GENTLE GIANT SPORTS HERO IMPACTS WHOLE AMISH COMMUNITY
Life, & Death & Giants
By Ron Rindo
(St. Martin’s Press)
Interview by Diane Slocum
“Something powerful happens when a novel finds its people, when it speaks to something shared and profound.”–Ron Rindo
A baby of gargantuan size and unknown paternity is born in an Amish community, delivered by the local veterinarian, in the back of a wagon. His mother dies during the ordeal and he is raised by his much older brother, until his death, which leaves Gabriel in his grandparents’ care. Towering over other children and teens his age, Gabriel becomes a sports phenomenon in his community and beyond impacting the lives of, not only his grandparents, but the vet who delivered him, the local tavern keeper, a coach from Texas and everyone in the community, both Amish and not.
AUTHORLINK: How did you think of the idea for this story? How did it develop from there?
RINDO: Many years ago, I was roaming around the internet while eating lunch in my university office, and I read about the Alton Giant, Robert Pershing Wadlow, who was eight feet, eleven inches tall with size 37 feet when he died at age 22 in 1940. He suffered from acromegaly (giantism) due to hypertrophy of the pituitary gland. It made me wonder about how our culture would react to someone that large today, and I decided I wanted to write a novel about that. I wrote a version of the prologue, the birth scene, essentially, and then I couldn’t decide where to go from there, so I put it away. I didn’t know what the story would be about or how or why it might matter to people, but more importantly, I could not figure out how a giant could exist in our era of modern medicine, when most forms of giantism can be treated and resolved. Then, early one evening many years later, I was flyfishing for trout on the Mecan River in central Wisconsin, and an Amish buggy went by on the county highway. For whatever reason it made me think about that prologue again, and I realized that if a giant was born into an Amish community, where childhood vaccinations and regular doctor visits were not necessarily a part of life, that child could grow up to be a giant. Moreover, that scenario would establish one of the novel’s primary conflicts, the tension in America between the sacred and the secular, which in the novel pits Amish values of simplicity, humility, and community against the mainstream culture’s veneration of individual fame and fortune.
AUTHORLINK: Your story centers on very large Gabriel Fisher but he is not a point-of-view character and isn’t active in many scenes. Rather much of the time, we see him through the other characters’ thoughts and feelings. How did this approach fit this story?
RINDO: Understandably, this is a question I get asked fairly often, and it’s a good one. Given Gabriel’s size and fame, it is natural to want to see and know the world from his point of view, since that is one of the things fiction does for us. It exposes us to ways of being and ways of knowing that are radically different from our own. Who wouldn’t want to experience—vicariously!—what it is like to be nearly nine feet tall? But there are a couple reasons why Gabriel is not one of the p.o.v characters. First, the novel is narrated retrospectively, in the past tense, which means that unless you’re writing in the form of a diary or letters, all of the narrators have to be alive at the end in order to tell the story of what happened. Ishmael has to survive the wreck of the Pequod in order to tell us the story of Moby-Dick, right? If he goes down with the ship, the story goes with him. Secondly, but more importantly for Life, and Death, and Giants, while the initial focus is on Gabriel, the novel’s aperture opens much more widely to provide a detailed portrait of the whole community. The novel’s not only about Gabriel but about the effect his presence has on everyone around him. To speak metaphorically, Gabriel is the sun, and the other characters are planets circling him. The decision to use multiple narrators emerged organically, and–serendipitously, in my view–it moved the narrative beyond my original intentions for it. No longer just about Gabriel (though he’s obviously the book’s central focus), it became a novel about community, about the many forms of love human beings are capable of sharing, and ultimately a book that explores one of our oldest philosophical questions, which is: what is the best way to live one’s life?
AUTHORLINK: You do have four POV characters – Dr. Thomas Kennedy, Hannah Fisher, Billy Walton and Coach Trey Beathard, and the book is their stories as well. How did they each become the ones to reveal Gabriel’s story (of course Hannah is his grandmother)?
RINDO: I came to novel writing from short story writing, and like many short story writers, I have always worked on multiple stories at the same time. I also love how writing in the first person allows you to create a voice distinctive from your own but also to become another person, to enter that consciousness and adopt their ways of being and knowing. It’s a magical transformation, and one of the most potent elements of the creative process. Hannah’s voice came to me first, and she remains my favorite character, but I also like all of the others, each of whom wants something different for Gabriel: Hannah obviously wants him to join her Amish faith and live their simple life; Billy wants him to play baseball; Trey wants him to play football; Thomas wants him to do whatever he loves to do but encourages him to use his gift of caring for animals, perhaps by becoming a veterinarian. So, what happened, essentially, is I adapted my usual practice of writing multiple stories at the same time by weaving all of those voices and strands together into a single, coherent (hopefully!) narrative. All of those characters collectively tell Gabriel’s story, but in the process they each tell their own stories as well.
