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.

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.