Dale Cramer: Writing from Life

I didn't read Dale Cramer’s first four extraordinary novels in the order they were written. I first read the third one, Levi’s Will. When I finished it, I knew I had found a writer both talented and true. He was writing not only from his imagination but also is heart and his own experience.

I will admit to some misgivings. I know Amish fiction is popular, but I prefer other genres. Levi’s Will looked more than vaguely Amish; it looked especially Amish. It turned out to be one completely absorbing story, one that transcended the author. He wasn't writing only from his own knowledge and experience; he was writing from mine as well.

And it turns out that all of his novels are like that.

Sutter’s Cross (2002) is the story of what happens to a small town when a stranger appears.

In Bad Ground (2004), a teenager leaves his home in Tennessee to live with his uncle, a miner in the Atlanta area. The uncle is called Snake, and he was badly burned in an underground fire, the same fire that killed his nephew’s brother.

 

Levi’s Will (2005) is about a young Amish man who abandons his family, joins the army and fights in World War II, marries a sharecropper’s daughter and is “banned” by his family for decades.

Summer of Light (2007) is the story of a construction worker injured on the job, and fired. His wife is working, and he’s left to be the primary caregiver for their three children, find an occupation, and find himself. It is a delightful story, by far the most humorous of the four novels, and it is the one I've gone back to over and over to read and reread how Cramer constructed some of the funniest scenes I've read in what is largely a serious novel.

All of the novels absorb aspects of Cramer’s own life and family. His father was Amish, left his Amish family for “the English,” and was indeed banned for 60 years. (Cramer has said that it was his novel, the novel written by the father’s son, that eventually fostered reconciliation six decades after the fact.) Cramer worked as a miner and was burned, though not as badly as Snake is. And Cramer has been a construction worker.

Clearly that’s a major reason why these stories seem so true. But it’s more than that. The stories transcend Cramer’s own experience. Reading Levi’s Will, for example, threw me headlong into my own father’s experience. He wasn't Amish but Southern Baptist. He wasn't banned or shunned for leaving his home town to move to New Orleans and eventually marry and raise a family there, but he was always something of a black sheep, and he and one of his sisters didn't speak for more than 40 years until they were so old it was ridiculous not to. He also fought in World War II, and while my mother wasn't the daughter of a sharecropper, she did come from a very poor New Orleans family. 

Reading Levi’s Will was like reading my own family history.

Cramer has that singular ability to write – and write well – from his own life. He’s not settling old scores; if anything, the affection he has for his characters tells the reader this is more about honoring than criticizing. His stories are inhabited by real people, with real human failings and real human dreams.

In late 2010, four years after the publication of Summer of Light, I saw that he had a new novel soon to be published. It was called Paradise Valley: The Daughters of Jacob Bender, and it looked like the beginning of a series.

The cover strongly suggested Amish.

But I trusted the stories of Dale Cramer and knew that he would find a way to transcend the genre. He did, and I wrote about it.

And then he did a sequel, The Captive Heart, and I read it and wrote about it as well.

It says a lot about Cramer’s writing ability that he persuaded me to read two Amish romances and that I enjoyed them both.

This article was originally published by The Christian Manifesto, but the site was redesigned and the archive (with all of my posts) disappeared. So I’m occasionally reposting some of the articles I wrote for the publication. This particular article has been updated to include the references to Cramer’s last two novels.

Dale Cramer's "The Captive Heart"

I’ve read another Amish novel. One that runs pretty close to an Amish romance. Okay, so it is an Amish romance. But it also has bandits, epidemics, kidnappings, and a murder or two.

Perhaps there’s a publishing genre called speculative Amish romance?

The book in question is The Captive Heart by Dale Cramer. It’s the second in the Daughters of Caleb Bender Series, the first being Paradise Valley.

I will read anything Dale Cramer writes, novels like Bad Ground, Sutter’s Cross, and Summer of Light. Levi’s Will is an Amish story, but more about a young man breaking away from the Amish order and joining the army in World War II. It’s based upon the story of Cramer’s own father. And Summer of Light, well, let’s say I laughed and cried at this story of a man finding himself.

Like its predecessor Paradise Valley, The Captive Heart is based upon the true story of Amish families who left Ohio in the early 1920s, fleeing from the state’s compulsory education laws, and settled in Mexico. This is the Mexico just past its revolution, and it hasn’t really left the revolution behind. Gangs of revolutionaries have turned themselves into gangs of bandits, and they roam the mountains and plains looking to pillage and plunder.

The Amish, of course, are pacifist. Cramer plays that pacifism against the violence of the bandits, and surprising, unexpected things happens.

