While preparing the Reading Group Guide for The Names of Our Tears, my publisher posed several questions for me, and I thought readers might like to see my answers. I have posted them below:
AUTHOR’S RESPONSES TO
QUESTIONS FOR
THE READING GROUP
GUIDE
TO ACCOMPANY
The Names Of Our Tears
An Amish-Country Mystery
by Paul (P.L.) Gaus
1. In this novel – as
well as in your others – you present Amish faith and culture in a
straightforward and sympathetic way. How
important is it to you to portray these people and their faith properly and
respectfully? Is it challenging?
My most important and challenging
goal in writing The Amish-Country
Mysteries is to illuminate Amish culture and lifestyle as authentically as
possible. Since all aspects of Amish
culture and lifestyle stem from their Christian faith, it is also important to
me to present this side of their lives authentically, too. I want my readers to learn what it is like to
live Amish, to think Amish, and to pray Amish.
I hope my readers will take away from each of my stories the assurance
that they now understand something more about Amish people than they did before
they discovered my books. In designing
and writing my stories, I work very hard to give my readers accurate and
engaging insights into this society set apart from the rest of us. To do this, I allow my plots and characters
to arise from an important scripture or religious principle that is central to
Amish life. Also, I work hard to show
accurately how Amish culture both coexists and comes into conflict with the
culture of English society, because these two cultures are closely interwoven
in rural Holmes County, Ohio.
In fact, it is the intersection of the two cultures that provides me
with the best opportunities to illuminate Amish life. So, my books are written at the interface of
these two very different cultures, and I think the novels benefit from the
conflicts and tensions that arise there.
2. In your foreword,
you mention that the glade where Ruth Zook is found is a real place, and you
describe how you went there as part of the research for the novel. How does fully fleshing out the setting help
you as you write the rest of the story?
The characters in my novels are
entirely fictional, but all of the places (except Millersburg College)
are real. In fact, one of my fan clubs
has made a practice of going to the various locations to take photographs of
the places where “things happen” in my stories.
I describe the locations accurately, and I plan a new novel with
specific Holmes County locations in mind. I think this gives my novels an anchoring
sense of place. I also travel in Holmes County
extensively, and I have photographed the types of scenes that typically appear
in my novels. For The Names of Our Tears, I also visited Pinecraft, in Sarasota, several times,
so that I could write about it correctly.
Because Amish life is so strongly anchored to the land, I think it is
vital to my work that I portray the land where they live and farm with special
care. Also, for my cast of English
regulars, who appear in each of the stories, I use the setting of the county
courthouse, the old red brick jail, and the courthouse square where the civil
war monument sits in the middle of Millersburg.
These and other places in my Holmes
County novels are real,
and my readers can go there to visit the sites.
3. How do you develop
the mystery plots in your books? Are
they ever pulled from the headlines?
What was your inspiration for this book in particular?
My stories are entirely
fictional, and I never write about true events.
Instead, I start with an important principle in Amish culture, and I let
the plot unfold so as to illustrate that principle as thoroughly as I can. In the seventh Amish-Country Mystery, Harmless as Doves, the principle was
Amish pacifism, and I wrote about several characters whose lives where
profoundly affected by their different understandings of pacifism and
peacefulness. Then in The Names of Our Tears, I designed the
plot and the characters around the scripture verse in Psalms 34, which promises
that God draws “close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in
spirit.” With this verse in mind, I
wondered how I could portray this promise to someone who is crushed in spirit,
and I hit on the idea that God is so close to us in our sorrows that he can
even name our tears.
4. What are you
working on now? Will we see more of Holmes County?
I am writing the ninth
Amish-Country Mystery, and like the others, it is a Holmes County
story. But some of the action also takes
place in Ohio’s
Middlefield Amish community. It is a
sequel to The Names of Our Tears. I have never written a sequel before, but I
realized that in The Names of Our Tears
I had told Ruth Zook’s story, but not Fannie Helmuth’s. The ninth novel takes up the story of Fannie
Helmuth.
Labels: Amish, Amish Culture, Amish-Country Mysteries, Holmes County, P. L. Gaus