Read, Write, and Pray with Lauren Winner and Jamie Quatro: Part One
As we engage more deeply with the ancient streams of art and faith, how they inform one another, and how all of this can create profound new possibilities for belonging, we need ways to respond. The Spiritual Direction for Writers Read, Write, & Pray series uses themes and excerpts from various books, essays, and articles to help you respond to writing by a specific author.
I have not worked with Lauren Winner or Jamie Quatro to create this series, but I did host them for an online conversation in October 2022, which informed how I designed this particular Read, Write, & Pray series. You don’t need to own a copy of their books to complete this series, but you should definitely buy their books anyway! You can buy their books here.
I’m excited to invite you to explore Winner’s and Quatro’s work in meaningful ways. I hope Read, Write, & Pray with Lauren Winner and Jamie Quatro helps you make space to notice God’s presence in your life and creative work. I hope it gives you opportunities to discover how making art and engaging with art help you belong to yourself, others, God, and the world.
Parts One and Two of Read, Write, & Pray with Lauren Winner and Jamie Quatro are available to the public at spiritualdirectionforwriters.com. Parts Three and Four are exclusive resources for those who registered for the Spiritual Direction for Writers Conversation Series with Lauren Winner and Jamie Quatro in October 2022.
Learn more about Read, Write, & Pray here.
Additional Read, Write, & Pray Resources:
Read, Write, & Pray with Lauren Winner and Jamie Quatro Part Two
Read, Write, & Pray with The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
Read, Write, & Pray with The Great Belonging by Charlotte Donlon
Read, Write, & Pray with Lauren Winner and Jamie Quatro: Part One
When I invited Lauren Winner and Jamie Quatro to participate in a Spiritual Direction for Writers Conversation Series event, I wanted to pick a book from each of them to focus on for our time together. I picked Still, one of my favorites by Lauren, and Fire Sermon, my favorite by Jamie. In case you’re interested, I love everything both of these women have written, especially Wearing God by Lauren and Girl Meets God, of course. Jamie’s book of short stories, I Want to Show You More, is fantastic, but Fire Sermon is just brilliant and it does something to my soul that I don’t have words for and I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read it.
While pulling together the four installments of Read, Write, & Pray with Lauren Winner & Jamie Quatro, I realized I could do 20 installments and be perfectly giddy doing so. These women are beautiful writers and humans and I’m so thankful for both of them and their genius writing and work.
Q: Can you explore that a bit more? Your insistence on this space — the space of longing without acting — is uniquely focused.
Jamie Quatro: Maggie does act on her longing in Fire Sermon — even though it’s just one night in Chicago. But she chooses to make the trip, to meet James, to act on her desire.
Overall, though, who knows why there is longing and restlessness in my work? I may want to explore options on the page that I haven’t explored in life. Maybe there’s a resistance to something in my own life that leads to restlessness on the page. I don’t want to probe it too deeply, or try to get into my own psychology. Composition is listening, not trying to communicate some a priori point. A pulse or rhythm becomes a sentence on the page. That sentence leads to another one. Meaning evolves through that sound-based process.
Well, and also, I’m a Gemini. Maybe that explains everything.
WRITE
Freewrite for at least 10 minutes about a longing that you have or a longing someone you know has or a longing someone you don’t know has. (Twitter might be a great place to find some material!) Be curious about the desire and just start writing. Let one sentence lead to the next. Don’t get in the way of the words. See what happens.
PRAY
A Prayer for the Evening from the Book of Common Prayer
O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows
lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is
hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done.
Then in thy mercy, grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest,
and peace at the last. Amen.
*
Jamie Quatro's debut novel, Fire Sermon, published in 2018 with Grove Press (U.S.) and Picador (U.K.). 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, LitHub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement, Fire Sermon was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers book, Indie Next pick, and New York Times Editors' Choice.
Quatro's story collection, I Want To Show You More, was a New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and was chosen as a favorite book of 2013 by James Wood in The New Yorker. The collection was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award, the Townsend Fiction Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. A new novel and story collection are forthcoming from Grove.
A contributing editor at Oxford American, her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Guardian, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Recent essays have appeared at The New Yorker, Oxford American, and as part of the Greenpeace Climate Visionaries series. Quatro is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo and has taught in the Kenyon Review Writing Workshops and the Sewanee MFA program. She lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Charlotte Donlon helps her readers and clients notice how they belong to themselves, others, God, and the world. Charlotte is a writer, a spiritual director for writers, and the founder of Spiritual Direction for Writers™ and Parenting with Art™. She is also the founder and host of the Our Faith in Writing podcast and website. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Curator, The Christian Century, Christianity Today, Catapult, The Millions, Mockingbird, and elsewhere. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University where she studied creative nonfiction with Paula Huston and Lauren F. Winner. She holds a certificate in spiritual direction from Selah Center for Spiritual Formation. Her first book is The Great Belonging: How Loneliness Leads Us to Each Other. She is currently writing her next book, Spiritual Direction for Writers, which will be published by Eerdmans in 2024.