Jays or all of these places that this was happening. So at that point, I had to take a pause and writing this novel.

And I wrote another one fire sermon, which came out in 2018. It's really tough research. But originally. I think the voice and the idea for that chapter was inspired by Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner said that The Sound and the Fury were just told in four sections. He was trying to write Cady Compson's story four times, failed four times, and that was The Sound and the Fury.

And I've, I'd always thought, you know, one reason perhaps that Faulkner felt The Sound and the Fury was a failure to tell Caddy's story, was that he never gave Caddy a voice. The first section is Benji, it's her three brothers. The second section is Quentin. Third is Jason. And the last section, he's approaching it, but it's an omniscient voice, more through the lens of Dilsey, if anyone, the servant.

When I drafted Michael's section, I had Quentin Compson's section in mind, but a female voice. So Quentin is one day. In the first person, the day he goes to kill himself, Michael's section is one day in the first person, the day she goes, leaves to have her abortion. I had a friend read the manuscript and she said, you know, it's really smart that you entered her first person voice the moment she takes agency over her life and you lose her first person voice the moment she loses.

Her agency. I hadn't planned that. I didn't even think consciously about that, but that is what her section, her agency section, the ending. Should we go there? 

Macie Bridge: Yes, I would love to. So this ending, you take us through Michael's on her. journey almost to DC. And at this point, the reader has so much sympathy developed for her and is really rooting for her.

And then good Samaritans step in to try to help her. And it results in her not being able to have the abortion. And she does go through with the pregnancy. And then you also bring us to the beautiful birth of a child and the joy that child brings to adoptive parents. And There is some good here in this, very good in this new life.

And then we also watch Michael then eventually go back to her traffickers, but then you pause, which this is the part that just made me audibly gasp as I was reading. And you ask us as readers to walk and reimagine the story as though she had. Gone through with the abortion and the ending is different.

It's still, it has some beautiful parts. Michael does quite well along those lines, but it also has some really hard parts because we feel that in the loss of this life and this alternate possibility, but how did this surprise you? And what made you, I'm really interested in this page. That's really just a paragraph that says, but wait, we're going to go back.

How did that come to you as the author? 

Jamie Quatro: You know, I wrote the ending of the novel before I'd written a lot of the real estate of the novel. So I'm a classical pianist. I'm a musician. I'm the daughter of a concert pianist. I write to sound a lot of the time. It's just, there's a pulse or kind of cadence that's beneath the words and I'm fitting words to it.

And the ending very much felt that way that I was writing along a pulse or a, or a chain. Again, it's all intuitive when you're drafting. So it's hard to answer the questions. Like, why did you do this? But looking. back at it. I was in this visionary mode with the prophets in his third person. We're seeing him have visions.

Then you enter Michael's first person and it's a little bit closer. You're in her memories and you're kind of first person firsthand experiencing the visionary. Then you get into the devil section and he's inviting you onto a stage and being part of an audience. And you're watching at the end of his section, a movie screen come toward you.

And you're now theater. So I knew that In some way, I needed to implicate the reader, break that fourth wall and implicate the reader into the realm of the visionary. I, there needed to be a vision that we would all experience collectively at the end of this book. I also liked the idea of three movements and a coda.

So prophet Michael devil, and then all three of their stories layered in this rapid fire, very short burst kind of way. So I think that the intrusion of the, but wait. What if she did get to the boat in time and she did get the money that she needed and was able to make it to Washington DC and have the abortion?

What would her life, what is one possibility for her life? That's the visionary. So it's, so in that visionary ending, she goes to graduate school, she becomes a curator. She when they're planning this, like in 2028, this retrospective or an installation of outsider artists, she says, Hey, I know this guy reaches out to his son.

They ended up dismantling his cabin, bringing it to the Whitney and his art lives on forever. And she has this really full, wonderful life. Most readers. Want that ending, they want the ending where she can have this abortion and she can have her life. When I spoke to the victims and the, you know, the survivors, they're like, you know, that's not realistic.

It is very rare for a girl who has been abused in this way to not at some point return to it or go back to it or to be able to pull herself up out of it. That would have in some ways been unfaithful to the experience. Of many of the victims and the survivors of, of sexual abuse, which is why I returned.

But we all know how this works. Let's go back to the truth. You know, she has the baby, she kind of wanders for a while. She goes back to her pimp. Eventually he's arrested, she tries to make a new life that ends up, um, back in sex work. But you're right that I didn't wanna take a political side. This is such a politically loaded topic, and I wanted to allow for.

Both sides of it, an acknowledgement of what abortion essentially is, which is a possible life and a possible child to explore that possibility of what that child's life would look like, and then also to explore another life. So it is a life for a life and which 1 is good, which 1 is bad. I mean, there's no answer.

This is why this issue is. We won't have answer and I think anytime we try and take out of the realm of the individual and into the realm of policy is where 

Macie Bridge: we go wrong. I think that what you've done speaks both to the complexity of abortion as an issue and just our tendency today as a country to try to make things black and white and you really push us away from that.

Um, what would you say to the listener who maybe hasn't explored fiction so much? If you think of fiction as this mode of exploring the full complexity and nuance of the human experience for you as a writer and as a reader, why go there and why bring your theology there with you? 

