A Quaker author chat. Peterson Toscano’s “What is Actually There” appears in the November 2025 issue of Friends Journal.
Peterson Toscano and Martin Kelley discuss the unique experiences of Quaker meetings, particularly focusing on the engaging and sometimes humorous moments that arise, such as playing bingo and sharing personal messages. They reflect on the community’s dynamics and the joy found in these gatherings.
Links
- Penn’s Spring by Peterson Toscano (Nov. 2024 FJ fiction issue)
- Quakers Today podcast co-hosted by Peterson
- Peterson Toscano Studios
Bio
Peterson Toscano is a queer Quaker writer, performance activist, co-host of Quakers Today podcast, and host of the Bubble and Squeak podcast. A member of Millville (Pa.) Meeting, his work has appeared in Advocate Magazine; The Friend: The Quaker Magazine; and Liturgy Journal. He uses storytelling to explore faith, identity, and justice.
Transcript
Martin Kelley:
Hi, I’m Martin Kelley of Friends Journal and this is one of our Quaker Author Chats. And my guest today really should need no introduction since I think Peterson you’re on every Quaker podcast at least once a month. Is that about fair?
Peterson Toscano:
It seems to be the case lately, that’s for sure.
Martin Kelley:
Peterson Toscano, who started podcasting. remember when you went from being a blogger to a podcaster many years ago. So you’ve been doing this for a while. Peterson Toscano is a queer Quaker writer, performance artist, cohost of Quakers Today podcast and host of the Bubble and Squeak podcast. A member of Millville PA meeting. His work has appeared in Advocate Magazine, The Friend, and Literature Journal.
Martin Kelley:
He uses storytelling to explore faith, identity, and justice. So we’re here to talk about your latest article in Friends Journal. It’s part of our fiction issue in November. What is actually there? So tell us a little bit about how you go about starting to write fiction for us or for anyone.
Peterson Toscano:
Yeah, you know, I’ve always loved literature, but I mostly have written plays, which is a completely different method of writing for me. When I’m writing a play, I don’t write it down until it’s done. Like I literally write the play in my mouth and my head. I’ll have a very, it’s all in my head and I form.
Martin Kelley:
So it’s all in your head.
Peterson Toscano:
the play in my mouth by performing it because they’re one person plays usually and I play multiple characters. So I don’t I want it to sound organic like because it’s all dialogue and that’s a totally different process from writing a short story like like this one, which is on paper. In this case, this was the process was I just felt like bad for Quakers right now who are feeling discouraged by the way the world is because
Peterson Toscano:
It’s not going well. And there’s like, yeah, and there’s some concerns, right? That things are just not going to go well. So I wanted to set a story a hundred years in the future, a future that had similar problems, just to kind of show that we will endure and some problems just will never completely go away. Hopefully the world would get better, but it’s never going to be utopia. That was my whole idea. And so I started with that.
Martin Kelley:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people were eating.
Peterson Toscano:
But the story just went in its own direction where it just didn’t like that idea of this futuristic looking back. And instead, as I was writing it, the strength of the story were these personal reflections about the main characters, particularly the 17-year-old Jordan and the grief he was experiencing from his mother’s death that it just sort of took over. And then his mother I introduced as a character.
Peterson Toscano:
in the writing and I showed it to my husband Glenn, who’s a writer, Glenn Rattiff. And he said, wow, there’s a lot of heat coming from this character. I would love to see more of the mom. And that helped me. And I think that’s part of what I learned about writing from knowing Glenn is that writing is a communal process. Like this idea of like the soul genius coming up with a brilliant idea and it’s right. And then, you know, they
Martin Kelley:
Banging away on the typewriter, yeah.
Peterson Toscano:
They refine it and then finally it’s perfect. I don’t actually see that with real writers, that it’s about getting feedback. It’s about other people helping to shape the story very much like it was when I did my plays and the audience taught me what was working and what wasn’t.
