Kirstin valdez quade biography of abraham

How did your approach to revision look different when developing The Five Wounds into a full-length novel? How liberal are you when cutting content, and is there anything specific you look for? Does backstory naturally interject itself as you write, or do you find it helpful to map out its contents and placement beforehand? Which does not necessarily mean that the reader needs all the information I discover in backstory!

The key is to give only as much backstory as the reader needs without making it hard to find the path back to the present story.

Kirstin valdez quade biography of abraham: Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author

Which approach would you suggest for budding writers practicing their craft, and how can writers avoid feeling restrained by an outline? I advise budding writers to try both methods: outlining and writing into mystery. I see that you earned an MFA in fiction writing. Did you find your graduate school experience to be an indispensable step toward your later success with writing, and would you recommend that aspiring writers take part in a program like this?

Having grown up as Catholic in the Southwest, questions of religion have long been a preoccupation for me, but I always begin with the characters. Any time I try to write a story about ideas, I fail—mostly because I am far more interested in people than in abstractions. Longing is also, of course, the engine that drives most stories.

I am always surprised. Often my entry into a story is a pair of characters who wield power over each other—parents and children, husbands and wives, employers and employees—because power imbalances are inherently dramatic and interesting. I mean, are there any relationships that are truly balanced? In most stories the balance of power changes from scene to scene.

Power between people is such a shifting, layered, tricky thing; we wield power over others in ways overt and subtle, and when you look closely, the sources of power can be surprising. Where did you first encounter King Canute? Was there a point when you knew that you wanted to work his story into one of yours? The consequences are major if you get it wrong.

A number of your characters seem burdened by that legacy.

Kirstin valdez quade biography of abraham: THE FIVE WOUNDS, by Kirstin Valdez

Do you feel that ambivalence? I think every person being able to make choices for his or her own body is pretty important. Jesus made a choice about his body. His sacrifice was a choice. He knew what he was getting into. I find those narratives appalling and damaging. When she resisted, he stabbed her fourteen times, and the big miracle is that she forgave him on her deathbed.

There are Maria Goretti clubs in Catholic schools that are supposed to encourage girls to look up to her as this model of chastity. I keep thinking back to her deathbed forgiveness of this man. Was it real forgiveness, or was she afraid to meet God with anger and outrage on her soul? These stories can be so meaningful and can help make sense of an unjust and world, but they can also be damaging.

Have you known people like that? Is there anything good about having someone like that in your life? But no, I think one of the reasons the stories of saints are so powerful and can serve as examples is that we read these simplified versions of their lives, but we never have to actually know them—much less live with them. I imagine that in real life many saints were either unbearable or profoundly boring.

Image: So many of your characters are shadowed by a fear of not really belonging within their families, of being displaced by interlopers; they seem to long for this stable but unattainable trio of father-mother-child. Your characters long for other things too—romance, success, escape into a bigger world—but those family relationships seem to be the things that create a physical gut punch.

Does it feel true to you that, in the end, our families are what cut us the deepest? KVQ: Absolutely. I was looking back over my stories and came across one that dealt with romantic love, and I realized I almost never write about that. My great-grandmother was the postmistress in her little town in Torreon, New Mexico, but in the early s, when her husband became county clerk one town over, they moved.

They left my great-aunt Mary behind with her grandmother to stay during the week, and my great-aunt really saw that as abandonment. It hurt her. Her younger sister, my grandmother, went with her parents to Estancia, and from her perspective, Mary being left behind was no big deal. But for the rest of her life, my great-aunt felt the sting of that abandonment.

That was how she experienced it, and that hurt never went away. Those family fears and longings are universal. What do you love about her? What makes her different from other fiction writers, to your mind? Anyway, the story opens with this mystery. She never tracks down the postal codes on the mysterious blank cards that arrive once a year.

She never files a missing person report. Why is she resistant to finding out the truth?

Kirstin valdez quade biography of abraham: Set in northern New Mexico,

I love that. She always goes deeper. Before he came to Stanford, he had been a Jesuit priest for nineteen years, and he wrote from a Catholic point of view, in a complicated way. It strikes me that something you have in common is that you both treat characters in ways that are both morally unsparing and also on some level nonjudgmental. Is that something you learned from him?

There were, I think, twelve of us around the table, and I was terrified of him. He could be an intimidating teacher. He was so smart and witty, and he could be brusque. I still can see his elegant, precise pencil notations in the margins of my papers. The only excuse I can give is that I was eighteen and maybe hopeful, but I wrote that she was going off to seek a new life.

Kirstin valdez quade biography of abraham: DeMott Prize, selected by author Kirstin

My writing improved so much in that class. My reading and thinking became more rigorous because of his rigor. Archived from the original on Retrieved Archived from the original on July 14, Lewis Center for the Arts. Narrative Magazine. The New York Times. Kirkus Reviews. American Library Association. Retrieved November 16, Henry Prize Stories".

Center for Fiction. Retrieved December 20, External links [ edit ]. Wikiquote has quotations related to Kirstin Valdez Quade. Authority control databases.