P. L. Gaus’s Ohio Amish Journal

Cool off in this July heat wave?  Here’s how Amish kids do it.  Enough said.

Do you remember walking home from school?  Do you remember what you wore, or what you carried?  I remember the books – always so heavy.  I remember the homework, even in grade school.  Mostly, I remember the certainty I had, at that age, that this would never change.  I’d somehow always be in school.  Even after my advanced degrees, I still found myself in school, carrying books home.  With homework!  I was a college professor for 31 years.  And I cannot shake the habit of inquiry that settled into me, I guess in the fifth grade.  Maybe earlier.  I suppose that’s why I write.

But here are three kids walking home from school, knowing that this will soon end forever.  Amish children don’t attend any school after the age of sixteen.  Their birthday arrives, and they walk home for good.  School was only something they did while they were still young.  I think there is a profound sense of anchored-in-harbor tranquility in this photograph.  It is foreign to everything I personally have known.  We have careers, life-long goals, and ambitions in the modern world.  Do you catch yourself wondering what it must be like for these children?

The plows are busy in Holmes County, Ohio, and a hard winter is closing its doors.  On Amish farms like this one, they are turning the soil somewhat ahead of the spring rains, hoping to get the fields ready before it is too muddy to work them.  Here two teams were out one recent afternoon, the Amish farmer getting some help from a neighbor fellow who clearly wasn’t Amish.  It will happen like this sometimes, English and Amish working side-by-side, and the cultural mix is fascinating. 

Can you make out what the young fellow is doing as he drives his team?  Right, he’s checking his cell phone.  Isn’t that posture a classic one, in a peculiarly modern way?  That’s what makes Holmes County so interesting to me – the cultural mix is astonishing.  It’s why I will never run out of material for my novels. 

You can read the latest news and reviews on my website: www.plgaus.com.  There is also a schedule of upcoming events.  The seventh Amish-Country Mystery will be published in July this year, and the website has a preview of this novel.  Perhaps I’ll see you at one of my signings or lectures, but in the meantime, I’ll be out in Holmes County, looking for photos like this one.

What is quiet to you?  A city at night, the background noises muffled by thick walls?  A distant train whistle in a small town?  Or crickets at night, nothing else around?  How about a place so quiet that you can hear the clipping of a horse’s hooves, two hundred yards away, on the blacktop of an isolated country lane? 

Here is a picture that speaks quiet to me.  Snow mutes both near and distant noises.  The countryside is asleep, everyone inside where a wood stove provides the heat.  There is no clanging from the metal parts of a windmill.  There is nothing happening on the farm.  And only once in a while does a buggy happen by. 

You hear the hooves first, and then the rattle of the undercarriage and wheels becomes audible.  It seems loud as it passes, but that is a relative thing.  After it has gone, the quiet returns.  If you stand there long enough to let your ears adjust, you pick out the faint trill of water running in the drainage ditch beside the road.  It’s still winter, but you want to think spring.  In Ohio, that means that it is still possible to have a deep freeze that silences even the noise of the snow melting. 

That is true quiet – a place so cold that nothing moves.  I’m sure it’s coming again, maybe one more time before the end of March.  But for now, quiet is that little trickle of water beside the road, the snow melting for the moment, in a rare February thaw. 

It seems almost to be a racket, once your ears adjust to the silence all around.  And if you live in the city, it’s a quiet you’ve probably never heard.

Would you hang laundry out to dry in winter?  Sure, if you were Amish.  The question is how do you wash it first?  Remember the old ringer-washers?  If the answer is yes, you’ve dated yourself.  The ones I remember were mostly electric, though, and many Amish forsake the use of gasoline generators for such appliances, using only those square galvanized wash and rinse tubs, often with a corrugated washboard and a hand agitator, too:

(http://www.lehmans.com/store/Home_Goods___Laundry).

How does that sound for an afternoon’s labor?  And remember – for a large family, that’s probably every afternoon.

With my wife Madonna, I just finished a book tour for Plume Books on the west coast, signing copies of Blood of the Prodigal, the first of the Amish-Country Mysteries. It was a fabulous experience, in great part due to the superior planning by Mary Pomponio, my publicist at Penguin.  We stopped at the best mystery book shops in Seattle, Portland, Tucson, Phoenix, San Diego, and Los Angeles, and spent time at the wonderful mystery writers’ and readers’ international convention, Bouchercon, in San Francisco.

Can you imagine a better set of west coast cities to visit?  It was all a dream, I think – too fabulous to be real – and yet it was very real and very inspiring.  There are so many fans of mysteries out there, and there are so many very fine mystery bookstores.  I have posted some photos of the events on my website (www.plgaus.com), and I have previously written about Bouchercon.

A tour like this one keeps you moving.  Sometimes we rose at 4:30 in the morning, to take showers and repack our suitcases, for a limousine that arrived at 6:00 A.M.  And the madness at airport security these days can drive you just a bit nuts.  But Penguin provides escorts in all of the destination cities, and all an author has to do is ride in pleasant company to the next bookstore, talk to fans, bookstore owners and staff, and sign books.  Sometimes you grab a quick meal on the run, and sometimes you dine well.  In San Francisco, our schedule worked out so that we had a little time to ride cable cars to lunch and dinner on Knob Hill and Chinatown, and in Seattle, we dined at the famous Elliot’s, right on the water.  Our room in La Jolla faced the Pacific ocean, and in San Francisco, we had a balcony room overlooking San Francisco Bay.

