A Thread of Brilliance in Novelist’s Debut

Consider, as first-time novelist Whitney Otto does, the traditional, free-form crazy quilt:

It is composed of scraps of material of various textures, colors and shapes--remnants from kitchen curtains; pieces from the worn-out clothing of family members--randomly stitched together, odds and ends that are “freighted with personal meaning” for each member of the quilting circle.

Now consider eight women of “varying ages, weight, coloring, and cultural orientation” who gather around a large wooden quilting frame in a small town outside Bakersfield.

That would be the Grasse Quilting Circle. With the exception of a couple of newcomers, the eight women have been quilting for more than 35 years. Like the colorful patches on the new crazy quilt they have just begun, the lives of the quilters are separate yet intertwined.

The stories of these women--the characters in Otto’s “How to Make an American Quilt”--make a literary debut that has Otto’s publishing house, Villard Books, trumpeting the arrival of an “extraordinary new talent.”

Otto, 36, a onetime bookkeeper, earned an undergraduate degree in history at UC Irvine. She wrote the novel as her thesis in the UC Irvine Master of Fine Arts Program in Writing.

Each chapter, like the distinctive patches on a quilt, is a mini-biography that chronicles significant passages in each woman’s life.

There’s Glady Joe, who has learned to live with the sexual betrayal of her sister and her late husband; Anna Neale, a mixed-race woman who “learned to speak with needle and thread long before society finally ‘gave’ me a voice.” There’s Sophia Richards, the once free-spirited teen-ager who married at a time when a young woman was not “expected to attend to her own intrepid journeys or follow her own desires.”

Interspersed between chapters, like borders between the patches on a quilt, are sets of “instructions,” which explain the techniques and history of quilting and also mirror and symbolize the lives of the women whose stories follow.

A review in the New York Times on Sunday praised “How to Make an American Quilt” for being “more than a study of women. It is a history of social change . . . an affirmation of the strength and power of individual lives, and the way they cannot help fitting together.”

The novel is excerpted in the April issue of McCall’s and is a Literary Guild Book Club alternate selection.

Otto is the latest in a spate of graduates of UC Irvine’s highly acclaimed Program in Writing to have books published in the past three years. They include Michael Chabon (“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” and “A Model World”) and Marti Leimbach, whose 1990 novel, “Dying Young,” is being produced as a movie starring Julia Roberts.

The seed for “How to Make an American Quilt” was planted in the summer of 1988 between Otto’s first and second year in the writing program when she saw a commercial for a quilting show.

Images of the quilts returned to Otto when she sat down that summer to write some short stories for her upcoming fall writing workshop.

“I’ve always been interested in quilts in a way, but I never knew anything about them,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in San Francisco. “I realized I couldn’t just write about a quilt. That would be like writing a story about a sofa or a bed. Before I knew it I was writing these instructions. Then I made this market list of women’s names. Eight women. Then, one by one, I wrote about each woman. I was just sort of noodling around and suddenly I had finished the story.”

At first, Otto said, she wasn’t going to show the unusually structured 24-page short story to anyone, thinking, “it’s probably been done. Then I thought, it’s lame or too girly or too homespun--even though I didn’t think my women were homespun at all.”

When Otto reluctantly showed the story to Donald Heiney of the writing program staff, she said, “He just flipped. He said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’ That satisfied me that it was somewhat original anyway. And then I got brave and showed it to the workshop and they said they’ve never seen anything like this.”

Like Heiney, members of her workshop urged her to turn the character-laden short story into a novel. But she resisted and it wasn’t until a year later that she returned to it.

“It almost sounds mystical and I’m not a mystical person, but I just suddenly saw what the novel, ‘How to Make an American Quilt,’ would look like,” she said. “Up to then I could only see the short story. It’s really hard to expand something that seems very complete to you. And that was when I started doing more research on the techniques of quilting.”

What was the appeal of writing a novel about a group of women who quilt for someone who insists she is not “a ginghamy sort of person?”

“It fascinated me--the idea that each patch, for example, has it’s own life or wholeness to it and when you join them together you get another sense of wholeness,” Otto said. “Quilting also interested me as an urge, or impulse, people have to be joined in marriage, or friendship, or love, or to join clubs. At the same time, there’s something equally appealing about being individual and singular.

“When I wrote the short story, I just sort of wrote it and didn’t think about all these things. When I finished it, I thought it’s like this metaphor of coming together and looking at each woman and talking about friendship, marriage, children, and lives that pull apart.”

Otto wrote a first draft of the novel in six weeks. By March, 1990, Otto had finished a third draft. At the suggestion of her friend, UCI undergraduate writing program director and novelist Michelle Latiolais, Otto sent the manuscript to Latiolais’ agent, Joy Harris in New York. Harris was as enthusiastic as UCI’s Heiney, who says Otto’s novel is “extraordinary for a first book.”

Harris sold “How to Make an American Quilt” to the first publishing house she approached.

“It was one of those odd publishing experiences,” recalls Diane Reverand, vice president and executive editor of Villard Books. “Joy and I were having lunch and she said to me, ‘I read a manuscript this weekend that came to me from Irvine that is one of the most brilliant novels I’ve read in a year.’ ”

Reverand said she read the manuscript and “bought it instantly.”

“There was something so original about that novel and so real-- true is the only word I can use--that I found it completely irresistible and I thought it had incredibly broad appeal,” said Reverand.

Reverand is sending Otto on a reading tour of bookstores in Washington, Idaho, Colorado and Indiana.

Of the critics, “I kept wanting to send out a letter--’It’s my first time; please be gentle,’ ” Otto said last week from her ‘20s vintage apartment in San Francisco, where she and her chef husband, John Riley, moved from Costa Mesa last November.

Even the favorable reception hasn’t eased her anxiety.

“My feeling is if there’s good there probably will be some bad along with it,” she said. “You have to keep it in perspective and not let it undermine you--and also not let it puff you up because if you do I think you’re in big trouble, too.”