Martin Kelley:
Yeah, the look back is still in there. And I thought that would be a spoiler. So I wasn’t even necessarily going to talk about that because you’re reading through and all of a sudden you realize like, wait, they’re describing today as 100 years ago. So that to me was sort of like, I had to reread it three or four times just to make sure I was understanding that. And I think actually there’s a lot of articles in this current issue that are like that where you’re kind of reading along and then all of sudden like, wait, what’s happening?
Martin Kelley:
are they talking to real people? Are they talking to dead people? It’s a fun, fun to read. And does actually make you want to read again and again, which is fun for a short story.
Peterson Toscano:
Yeah.
Peterson Toscano:
Well, the funny thing is a hundred years ago with the Gilded Age and the 1918 pandemic conditions were very similar to what they are today, where you had the rich folks who were running the things, know, you the railroad folks, the robber barons, you know, these like elite few had most of the power. The, you know, there’s a lot of fear of immigrants and outsiders like
Peterson Toscano:
It’s interesting how 100 years ago really wasn’t terribly different than today.
Martin Kelley:
Lots of scandals going on, Teapot Dome and everything, everyone on the take. Yeah.
Peterson Toscano:
So many scandals, my goodness.
Martin Kelley:
So guess that sort of gives us a little sense of like Quaker worship. We’ve been through this before. We can get through it again. It gives a little bit of context to it, maybe it’s just Misery Loves Company that we love to know that we’ve been here before
Peterson Toscano:
Yeah, we endure. And I think also, while there are huge shifts in culture and technology, that humans are still humans. That if you write a story 100 years from now, human nature is, I don’t think it’s gonna be that much different 100 years from now than it was 100 years ago.
Martin Kelley:
So tell me how you come up with the characters. So you have two very well-defined characters here. Jordan Masters, he’s 17, he’s about to go out to college. He’s been through trauma, he doesn’t really engage with the outside world. He’s kind of interior focused, a very strong character. And then I always have to look up Longfellow Niederlander. For those who don’t know, Peterson does live in Pennsylvania Dutch country, so you have names like that.
Martin Kelley:
in his 90s and is kind of the grumpy history professor who gives prepared ministry, which is young Jordan finds shocking. And it’s always talking about history. So how do you come up with these? Are these people you know or pastiches of various people you’ve known?
Peterson Toscano:
Yeah, it’s often dialogue driven. I usually like first have a line. And so Jordan was kind of the snarkiness of this 17 year old who is super judgmental and then who feels bad about being judgmental because he’s trying to do better. It’s sort of that’s what started with the core of his identity and then built from there. I do have a nephew who’s 18 who just went off to college and this summer we were
Peterson Toscano:
texting back and forth a lot about like, what can he do over the summer to be better prepared for college? And I remember being in that state myself when I was leaving home and the summer before I was like, I’m gonna get in good shape and we’re gonna learn to read more because I have to do all that stuff. yeah, so sort of a little bit based on me, a little bit based on my nephew. The Longfellow character is…
Peterson Toscano:
reminds me very much of a man I knew many years ago in New York, although he really was very tall and thin. And this character is actually short, which is something that Jordan finds amusing and annoying. Why would such a short person have such a name, Longfellow? It’s a long name too. But he was a very wise man. He was a New York Times reporter, actually, McCandlish Phillips.
Martin Kelley:
A long name, yeah.
Peterson Toscano:
and he would speak in our church regularly, very thoughtful, well put together, but from another time. He spoke in this cadence that was not of the time. And I found him really interesting, but he really was scraggly and old and his voice was raspy. So I think some of him got through.
Martin Kelley:
And how did you bring him into a Quaker context?
Peterson Toscano:
Well, initially it was again this construct I had about the future and that, you know, he was going to talk about like the pandemic and that they had in the future, they had just gone through another pandemic. So it was part of that to bring that in. But also, I think it was I wanted to set it in a meeting house because, well, it’s a friend’s journal. And I have once before I submitted a story that was not
Martin Kelley:
future.
Peterson Toscano:
Quakerly. No, it wasn’t that it wasn’t Quakerly. I thought it was very quickly, but there was not explicitly Quaker. I thought it was a great story, although no one’s published it yet. It was satire too. So was like very different from what you normally get. It was about Donald Trump’s great, great grandson who likes building things, but like not like the family, how he, because of the world that he lives in, he becomes another Trump.