That’s the larger story within which two romances develop. First is Rachel and Jake; Jake’s family had decided to stay in Ohio but Jake is able to come to Mexico eventually with another family as a kind of indentured farm hand. But the focus is Miriam Bender, the settlement’s schoolteacher and at 20 beginning to face the possibility of an unmarried life. Miriam finds herself pursued by a young Amish man while she’s attracted to her father’s hired man Domingo. But a romance with Domingo risks banning and separation from her family.

Cramer tells a good story. He builds suspense – and a growing sense of dread – at what is going to happen. The characters come alive with their hopes, dreams and struggles, not the least of which is the struggle of maintaining their faith in the face of a very harsh, very brutal reality.

The Captive Heart is a fast, enthralling read. I will even say I’m anticipating the next book in the series. I may not have converted to the cause of Amish romances, but I have converted to the cause of Amish romances as told by Dale Cramer.

Related:

Dale Cramer’s web site and blog.

My review of Paradise Valley.

Confession: I Have Now Read an Amish Romance

In the April issue of Christianity Today, history professor Eric Miller of Geneva College has on article on a subject that has usually made my blood run cold.

The title says it all: “Why We Love Amish Fiction.” It’s an account of this genre of Christian fiction, more accurately called Amish romance fiction, that seems to have become something larger than a genre. What I didn’t know, until I read the article, was that there are actually sub-genres of Amish fiction, including one that is distinctly unsympathetic to the Amish.

I had never read an Amish romance novel, not because I hadn’t noticed them (they’re everywhere – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, airport book and newsstands, the grocery store, everywhere). They simply held no appeal to me. None. Zip. Nada. The closest I had come to reading one was Dale Cramer’s Levi’s Will, one of the best stories I’ve read and which won the Christy Award in 2006. But it’s not an Amish romance; it’s the story of a young man who leaves his Amish family and community to strike out on his own, fight in World War II, get married, have children – and then come to turns with his family, especially his father, and his past. The novel is loosely based on the life of Cramer’s own father.

I liked Levi’s Will so much that I read everything Cramer had written – Sutter’s Mill, Bad Ground, and Summer of Light (I read that one twice). He’s a great writer and a great storyteller, and I’ve been waiting impatiently for his next novel to come out.

But he did what I didn’t expect him to do. He wrote an Amish romance. Not only that, he wrote an Amish romance that is the first in a series of Amish romances.

It was a struggle. Do I skip this novel and the ones to follow? Or do I trust Dale Cramer the writer and read this new novel?

I trusted him.

I have now read an Amish romance. Even if it had the name of Paradise Valley. Even if its cover artwork featured a young woman in the traditional Amish cap and dress. Even when it said it's the first in the series entitled “The Daughters of Caleb Bender.”

Cramer didn’t just want to test me; he wanted to give me the final exam.

Paradise Valley is based on a true story. In the early 1920s, the state of Pennsylvania enacted a law requiring children to attend school until they were 16. Five Amish fathers were arrested and jailed for refusing to send their children to the “Englisher” school. They relented only when the children were removed from their homes and placed in a children’s home. Many of these familes and others eventually emigrated from the United States to create new lives in Mexico.

In the novel, Caleb Bender, with three of his children forced to attend the school, decides to emigrate to Mexico. And this is Mexico of the early 1920s: political chaos, the old hacienda system quickly dying, banditry and Pancho Villa.

The entire Bender family leaves: Caleb and his wife, his two sons and his five daughters. Daughter Emma, who is pregnant, quickly marries her boyfriend Levi (and marries him out of the usual Amish marrying season); Levi realizes that emigration will help them avoid the inevitable shunning. Daughter Miriam is 18 and has no beau, or even the hint of one. Daughter Rachel has just realized that neighbor Jake Weaver, a year older than she is, is “the one,” and now he’s become the one who has to be left behind, because his family isn’t leaving.

The story of the problem in Pennsylvania becomes the story of moving to and living in a new land. Cramer works in several sub-plots – racial discrimination, threats from the bandits and unemployed soldiers, and a budding love interest between Miriam and the hired man Domingo – to weave a delightful story.

In the afterword, we learn that Cramer’s own father was born in Mexico. And Paradise Valley is a loosely fictional account of a real family history. It’s a history written with love, understanding and a kind of wonder.

So now I’ve read an Amish romance. I’m not going to rush out and load up on Amish romances. But I am going to read the rest of this series.

Cramer is that good of a storyteller.

The Writings of Dale Cramer

Author Dale Cramer has written four extraordinary novels and has a fifith one due to be published in January. They are novels written from life and personal experience. To see my post on "Dale Cramer: Writing from Life," please visit the Christian Manifesto.

Didn't Quite Make the Century Ride

Well, I almost made it, the Flat As A Pancake Century bike ride, that is. I did a relatively short training ride last night (20 miles) and was feeling fine. But about 1:30 this morning, I woke up, turned on my side, and had to grab the bedpost because of the pain on my left side.