AUTHORLINK: While they each give us where they are coming from and their perspectives of Gabriel, three of them are written in first person and Dr. Kennedy in third. Why is that?
RINDO: The reason for this is really just technical. I felt I needed the opportunity to be omniscient at times so that I could provide additional information, exposition, background details, and so forth. You can see this, for example, in the Prologue, particularly in the opening pages, where the history of Lakota is sketched out, but also in other places as well. While most of Thomas Kennedy’s sections stay fairly close to his point of view, at times they move beyond that to fill in other details. The great advantage of first-person narration—the ability to create a distinctive and attractive voice—is countered by the restriction that first-person narrators generally can only narrate what they’ve seen, heard, or experienced. Third person is not restricted in that way.
AUTHORLINK: What did you do to research the various aspects of your book, including the Amish and perhaps Gabriel’s extraordinary growth?
RINDO: I based Gabriel’s growth upon Robert Wadlow’s growth chart, which is available on the internet, and I did some additional research on acromegaly. Gabriel is a completely fictional creation, and he may be far more gifted, athletically, than someone his size would likely be, but that is one of the things a novel can do. I did much more research into Amish life, because I really wanted to get all of those details exactly right. Fortunately, there is some excellent scholarly research available. The two books I found most helpful were The Amish by Donald Kraybill, Karen Johnson-Weiner, and Steven Nolt; and Kraybill’s Concise Encyclopedia of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites.
AUTHORLINK: You have another published novel, Breathing Lake Superior, which I believe is your first. How did writing and publishing the second differ from the first?
How would you compare and contrast the two novels?
RINDO: Structurally, Breathing Lake Superior is essentially a long short story. It has a single narrator who is telling the story retrospectively in an effort to understand what has just happened. Like Life, and Death, and Giants, it is set in a part of Wisconsin that is dear to me and my family, the northern forest bordering Lake Superior. (Giants is set in central Wisconsin along a trout stream I fish regularly.) While, thematically, Breathing does have some similarity to Giants, particularly in its portrait of the father’s ecstatic faith, the story is more focused on grief and the collapse of a grieving family. Giants is more complex, both structurally and thematically, and I am thrilled that it has struck a chord with so many people around the country, but I still feel quite attached to the characters in Breathing and proud of how that book holds up.
Like my three short story collections, Breathing was published by a lovely small press, Brick Mantle Books out of St. Louis, so of course that experience is quite different than publication by a major New York house such as St. Martin’s Press. The resources and breadth of expertise the latter can marshal in support of publication are just so impressive, and I’ve worked with so many extraordinary and professional people there, my editor, George Witte; publicist Dori Weintraub; and many, many others in the marketing, copy-editing, and audio book departments. It’s been a remarkable experience.
AUTHORLINK: What do you hope readers might gain from your portrayal of Gabriel’s life and those who surrounded him besides enjoying the story?
RINDO: Something powerful happens when a novel finds its people, when it speaks to something shared and profound. Obviously, always, I want readers to find the stories I write and the characters I create engaging and worth their time. I want them to be both moved and entertained. But our current moment is so fraught with conflict, fear of Others, tribal distrust, and state-sponsored cruelty, I hope Giants also provides—among other things–a model of community we can strive for, a place where freedom means freedom for everyone, regardless of physical, social, or cultural differences. I also hope the novel gives people a chance to think about how they’re spending their limited time on earth, and where they’re spending it, so that if a reprioritization is something they desire, they might be prompted to pursue that.
AUTHORLINK: What are you working on next?
RINDO: I don’t want to say too much about the project lest I jinx it, but I’m working on a new novel inspired by our current, dystopian moment. The main character is an epileptic Catholic priest who gets high regularly, plays shredding guitar solos during Mass between verses of Immaculate Mary, and follows what he believes to be the example of the historical Jesus, who is a far cry from the placid, blue-eyed, long-haired shepherd carrying a little lamb on his shoulders, as depicted in so many garage sale paintings.
About the author: Ron Rindo has taught English and creative writing for many years at the University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh. His fiction and essays have appeared in many journals and magazines. and he has published three short story collections and two novels, Breathing Lake Superior and Life, & Death, & Giants. He is a lover of books, a trout fisherman and cares for chickens, sheep, a garden and an orchard. He lives in Pickett, Wisconsin with his wife, Jenna.