Peterson Toscano:
another one of the brand. But I knew that for Friends Journal. If I’m to put a short story in, it’s got to be about Quakers. And what’s more Quaker than a Quaker meeting, I thought. And what that does too is it gives us a chance to have perspective of what’s going on in people’s heads. We don’t quite know what’s going on in Longfellow’s head. We just hear his words. It’s mostly what’s going on in Jordan’s head in these flashbacks, the stream of consciousness as he
Peterson Toscano:
remembers his mom before she died and lessons that she taught him and even the strange request for him to seem strange that she said, I’d like you to carry on going to Quaker meeting until you’re 18, which was strange to him because he didn’t realize how important her faith was until she said that, which I think is actually kind of true for a lot of Quaker kids because we don’t always, the adults, don’t always talk about our faith. We just kind of do this thing. And, and since our faith is so interior,
Peterson Toscano:
People don’t know what’s going on behind the curtain.
Martin Kelley:
Yeah. Yeah, I think my kids think Quakers are all kind of strange. My wife and I have different religious backgrounds, so they’re not being raised Quaker. But whenever they come to the meeting, they’re always kind of looking and thinking, like, what is going on here? A bunch of old people, and they’ll stand up, and they’ll say a little something. And from a kid’s perspective, that is different than 24-7, always on world that they live in with the cell phones nearby.
Martin Kelley:
We don’t have our cell phones out. We’re not doing anything for that hour or so that we’re sitting there. It is, I guess, even counter-cultural a little just to sit and do nothing except wait on the Lord as we go about in our worship.
Peterson Toscano:
It’s radical, actually, and it is counter-cultural. think it’s a great way to cleanse our brain because there’s just so much, we’re just constantly receiving things. And I was listening to a podcast at a Vanderbilt Divinity School with a professor who teaches psychiatry, psychology, Bruce Rogers Vaughan.
Peterson Toscano:
And he was talking about some recent studies that came out with some young people who claim they have no inner life. Like they have no inner thoughts. And like the thought of it is just terrifying to me. But that is one of the challenges too of going to Quaker Meeting because you’ve got nothing to distract you. And some pesky, accept your inner thoughts, but sometimes like…
Martin Kelley:
Yeah.
Martin Kelley:
Accept your inner thoughts, perhaps. Accept your inner thoughts always distracting you and you’re trying to negotiate them.
Peterson Toscano:
Right. But then there’s also that thing you’ve been avoiding, the feeling you’ve been avoiding, and you don’t have TikTok to just kind of snap it away.
Martin Kelley:
Yeah. So why do you feel it’s important to write this down and not just, you know, experience it on Sunday, but why are you telling stories? What’s the purpose for you of fiction?
Peterson Toscano:
Well, I think it goes back first to writing. And I’ve learned through the years that writing is a form of thinking and it’s a reform. It’s a form of reflection and contemplation, which we all really like as Quakers and find really useful. So it doesn’t happen always with fiction, but when I write a lot of nonfiction to a lot of personal essays, I recently wrote one about that time period when I first went to college, the first semester at a
Peterson Toscano:
Christian college, an evangelical Christian college when I was trying desperately not to be gay. And I, I never really spent much time thinking about that, that period of my life. But in writing the essay, I learned new things about myself. I was able to see that period in a very different light. I was able to develop some real empathy and compassion for myself, which I didn’t have at the time. I was very hard on myself.
Peterson Toscano:
I was able to just see why it was so hard and not the obvious stuff that was going on. It was so helpful. And I think that’s what I’m learning too about writing is that the end goal isn’t getting something published. It is the writing. up until now, most of my writing has been very utilitarian. Like I’m writing a play so I can present it to an audience because there’s a political message behind it because I need…
Peterson Toscano:
to say something about trans rights or about the harm of conversion therapy or climate change. Or I wrote essays about the same, right? They’re more like op-eds and letters to the editor. But to write without a particular aim of where it’s gonna go or that it will go anywhere, that helped me to relax and enjoy the process and delight in it. Like it’s entertaining, it’s hard.
