Writing in Public: Jamie Quatro on structure as scaffolding, giving just enough detail, and the man who inspired Two-Step Devil

Plus prose and poetry to inspire writers and surprise readers

I have a complicated relationship with consuming author interviews. On the one hand, authors are my heroes. I’m always curious about the way their minds work and how they put together the work of magic that is a novel or story or poem. I want to know these people who take the world and art seriously and give us great stories to graft onto our lives. On the other hand, I take as sacred the responsibility of the reader to make meaning from the text at hand. I do not want to be told how to interpret a book—even by that book’s creator. And so I journey into author interviews with some trepidation because I’m so protective of the sacred space of readers.

And yet there are occasionally books that are so captivating and so singular that I simply must know more about the person behind them. In this vein, I have had the distinct honor of talking to some wonderful authors such as E. Lily Yu, Alice Elliott Dark, Kelsey Norris, and Lauren Groff. These conversations made me a better reader, not because they instructed me in how to read their own books, but because they have given me new lenses through which to view all literature. With that goal in mind, today I am thrilled to launch a new (sporadic) author interview series called Writing in Public by sharing a conversation with Jamie Quatro, author of I Want to Show You More, Fire Sermon, and Two-Step Devil.

Jamie Quatro’s new book Two-Step Devil is one of the most original and compelling novels I’ve read this year. When I first began reading, I felt unsettled—I just wasn’t sure who she was introducing me to and where this ride was going to take me. I started to get my bearings not because the journey ahead became clear or obvious, but because Quatro’s skill made me care deeply for her characters almost immediately, allowing me to relax into the prose. The compassion she displays for her own characters let me know I was in sure and capable hands and that this was an author who was guiding me with purpose through a difficult but meaningful story.

Two-Step Devil is a book I cannot stop thinking about—and talking about with everyone I know who has read it! So I had to reach out to Jamie to see if she would tell me a little bit more about the creation of this book that surprised me and left me reeling. Jamie’s responses are so generous—both in terms of the time she took to engage with my questions and in terms of the trust and agency she extends to her readers.

You can (and should!) read this interview even if you haven’t yet read Two-Step Devil. Jamie has incredible insights on structure and craft—including what alienates readers and what pulls them in. Plus she tells an amazing story about meeting the man who helped inspire the novel. I hope you love meeting Jamie and learning more about this incredible book!

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Photo courtesy of Jamie Quatro.

SH: Can you share a brief set-up of Two-Step Devil for those who haven't yet read it?

JQ: Sure! It’s the spring of 2014. A visionary self-taught artist known as The Prophet lives off-grid in a backwoods cabin in Alabama. His paintings are mostly apocalyptic: the downfall of the American empire, invasions from outer space, epic cosmic battles. He believes a “Big Fish” is coming who will take these warnings to President Obama. Complicating things is Two-Step Devil, a jigging performer in cowboy boots and a bolo tie who keeps materializing inside the cabin to taunt him.

One day the Prophet sees a car with no plates pull up to an abandoned gas station. In the back seat is an adolescent girl with zip ties on her wrists. He realizes the girl is being trafficked and decides to rescue her, certain that she’s the Big Fish he’s been waiting for. What follows is an unexpectedly tender story of how two marginalized, voiceless characters try to save one another. It’s a kind of grandfather and granddaughter relationship, very interior, until the girl—her name is Michael—undertakes plans of her own.

SH: Ok, I need to know everything about the Prophet! When and how did this character first come to you? When I first met him I really wasn't sure if he was going to be a sinister figure, and then he almost immediately won me over. Was this a tension you were consciously playing with in your writing?

JQ: Ha, your experience reading the Prophet is exactly my experience meeting him – I mean the man who inspired me to create his character. Here’s the story. I was teaching my 15-year-old daughter to drive. We lived on Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where the streets are narrow and hilly and winding, not a great place for beginners. I took her out the back of the mountain, where the roads are straight. We saw a cabin with pumpkins laid out for sale and decided to pull over. An old man came out of the cabin, said his name was Ralph, and invited us inside to see his “prophecy paintings.” My daughter refused to get out of the car (the wise response, really) but what could I do? I’m a writer. I had to go in. I was deep inside Flannery O’Connor territory –not just geographically, but spiritually. It felt like holy ground.

Ralph and I became friends, and when I told him that he might become the inspiration for a character, he was thrilled. His voice and speech patterns and ways of thinking are very much like the Prophet’s. But everything else—plot, family structures, backstories—all of it is pure fabrication. We’ve been friends for almost 15 years now. The book is dedicated to him.

SH: I loved how you described the Prophet's paintings and visions, and I just can't fathom having the imagination to bring those to life! How did you go about crafting these images in prose? 

JQ: Ekphrastic writing is tough. To take something meant for visual consumption and translate it into black marks on a white page, where the eye and ear work in tandem to create an image in the imagination. That triplicate translation—an objective/exterior image, turned into words, turned into a subjective/interior image which is a unique co-creation between author and reader (no two readers will have the same painting in their minds)—I mean if you really think about it, it’s miraculous. Like light through a prism.

