Author and Stanford University English Prof. Kirstin Valdez Quade held a dialogue and read from her debut novel “The Five Wounds” at Northwestern’s 16th Annual Writers Festival Monday.
Published in 2021, “The Five Wounds” tells a yearlong, multi-generational narrative of a New Mexican family. The book received The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and won Quade the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Quade discussed the novel in depth and read passages aloud during the festival — running from May 6-8 — which also features Stephanie Elizondo Griest and Airea D. Matthews alongside Quade. The festival also features craft talks in the afternoons and public readings in the evenings at Deering Library.
Brian Bouldrey, a lecturer in the creative writing program, introduced Quade.
Quade read two excerpts from “The Five Wounds.” Quade said she expanded the novel from a 2009 short story of the same title she wrote and published in The New Yorker.
“For a long time, I was so ashamed because I thought it was cheating to extend a story that had been published,” Quade said.
But through these doubts, she said she felt she was beholden to this previously published story.
During the reading, Quade also gave advice to aspiring writers on learning to trust and appreciate their own voice.
“You are the only person who can write the stories you’re going to write,” Quade said. “You could lift a plot from the person next to you and write that, but it would still be your story.”
Communication junior Ella Gatlin, who attended the festival, said she enjoyed hearing the excerpts from “The Five Wounds.”
“I just loved the wit and the humor of this author’s ability to delve into this potentially really difficult topic or life with so much levity and joy and realness,” Gatlin said.
Quade said being both the writer and the editor requires her to juggle between pieces of the story that she is drawn to and what is essential to the narrative. To her, writing truthfully means writing humor. So, Quade works to always find humor in a situation, even when there’s suffering, she said.
English Prof. Averill Curdy also appreciated Quade’s balance of humor and reality in her work.
“I really loved the way she moved so quickly between these moments of pathos and then the moments of humor,” Curdy said. “It felt like family life to me.”
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