Peterson Toscano:
But it’s entertaining too, to just kind of see how things, stories emerge. But to the bigger question you asked, like why fiction? Well, because I think we need more empathy now than we’ve ever needed before, which they probably said a hundred years ago. But fiction does that, right? Just like plays, it gives us an opportunity to think and feel in somebody else’s mind and body, which…
Martin Kelley:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Peterson Toscano:
in this day and age where there’s lots of fear and hostility, it’s so easy to just clamp down and to be able to experience somebody else’s thoughts and feelings and bodies is a very useful thing to do these days.
Martin Kelley:
Yeah, and I mean, as a reader, like I appreciated it. I could recognize myself in 17 year old Jordan. I was definitely clamped down and not sharing. And I had all these things going on in my head. So I appreciate that. But I also appreciate it just you talking about people’s thoughts during meetings. So French Journal, we know we publish 11 issues a year. We’re talking about Quaker theology. We’re talking about Quakers and
Martin Kelley:
you know, whatever topics, climate change or racism. But we don’t actually often talk about, what’s happening in our heads as we’re sitting down at meeting, which is the most sort of quakerly thing we can do that we do, you know, every week or however often we can get to meeting. We don’t really talk about that in essay form. So to have it in fiction, I think has actually helped.
Peterson Toscano:
Hmm.
Martin Kelley:
share that with with an audience like what what are these Quakers and what’s what is going through their head as they’re sitting in meeting and someone’s starting to stand and you’re starting to roll your eyes like this guy again with this message again so I appreciate having that in a fiction form
Peterson Toscano:
Well, and you’ll probably appreciate them. The companion episode of Quakers Today that goes with this issue because it’s one of the things that we actually do. I’ve been thinking for a long time of how to make a Quaker meeting for worship more accessible to young people who maybe don’t know what’s going on in their parents’ head, but also to visitors because you’ve got to know a lot before you walk into a Quaker meeting.
Peterson Toscano:
you know, and sometimes they’ll give you a little pamphlet like this is how it works. But the first time I went to a Quaker meeting, I didn’t even know it was supposed to be an hour of silence. No one told me. But yeah, but also like you see people and you think what’s going on. So you’ll hear in this next episode this idea that I’ve been pitching and we’ve modeled it at Millville meeting a few times. It’s meeting for worship with attention to worship where
Martin Kelley:
It’s a surprise,
Peterson Toscano:
two people volunteer in advance to be the ones who pull back the curtain. And at the beginning of worship, they introduce themselves and they say, we’re having meeting for worship with attention to worship. This is how we settle in. Typically, this is how I settle in. The person says, is how I settle in. Then we’re gonna settle in, have worship. And at the end, we’re gonna share with you our worship experience. So that when the meetings.
Peterson Toscano:
done and people introduce themselves, those two people can say what happened, what their worship journey was like, not necessarily like what messages they had, but like what was the process that went through, which is a journey. And it’s like being dropped in the wilderness, right? Because there’s no paths. It’s not like we have designated paths like an Episcopalian church where you know when to stand, when to sit. We’re just in the wilderness. And hearing how people navigate that
Martin Kelley:
Yeah.
Martin Kelley:
Mm-hmm.
Peterson Toscano:
how they deal with the distractions, how they sometimes embrace the distractions. That I think we don’t, that’s the stuff that a lot of people don’t know and don’t know how to learn. And then my idea is after that we have, as always, a good potluck and all of the committees can have tables out to talk about what happens on the committees so people know what else is going on in the life of the meeting.
Martin Kelley:
Yeah, it sounds like a great idea. I know from my meeting I have a what to expect on our website where I go through like this will be about an hour and you know someone might you know we’ll have start with silence someone might get up and give a little scripture someone might get up and talk about their life a little someone might stand and it’s all like the real people in the order that they generally do give messages at my meeting it’s like when it’s like someone might stand up and give a little scripture it’s like that’s Earl our old clerk Earl he’s going to do that and someone’s going to
Peterson Toscano:
Mm.