But how to do it? Well, one thing I’ve learned is not to over describe. The tendency is to think, the more description, the more clarity. But I don’t think that’s true. Say I want to describe a vision of three green apples floating in mid-air above a sunlit table. Right now, a first-blush image has appeared in my head, and in yours. But if I go on and tell you that the apples are in a black bowl, that the bowl is also floating, that the table is white marble, and that the sunlight is coming from a dormer window above the table… the more I pile on, the more you have to go back and revise your initial image.

You want to give just enough detail, then let the reader fill in the rest. You’re trusting your reader this way, giving them agency. Reader, you and I are creating this book together. Too much description risks alienating them.

SH: You move back and forth in time in this novel so I'm curious how you decided which story you wanted to use to introduce The Prophet and how you planned the pace at which the past storyline is revealed to the reader?

JQ: I don’t plan anything when I’m drafting. I don’t write in a linear way. In fact, I wrote the ending to the book before I wrote most of Michael’s section. Pacing, ordering, structure – that all takes shape in revision, once I have the real estate in front of me. I’ll try to describe how the process worked for me, writing Two-Step Devil. When I realized I had a living character on the page, and that he was going to drive the narrative, I started writing into his backstory to learn everything I could about him. The Prophet is the kind of character who would be easy to caricature, so I needed to dig deep. I’d write a scene to learn something about his past, and that new knowledge would raise another question. I’d draft the next scene to try to find out the answer. Drafting, for me, is chasing questions, one to the next. Whatever unfolds is organic in shape. It’s never the right shape at first. But you can’t worry about it at this stage.

I learned that the Prophet lost his son, Zeke -- “lost” in the sense that Zeke rejected him and his religious beliefs, moved away and stopped communicating. When I realized the father-son relationship was severed, I knew I needed to understand what that relationship was like beforehand. I started writing into Zeke’s childhood and learned that Zeke used to idolize his dad, and hoped to be like him one day. I began to see how Zeke’s admiration shifted into embarrassment as he got older, and how the Prophet was confused by his son’s anger and rejection. Knowing this helped me to understand, finally, the stakes in the Prophet’s relationship with Michael: she’s another chance to get it right. To do what he failed to do with Zeke: to love someone simply, the way they are. I don’t think the Prophet himself fully understands this – that his motivation in helping Michael is connected to his failures with Zeke. But the reader sees it.

SH: Okay, I also want to talk about Michael because this is as much her story as it is the Prophet's. When and how did this character first come to you and then how did you know that these were the right two characters to bring together in such an unlikely way?

JQ: Michael came to me separately, as just an image: a girl in the back seat of a car, raising her hands to her face as if she’s about to sneeze or push her hair behind her ears. At first I’d imagined this girl with ropes on her wrists. But my editor pointed out that ropes felt antiquated, so we changed it to zip ties. I didn’t know how she would be connected to the Prophet. I just knew that they were somehow related. I wrote to find out how. Everything took me by surprise—the rescue, the way he went about it. Once he’d managed to get her into his van, I was just writing to see what he’d do next. How was this sick old man going to help her through her opioid addiction? What would she do, when she realized she was in this strange cabin filled with art?

SH: Religion plays a large part in the book both thematically, but also structurally as sections of the book are given titles that are often books of the Bible or have religious connotations. Can you tell us a little about the role faith plays in the themes of your books as well as how you arrived at this structure?

JQ: I love talking about structure! there’s a fantastic craft lecture Zadie Smith gave at Columbia years ago, in which she talks about scaffolding your novel. She says that while it’s a useful tool, and can give you confidence when you’re starting out, eventually you have to be prepared to dismantle your scaffolding.

My original scaffolding was Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which as you know has four sections. Faulkner said the book was his attempt to tell Caddy’s story, and that he failed to tell it four times over. I think his sense of failure might have been because he never gave Caddy a voice. Her story is told from the first-person perspectives of her three brothers. Faulkner approached the female perspective in the final section, with Dilsey’s character—but we get her perspective in a distant, 3^rd person omniscience. In Two-Step Devil, Michael’s section is homage to Quentin Compson’s first-person narrative, which takes place over the course of a single day. We switch to her first-person voice the moment she takes agency over her situation.

So I had these three voices: the Prophet, Michael, and Two-Step Devil. I realized I was mapping onto the trinity in a subversive way—and because of this, and the southern setting, and the fact that my characters are steeped in biblical texts and images, I felt the Old Testament/New Testament structure was right. Prophecy and Song of Songs for the Prophet and Michael; Gospel and Revelation for Two-Step and the ending.

Also, I’m a classical pianist, and another way I conceived of the structure was as a musical composition: three movements plus a coda, with a short overture at the beginning.