Jamie Quatro: It's again, one of those questions like Flannery O'Connor says, the writer writes with her whole personality and with everything that you are, you bring that to the page.

And I've told myself with all three books, you know, leave God out of it. leave Christianity out of it, and it just keeps emerging. So I think it's just that whole personality, you know, a little of my background. I suppose I was raised in the Anabaptist tradition and the church of Christ. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's like a very stripped down, no, no images.

We didn't even have a crucifix really had to invent. God and anything in the Bible. It was like idolatry to make any images of it. So it was this very heady Biblicist tradition. I was accustomed to reading the Bible as if it was written directly to me. There was no historical or theological context came out of that and came into a more Presbyterian reforms.

tradition for many years. And that gave me sort of the theological lens on everything that maybe there were other ways of reading the Bible than just my own thinking. And in English, in his translated way, there were Greek and Hebrew ways of inflecting and understanding the text, but still really missed the embodied ways of.

of worship. And then finally, about four years ago, started attending Anglican Episcopal Church and became a confirmed member of the Episcopal tradition a couple of years ago. And I finally, I think it was sacramental theology that I was after all along. And it made sense of what I was doing as a fiction writer, which was not the incarnation sanctified matter forever.

And that fiction, the fiction writer is very much engaged in. matter, the body, the senses. And it was coming out of those other traditions was hard to reconcile. Spirit is good and body is bad in this sort of neoplatonic way. And how wrong that thinking is that heaven and earth are intersect and interlock at every point.

And that Christianity, isn't this some like pie in the sky. Someday we all get out of our bodies and go to heaven. That what. What Christ, the resurrected Christ, means is embodiment and that, you know, what heaven is already here, imminent, and there's maybe a scrim, but that heaven will be here now, and that when we die, we'll be like, oh, we've always been in heaven.

I feel like that's the project of fiction is. sanctifying matter and staying at that realm of matter because that is in fact where heaven is. It's not a takeaway or a, you know, the world isn't pulling me away from heaven. The world, the world is heaven. So I don't know if any of that makes sense or is logical, but for me, it was kind of where I came to rest as a fiction writer that I can stay in the realm of bodies and sweat and sexual desire and a whorl of wood and an oak table and the scent of garlic.

On the fingertips, the, the clean spectacles pushed back on a bald head to invoke Seamus Heaney. But that is where the fiction writer lives and that is where God lives. 

Macie Bridge: Beautiful. Jamie, before I let you go, you've put this novel out into the world at a very specific political and cultural moment in our country and in our world.

What does your novel mean to you? In in light of America today and well, what does America mean to you in light of having written this novel? Well, 

Jamie Quatro: I mean, it's a little bit tied to when people do call me a Christian writer. I bristle and that's because of what the word Christian has become. In political parlance, I think there used to be a very different view.

But now that word has become tainted because it's been thrown around in the name of power and making the country great. So there's this idea right now that if we can just get back to what the founding fathers wanted, this moral nation, almost a theocracy in some way, if we can just legislate enough that the blessings will return this idea that somehow America has fallen because Our Christian morality has fallen.

And so there's almost like a forcing like we're going to now we've become this diverse, beautifully diverse nation with many religions, but we're going to force this one way of being religious because that's the way our country was founded on to everybody. We don't legislate that way. And when I think that is what is being done and being called Christian, it's really difficult because when you look at the life of Jesus and the harsh words that he had.

For people, he was never disparaging. Like you need to get your morality in check. In fact, his harsh words were for the morality police, which were the Pharisees who were very much trying to legislate this, this is the morality that everybody should have. Look, this is a leopard. This is an adulterer. How can you eat with these people?

And correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not a biblical scholar, but to a number, Jesus. Was there to say, no, these are the kingdom, not the powerful and not the moral, the poor and the women and the weak and the slaves and the suffering. These are the kingdom. And so it seems to me when you're talking about inversion in the novel that the great inversion of America right now is that Christianity is being used in the name of power.

And power is being touted as this is, this is Christianity, this is morality. And, you know, we're hearing this, but it's just a heartbreak to me that the Michaels and the prophets, the two steps of the world are, you know, this is the kingdom. And that those are the very people who are being shut out of our country at the moment and feeling, feeling marginalized.

I feel like the book is speaking directly into that political moment that I could not have known that in 2014, certainly with the rise of the Tea Party in the South and some of the things that I was seeing happening around. I was, you know, we were coming into the first Trump era. Coming out of the second Obama era.

So there were things brewing, but who could have guessed that we'd be back here again in 2025? Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for making art that speaks 

Macie Bridge: to that plexity.

Jamie, thank you for bringing your whole self to two step devil and. To the podcast today. It's been such a treat to talk with you and to explore all of these themes and your work. Thank you. Thank you, Macy. It's a pleasure.

Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Jamie Quatro and Macy Bridge. Production assistance by Emily Brookfield, Alexa Rollow, Zoë Halaban, and Kacie Barrett. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu or lifeworthliving.yale.edu. There you can find all sorts of educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. If this is your first episode, welcome, and remember to subscribe in your favorite place. Podcast app, so you don't miss the next episode and to our loyal supporters and faithful listeners, we would be so delighted if you'd share this episode today, it's one of the best ways for us to grow, and it's a really easy, practical way for you to lend us some support.

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