But the best part of the tour was the chance to explain what the Amish-Country Mysteries are all about.  Most people out west don’t know a great deal about the Amish, and it is fascinating to answer questions and explain about Amish lifestyle.  That is the whole point of my novels – to illuminate Amish culture as much as possible in the context of a mystery story, and each book is packed to the brim with detail about Amish thought, religion, and lifestyle choices.  What is it like in America to be different?  What does it take to separate yourself and all of your family from “the circus of the greater American spectacle”?  Why do so many people find peace and happiness on a farm without all of the gadgets the rest of us just couldn’t live without?

So, that’s what we took out west – the Amish-Country Mysteries – the books, to be sure, but also the knowledge of a community set apart.  My guess is that people will not be able to get enough of it.  So, I’ll keep writing them.  The seventh Amish-Country Mystery should be out next summer, and in it I take Professor Branden to the Amish retirement community of Pinecraft, in Sarasota, Florida.  Surprised?  I don’t doubt it.  There is always something surprising and interesting about Amish people.  And on our recent book tour out west, we made the point that here is a culture worth knowing.

Next, we will visit bookstores in Ohio and Kentucky (Broken English just came out this week), and then there will be an important mystery convention (Malice Domestic) on the east coast next April, and I think we might be able to arrange a tour of more book stores, then.  If so, I’ll post a schedule on my website, and maybe we’ll see you at one of the signings.  I’ll be the guy with the pen.  The pretty one will be my wife.

The last four days at the Bouchercon convention in San Francisco have been wonderful, exhausting, fun, intense, impressive, inspiring, and more, even, than all of that.  Here I am signing books for fans after the panel I gave on Plotting techniques.  The room for my panel presentation was packed with writers and readers, as is the case pretty much all through Bouchercon, and there were a lot of insightful questions from the audience.  Bouchercon is the international convention of mystery writers and readers, and if you love mystery novels, it is one of the best treats you could give yourself.  There is a constant schedule of speakers, many of them the top novelists in the field.  Special guests this year were Denise Mina, Val McDermid, Lee Goldberg, and Lee Child, and awards were given for the best novels in dozens of categories.  The mystery writers community is a close-knit bunch, and all very friendly.  It includes the whole spectrum of genres from bloody thrillers to the softer cozies, and the writers are all fascinating people.  If you like mysteries, try to get to Bouchercon – 2011.  It will be held in St. Louis.

 Literary critics?  They can be a bane or a boon to an author.  And even a single critic can simultaneously be both.  The experience of reading the critics’ reviews can be traumatic for new authors, and even for authors who have been around awhile, the sting of a bad review can be a trial.  The trick is, to let the sting serve as something useful, like the sting of a flu shot.  It hurts, but you just keep telling yourself that it’s good for you.  Even for authors who have made it to the top, although they may profess a disdainful disinterest, I suspect it still matters to them what the literary critics say.

The barb of an unkind critic sinks deep into an author’s skin, especially when there is evidence that the critic really hasn’t given your work a fair and honest reading.  New writers, get ready, because this sort of thing does happen.  Less traumatic are the critics who clearly have read your work carefully.  Often comments from such reviews serve useful purposes.  Ouch, you say, “I’ll never do that again.”  Or you might say, “OK, that’s fair criticism, so I’ll work to improve that the next time.”

With good luck, as a writer, you keep at it, and you begin to read comments that make your whole day.  It’s one of the most gratifying things in a writer’s life.  But, you soon realize that praise for your work is not as useful as criticism.  It’s fun to get a good review, but really, you tell yourself, you knew that already.  You suspect your editors knew it too.  Praise is wonderful, but it gives you no new levers to push against or insights to guide improvement while you write your next book.

But once in awhile, even if there is some criticism involved, a literary critic will pay you the high compliment of taking your body of work seriously, treating it as literature, and demonstrating that he or she does “get it.”  They have really understood what you were trying to do.  They find and give respect to the deeper things you have written.  They provide a detailed and knowledgeable assessment of what your novels have accomplished.  They get inside the writer’s work and search out the hidden insights. 

Such a review of my novels was written recently by Professor Kyle Schlabach (Goshen College) in the online journal of the Center for Mennonite Writing.  I have linked to this critical review under News and Articles on my website (www.plgaus.com).  Schlabach’s is the type of review and literary critique that writers want to see.  I think it is much better than standard literary criticism, because it aspires to the higher goals of that craft.  Critical or complimentary, such literary critics give high respect to authors.

The civil war monument on courthouse square in Millersburg, Ohio, is mentioned often in my Amish-Country Mysteries, not because it has ever played an important role in one of the stories, but because it stands outside the north office window of Sheriff Bruce Robertson.  Many times, my characters have gazed upon it while contemplating one case or another.  As you can see, it is very much like other such monuments sprinkled in small towns throughout the country, and if you’ve driven much over the so-called blue highways of America, passing through small, rural towns, you know you’ve reached the center of town because one of these monuments is often there, especially in county seats, marking a place of memory and honor, of valor, sacrifice, and devotion to duty.  This one in Millersburg anchors the northwest corner of courthouse square, in front of the courthouse itself, and Robertson’s red brick jail is out of the picture, off to the right.  So, I thought you’d like to see it.  I’ll probably mention it again, when Professor Branden or Pastor Troyer stand looking out of Robertson’s north window, arguing as friends will, about their next case.

It took a while, but I finally was able to finish constructing my author’s website, and perhaps those of you who have been following my blog will find it interesting.  The launch of my website is timed to precede the release of the new Plume (a division of Penguin Group USA) editions of my stories, which are all going to be re-published as trade paperbacks, beginning on September 28, 2010.  Details of the publication dates are available on my new website.  These Plume editions have been edited lightly to remove a few intemperate words and passages, making them considerably more appropriate for the Christian book market.  The essence of the original stories is all still perfectly intact, so I was pleased with the opportunity to improve the writing.  At any rate, check out the new website at www.plgaus.com, and if you are inclined, use the email link listed under contact information to let me know what you think of it.