I made it to work this morning, but had to give it up after an hour. Making a left turn in the car was agony. Getting out of the car was agony. Walking was okay for the moment, but sitting or standing was no fun. A member of my team came into my office to talk, and as I turned from my computer, it was all I could do to keep from yelling out loud.

The doctor checked me out, and even had a chest xray done. My wife kept glaring at me for not telling her about the pain in the first place. Diagnosis: something torn/strained/pinched with a muscle that wraps from my left shoulder blade around my left side. Treatment: Aleve, tylenol, heat, ice -- and no century ride. I had to listen to the doc on this; he's more of a biking fanatic than I am.

So instead of getting up before dawn tomorrow and going for a long, long ride with a group from the YMCA (wearing those great jerseys, too), I will be finishing Leif Enger's Peace Like a River and rereading an interview with author Dale Cramer in the latest edition of Christian Fiction Online Magazine. I love Cramer's writing. The interview is good, but the interviewer didn't ask half the questions I would have (okay, so they have space limitations). This edition of the publication also has an article about my online friend Mike Dellosso, author of Scream and The Hunted. Mike and I have never met face-to-face or even talked on the telephone, but we've become friends via the internet. His books scare me silly. He's working on a new one, tentatively entitled Darlington.

So no century ride tomorrow. Instead, I'll be reading and working on a work in progress, a novel I'm calling (for now) Plain Sam.

Reading Charles Martin's "When Crickets Cry"

I've been reading Charles Martin's When Crickets Cry. I really like his novels, for much the same reasons I like the novels of Dale Cramer and Chris Fabry.

All three authors evoke a strong sense of place in their works -- Martin in Florida/southeast Georgia, Cramer in the Atlanta area (and Kentucky), and Fabry in West Virginia. Okay, so I like Southerners. I'm one of them. I count West Virginia as part of the American South -- they talk like us, although the accents, or actually the array of accents associated with "Southern," are being homogenized into American newspeak. (I'm the classic example of this.)

All three writers are also strong on story -- and they always tell a good one. Always. I haven't hit a bum one yet, and I've read all of Cramer, most of Martin and the one adult novel Fabry has published (his second, June Bug, is scheduled for publication this summer).

And all three don't smack you upside the head with the Christian message, or any Christian message. But it's there, informing and often saturating their novels, even more powerful because it's not overt. You get the themes of brokenness and redemption, and of sacrifice and debt paid, without having them shoved at you. It's done much more subtly, almost wooing the reader, in much the same way I believe God often woos us. Odd word, that -- woo. The dictionary says it means to seek the affection of, to court, to solicit or entreat, to seek to gain or bring about.

That's what their writing does for me -- woo.

Dale Cramer's "Bad Ground"

Last November, I was scouting Christian fiction at Barnes & Noble, and pulled a volume called “Levi’s Will” from the shelf. The premise looked interesting – a young Amishman runs away from his family in Ohio during World War II, and his rejected heritage shapes him the rest of his life. The novel was written by C. Dale Cramer, the third of his four published works.

Cramer drew on some of his own family history, and the life of his father, to create the novel. I was captivated. It’s a great story, well characterized and well plotted. The writing is exceptionally fine. And if I substituted “Southern Baptist” for “Amish,” and north Louisiana for Ohio, I was reading the history of my own black sheep father and, by extension, myself.

“Bad Ground” is Cramer’s second novel. He scored well deserved acclaim for “Sutter’s Close,” his first published work, and “Bad Ground” lived up to expectations (a lot of second novels don't). It’s a story about mining, and it doesn’t take the reader long to figure out that while it’s a work of fiction, the mining details are too realistic and too precise for this not to reflect the author’s personal experience.

The story is about Jeremy Prine, a 17-year-old boy whose father died years before in a mining accident and whose mother has recently died from breast cancer. Before she dies, his mother gives him a letter, telling him to go to his Uncle Aidan, because the uncle has something only he can give to Jeremy, and Jeremy has something that he can only give to Aidan.

Aidan is a miner near Atlanta, and he bears the physical scars of a terrible mining accident, the same accident that killed Jeremy’s father. Aidan has not seen family for more than a decade, because the emotional scars are worse than the physical ones. He's known to his fellow miners as Snake, because of obvious physical reminders of skin grafts. Aidan's blocked the emotional pain by isolation and alcohol. And then Jeremy shows up at the mining office, lies about his age, and signs on as a yard worker.

How Jeremy and Aidan come to understand each other and ultimately love each other is the heart of “Bad Ground.” It’s a fine story, a beautiful story, about the pain and joy of family, and the pain and joy of forgiveness.