Kirstin Valdez Quade did not initially envision her 2009 short story The Five Wounds as a full-length novel. But that’s what it became.
“My now-editor emailed after the story came out and asked if I had considered turning it into a novel,” says Quade. “I wrote back very nicely, but said, ‘Absolutely not. I’m done. I’m working on other stories.’”
A few years later, Quade was looking through story drafts and found three that dealt with similar themes, characters and settings.
“I realized in a flash that it was the exact same family constellation that I’d been dealing with in the story The Five Wounds,” recalls Quade. “They were different ages and it was at different points in their lives, but I thought, ‘Oh, wow. Maybe I actually am working on a novel.’”
Published in 2021, the novel takes readers through the lives of the Padilla family, a multi-generational Latin American family living in the fictional city of Las Penas, New Mexico. Quade has crafted characters that feel all too real as they face issues like addiction, young motherhood, unemployment and fractured relationships.
CityBeat caught up with Quade ahead of her talk at the University of Cincinnati’s Visiting Writers Series, where she will appear on Nov. 7 at 5:30 p.m. for a fiction reading and again on Nov. 8 at 3:30 p.m. in conversation with her literary agent, Denise Shannon. Both events take place in the Elliston Poetry Room, in Langsam Library.
The novel opens with 33-year-old Amadeo, a mess of a man who has been given the role of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. Then there’s Angel, his 15-year-old pregnant daughter who shows up at his doorstep determined to make a better life for her and her baby. Her arrival at Amadeo’s comes after leaving her mother, Marissa. Readers also meet Yolanda, Amadeo’s mother, who learns that she’s terminally ill –– a fact she keeps secret.
One of the things that drew Quade to the Padillas was their inter-generational dynamics. Each character has their own needs and is facing a different era in life, be it coming-of-age, seeking redemption, navigating motherhood or facing mortality. When asked about the process of shifting into each character’s mindset, Quade replies that was one of her “great pleasures” in writing The Five Wounds.
“Some of them were more fun than others,” says Quade. “Amadeo, I will say, was the hardest to be because he feels sorry for himself. He doesn’t have a ton of self-awareness, although he works on it over the course of the novel. When I got fed up with him, as I think the reader does, too –– and certainly his family members do –– I was then able to switch to other points of view.”
Quade notes that though Yolanda’s point of view was sad to be in, it’s also the first time in the character’s life that she’s making decisions based solely on her wants and not others’ needs. There’s a sense of liberation to Yolanda’s storyline, despite her illness.
“Angel was the most fun to be with because she’s hopeful,” says Quade. “She’s funny. She’s smart in that she’s looking at the adults around her and judging them. I’m a teacher, and I like spending time with young people, and so it was fun to be in her perspective.”
Quade is currently an associate professor at Princeton University. The Five Wounds won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, along with an array of other recognitions. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The New York Times and more.
The Nov. 8 event, in particular, will give aspiring writers and students the chance to learn about the literary agent-writer relationship. Quade praises her agent, Shannon, citing her ethical approach and no-nonsense attitude. They connected through one of Quade’s professors, the late Ehud Havazelet.
“He taught me more about writing, I think, than any other teacher,” says Quade. “After I graduated and started publishing stories, he put me in touch with her. He gave me so many gifts as I was learning to write. He changed the way I think about fiction and think about my characters and my responsibilities toward my characters. But Ehud also gave me the gift of Denise.”
Pervading through The Five Wounds is a sense of hope, even when the circumstances feel dire. In penning the novel, Quade says that she knew she wanted a happy ending for her characters and for them to be better off than when the reader first meets them.
“I wanted that ending to be hard-won for them. I wanted them to have gotten there on their own,” says Quade. “I also wanted to write about love. I wanted to write about romantic love and sexual attraction. I wanted to write about family love, too.”
The Five Wounds includes two things that often appear in Quade’s work: the setting of New Mexico and Catholicism. Of the latter, Quade says that it has been a part of the fictional project from the start. For one, she’s figuring out the role it plays in her life, too.
“It’s shifted over time and yet remains really important,” says Quade of her relationship with Catholicism. “A lot of it grows out of the time I spent as a very young child with my great-grandmother and grandmother. It’s the sense that there are these other forces, that miracles are possible and the richness of story and mythology that was always really, really compelling to me.”
As for New Mexico, it’s the place Quade considers home: It’s where she was born and where her family has lived for centuries. Though she, her mother and her dad moved a lot when she was a child, Quade says her grandmother’s home in New Mexico was still always home.
“When I’m there, I’m never experiencing it as it is now, entirely,” says Quade. “That’s one layer, but I always have this sense of transparencies laid on top of each other. I’m experiencing it through the stories my grandfather told me about when he was a little boy and first moved to Santa Fe. All of those versions of it are there. A large part of why I write is to return home.”
The University of Cincinnati will host two events with Kirstin Valdez Quade as part of their Visiting Writers Series on Nov. 7 and 8. More info: artsci.uc.edu.
This story is featured in CityBeat’s Oct. 30 print edition.
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 12, 2024.