Peterson Toscano:
You
Peterson Toscano:
You
Martin Kelley:
start sharing about a moment of their life and struggles they’ve been through. And it’s like, know who that is. And I just try to really like lay it out just so someone’s not just like, I’m going to go into a strange building and who knows what’s going to happen. I think we do need to be more transparent.
Peterson Toscano:
It’s great that you have it on the website too and I encourage everyone to do that because these days that’s how people are learning about our meetings. So for instance if you’re welcoming it’s great have a sign at your meeting house have signs inside who you’re welcoming but put it on your website too because that’s usually the first place people are going. Back in the day when I first went to the Quaker meeting they didn’t have a website for that meeting in Hartford. There was a web barely it just was starting.
Martin Kelley:
or don’t have anything updated. Yeah, yeah, well, had one visitor recently. She determined she was going to go, and she lived right behind the meeting house, and her dad said, like, are you sure you want to go there? I don’t think anyone’s actually there. Like, they didn’t even know that it was an active meeting still happening. So, you know, we do need to let people.
Peterson Toscano:
problem with my meeting as well. We had to like make more noise or something. But when I was in New England, yearly meeting at Hartford, I was involved with the Young Friends Program, which is the teen program. And at that time, they had a very active program. Like every month, there was a retreat in one of the meeting houses in New England. And we would play worship bingo, where we had like a bingo card that of
Martin Kelley:
Thanks.
Peterson Toscano:
the kind of messages that you might run into, like the message about the pet. Like that would be a, know, somebody give a message about a pet or on my way to meeting, right? Okay, that’s a good one. On my way to meeting message or, well, I was listening to NPR, National Public Radio the other day, but one time we almost lost it because one person stood up and said, well, on my way to meeting today, and we’re like, yeah, I was listening to NPR.
Martin Kelley:
Sure.
Martin Kelley:
That’s just about the flowers blooming. Yeah.
Martin Kelley:
listening to NPR.
Peterson Toscano:
And I was thinking about my pet Misty, we’re like, whoa! It was like the trifecta. And the adults were like, why are they getting excited, those kids?
Martin Kelley:
The most perfect Quaker meeting ever.
Martin Kelley:
Yeah. Well, great. Well, thank you for sharing all this. And we’ll put a link when it comes out to the podcast next week as we’re broadcasting this. yeah, thank you for sharing your stories. And we want to continue telling these Quaker stories. Because I do think fiction, it brings us to a different understanding of who we are and sort of shakes things up. So I’m really glad French Journal has been doing these fiction issues. I think this is our fifth year of having an annual fiction issue.
Martin Kelley:
And I’m glad you’ve been sharing your stories with us Peterson
Peterson Toscano:
And it’s because actually I need to tell you this and thank you. It’s because of the fiction issue that I began writing more seriously after the first episode of Quakers Today, which was on the fiction issue. The following year, was another fiction issue and I met Vicki Winslow, who’s had a number of pieces in Friends Journal and yeah, so good. A Southern writer, amazing. And I asked her when I was talking to her,
Martin Kelley:
Yeah, great writer.
Peterson Toscano:
for the interview, like who does she share her writing with? Because it’s so polished. And this idea like this communal writing and she said, I wish I had people to share it with, but I haven’t really done that since I was at university. And I thought, what? you’re so good now, how much better will it be with community? So we started a very small Quaker Writers Workshop, mostly, you know, for her and for…
Martin Kelley:
Yeah.
Peterson Toscano:
another writer, Anita from Brooklyn. You know Anita, she’s written Friends Journal too. so I had to start presenting something because we had this workshop and that’s what got me going. So thank you Friends Journal. Thank you Fiction Issue because you got me writing.
Martin Kelley:
I think I know who you’re talking about.
Martin Kelley:
Well, glad to know it. Well, thanks Peterson for coming on the podcast here with us.
Peterson Toscano:
Thanks Martin. Have a good day.
Martin Kelley:
too. Bye bye.
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