At the Glen Workshop , Jamie Quatro was in conversation with Sophfronia Scott about the similarities and differences between writing fiction and nonfiction.
Both writers are gifted across the two genres, and it was wonderful to hear the interplay between reality and imagination. Quatro shared that she is trained as a classical pianist, like her mother, and that music was itself a language with its own syntax. I wanted to continue the spirit of that summer afternoon, and am grateful that she answered a few additional questions for Image. Two-Step Devil , her new novel, was released this week from Grove Press.
Quatro lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And in what ways does reading poetry play into your process as a fiction writer? Jamie Quatro: Deeply melancholic indeed. Milosz wrote the poem in , the year Polish underground resistance attempted to liberate Warsaw from German occupation. The Home Army received almost no outside support, and the Nazis ended up leveling the city. Every building must be razed to its foundation. The sense of heightened beauty in the midst of suffering; the way we blink in disbelief when tragedies occur on brilliant sunny days.
On the other hand—and this is where I think the poem has much to say to us now, in our contemporary moment—Milosz seems to be critiquing the refusal to look at, to engage with , the enormity of human-inflicted suffering. How many people turned away as Warsaw burned?
How many of us turn away today? Gaza and Israel, Ukraine and Russia; starving reindeer populations in Arctic Sweden, decomposing albatross chicks with abdomens stuffed full of plastic bottle caps. The poem captures and subtly indicts a kind of collective, willful sleepiness. Tragedy and mayhem everywhere, yet women stroll beneath umbrellas, drunkards lie about on lawns, peddlers continue selling vegetables.