SH: You can probably tell at this point that I'm a huge sucker for structure, and I loved the structural agility of this work. You seem very aware of how text is arranged on the page and you even include some sections written in play format. How do you determine what the right structure and even layout are for various moments and plot points?

I came to the play format late in the writing process. I’d tried the devil’s voice a number of ways – an extended rant, a Q&A session, a screenplay. None of it was working. I went to Yaddo, facing down my deadline, and came across a book in the library called Telling Tales: New One-Act Plays, edited by Eric Lane. I read all 28 plays in one sitting: Terrence McNally, Maria Irene Fornes, Harold Pinter, John Patrick Shanley, Migdalia Cruz. I decided to try the devil’s section as a play—and that was it, the play was the thing, emerging almost unbidden. Once I’d finished, I realized the stage image was already everywhere in the novel: Two-Step shows up as a performer dancing on a stage; Michael watches herself from above, as if watching someone perform on a stage; the Prophet imagines himself up on a stage, doing hand-to-hand combat with the devil. My subconscious knew all along. It just took my conscious mind some time to recognize it. I always tell my students that the subconscious is so much smarter than the conscious. The trick is to get out of the way.

SH: One of the things I loved most about this reading experience is that Two-Step Devil is so singular--and that is really hard to come by when you read a lot of books! Can you tell us a bit about what books or genres or traditions your novel is in conversation with, but also share why this sort of playful inventiveness is important to you as a writer?

JQ: Well, as a reader I always want to be surprised. If the plot is obviously borrowed, or if the language at the sentence level is tired or leaden or simply cliché, it ruins the reading experience. I have the same standards for myself as a writer: I want to be surprised when I draft. Not just by what happens, but by the language through which it happens. A writer whose work never fails to surprise and delight me is Joy Williams. She’s one of the best we’ve got. I’m also a huge fan of Samantha Harvey, who happens to be one of my best friends. Every book she writes is a massive departure from the last. I read a lot of poetry, especially when I find myself in a rut. The compression of poetry, the demands of the poetic line… poetry works wonders for my prose. Some poets I’ve read and loved recently: Mary Szybist, Kaveh Akbar, Tarfia Faizullah, Donika Kelly, Carl Phillips, Ada Limón. Never far from me are Jack Gilbert, Sharon Olds, Linda Gregg, Louise Glück; Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Herbert. And Milton. And Shakespeare, by god.

SH: This is a favorite question that I've paraphrased from a FictionMatters reader: Is there anything about your book that you wish someone would ask you, but no one has yet? [Spoiler alert for this answer!]

JQ: Yes, but it’s a spoiler, so I’m glad we’re waiting till the end of the interview. No one has asked, yet, about Michael’s unchosen pregnancy and need for an abortion. In the first few weeks after the book was released, I didn’t want to mention it. I think readers should have the chance to buy the book and experience that revelation for themselves. But it’s been out a month now, and maybe it’s time to talk about this plot point. Because Michael is a minor, and because she’s in the south, the costs and stakes of limited access are astronomical. The closest place to Tennessee that she can get a no-questions-asked abortion, in 2014, is Washington D.C. So she’s making the journey the Prophet has asked her to make, but for a vastly different reason. In excavating this sensitive terrain, though, I didn’t want to write with knee-jerk or agenda-driven simplicity. There’s too much complexity. One of my early readers said, after she finished reading, “you found a way to split the baby.” I hope readers agree. This isn’t about politics. It’s about a fourteen-year-old child. An individual with a unique story. Any time we take the conversation out of the realm of the individual, we begin to lose ourselves.

Another thing no one has asked me is: What’s the message the Prophet wants Michael to take to the President? It’s a wild message! He’s had a vision of a military invasion coming from outer space. Some kind of glittering fleet or armada. In the vision, he sees all the armies of the earth combined flying up into outer space, to fight off this invasion. He imagines the soldiers as bees swarming out of beehives, which are actually cooling towers at nuclear power plants. The Prophet wants President Obama to tell the bee-soldiers to stand down. The invasion is warfaring angels, and they’re on our side. They’re coming to fight an ancient evil that has been hiding under the ocean. Humans simply need to get out of the way.

It was important for the Prophet’s character, to have this massive-scale, cosmic battle in mind. Otherwise it would be hard to sympathize with the urgency he feels, and with his decision to first kidnap and then send this young girl away.

SH: FictionMatters readers can never get enough book recommendations, can you give us a few books you recommend?

JQ: In addition to the poets above, I’ll mention a craft book: Break, Blow, Burn, & Make: A Writer’s Thoughts on Creation, by E. Lily Yu. Karen Russell recommended it to me. I read it once, and then straight through again. I’m going to write about it in a more formal way soon. It’s in the vein of Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners, a devotional book in many ways, a love letter to God and craft and language and writers she loves. Reading the book made me want to re-read all of James Baldwin…

Oh, and there’s a memoir-in-essays coming out next spring called Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, by Nicole Graev Lipson. Her first book. It’s one I’ll be recommending to everyone I know.    

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Happy reading!

Sara