Shame (29 page)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book took me some fifteen years to write (or to write right) and only took shape because of the help of some people who may not have ever known they were helping. I particularly want to note the two farmers in my life, both now gone, who taught or told me specific things I needed to know to write this book: my grandpa, Chuck Godwin, and Dale Randolph, my late stepfather. Because of them, I have driven a tractor, plowed a field, stacked hay, fed cattle, and learned the tiniest bit about what it is to be a farmer—enough to supplement it with research and imagination into the book you hold.

I'm grateful also to the other members of my Watonga-based family—my mom, Karen, my grandma Rose, and my stepdad, Dave—who have welcomed me over the years to the patch of Oklahoma ground we call our farm. The Tilden farm is very closely based on our land, as sharp-eyed observers in my family will note. I am grateful for the real people of Watonga, an awful lot of whom I seem to be related to in some degree. This is a novel, but I have tried to be as accurate as I could in depicting this fictional Watonga circa 1994. I have changed things as they've been necessary for the story, though, so please don't assume that any person, place, or thing depicted in the book necessarily has a real-life analogue.

Well, except for the Hi-De-Ho, of course. I could never make up a place as good.

The Reverend Dr. Raymond Bailey unknowingly gifted me with the “weep with you” line in the last chapter during a sermon he preached fifteen years ago at Seventh and James Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, and I thank him. Sometimes things we say take a long time to bear fruit—but they do, eventually.

I give thanks for my agent, Jill Grosjean, who has stuck with me through thick and thin. It's been awhile since the last novel. Thanks, J—and may the bookselling gods assure that this novel gets filed in the right part of the store so people have a chance to find it.

Thanks, as always, to Joe DeSalvo, Rosemary James, and the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society in New Orleans. They gave me my first big recognition, encouraged me in lean years, and celebrated with me in flush.

I am grateful to be working (again, in many cases) with the wonderful folks at David C Cook. Thanks to Don Pape, who directed his staff to get a book from me. Thanks to Andrea Christian, Steve Parolini, Kate Amaya, and Terry Behimer. It's a joy to be back with you all, and I look forward to the next book.

Thanks to Baylor University, my employer, which has given me good work to do for twenty years, and to my students, who keep me energized and interested. Thanks to the College of Arts & Sciences and the Provost's Office for sabbaticals and research leaves that made this book possible, to my deans Wallace Daniel and Lee Nordt, and to past Baylor provosts David Lyle Jeffrey and Randall O'Brien for their support of my writing. This book was completed during my 2008 research leave. Thanks to Maurice Hunt and Dianna Vitanza, my department chairs, for their encouragement and for a schedule that makes writing, speaking, and other authorial duties possible.

Thanks to the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest for a space to write and for many other things as well. Thanks to my classmates and colleagues there. Thanks to my community of faith, St. David's Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, and to the communities of faith that have sustained me during these years, especially St. James' Episcopal in Austin.

Thanks to the Right Reverend Greg Rickel, who always looks across the table and asks me, “So, what's next?” and to the Most Reverend Rowan Williams, who kept telling me he was waiting for the next novel.

I am thankful for my boys, Jake and Chandler.

And I am thankful for Martha, who is the kindest person I know.

This book was written and rewritten at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and in Austin, Texas, and edited at Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico. Many thanks to Jim Baird, Program Director, and Carole Landess, Host Companion at the Casa del Sol retreat center, for arranging a place to work.

I listened to Bruce Springsteen, Bruce Hornsby, Eliza Gilkyson, Shawn Colvin, Gin Blossoms, Dixie Chicks, Jon Dee Graham, Coldplay, Bob Schneider, and U2 while I wrote and rewrote this novel. Thanks to all of those artists for their inspiration, and for comfort in dark times.

Let's imagine this is the back of a CD: Greg Garrett plays Martin, Fender, and Epiphone guitars and Hohner harmonicas.

Speaking of music, I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that my band, Lavabo, is the only roots/Americana group in Austin, Texas—the live music capital of the world—made up entirely of Episcopal priests and preachers. The folks I've played music with in recent years are the Reverend Cathy Boyd, the Reverend Ken Malcolm, the Reverend Kevin Schubert, the Reverend Lance Peeler (now gone on to the Pacific Northwest), and, following the departure of the Reverend Anthony MacWhinnie for the Gulf Coast, a bassist to be named later. You should hear us. Seriously.

Finally, thanks to all of you who buy my books, come to talks, signings, and teachings, or who have let me hear from you over the years.

I write first for myself, as every serious writer ought to.

And then, when I am finally happy with something, I give it to you.

Thank you for reading, and may God richly bless you.

Greg Garrett
Christmas 2008
Casa del Sol, Ghost Ranch
Abiquiu, New Mexico

 

… a little more …

When a delightful concert comes to an end,

the orchestra might offer an encore.

When a fine meal comes to an end,

it's always nice to savor a bit of dessert.

When a great story comes to an end,

we think you may want to linger.

And so, we offer ...

AfterWords—
just a little something more after you

have finished a David C Cook novel.

We invite you to stay awhile in the story.

Thanks for reading!

Turn the page for ...

• Discussion Questions

• An Interview with the Author

 

Discussion Questions for
Shame

1. John Tilden is the main character and the narrator of
Shame.
How does it affect our experience for him to tell his own story?

2. Several chapters at the beginning, middle, and end of the novel highlight John's strange journey, symbolized by his time on the tractor, moving but never getting anywhere. In what ways can we see that John is on a journey even though he never leaves town?

3. Why is the novel called
Shame?

4. How does the major setting of the novel affect the action? The characterization? Would this story feel different in an urban setting?

5. Why does John still feel so affected by the past? How does this shape his present and future?

6. John says that he truly wants to be a good person. What are his best qualities? What are his worst?

7. Dreams are important in the novel. How do they reveal John's inner conflicts? How do they reveal things about John and his history we might not otherwise know?

8. The device of using letters in a novel has been used since the first epistolary novels hundreds of years ago. How does the author employ them in this book?

9. In what ways does the setting (the early 1990s) seem alien to us as readers? What technological advances and other changes have altered the way we live in the years since the 1990s?

10. How does the author use music, television shows, and other popular culture artifacts to help tell the story?

11. John says he feels that he may be experiencing more than a simple midlife crisis—that what he's undergoing is also a crisis of faith. Is this true? How does John change spiritually as a result of the events of this story?

12. Fatherhood is a central theme in the novel. Judging from the relationships we see in the book, what does it mean to be a father? More broadly, what does good parenting look like?

13. How is friendship an important theme in the novel? Which characters prove to be true friends to each other?

14. Who are John's heroes or role models? What do these choices tell us about him?

15. What do you consider the most important themes in
Shame?
What does the book seem to say about them? What did you carry away from your reading of the novel?

 

A Conversation with Greg Garrett

Q: Tell us a little about the writing of
Shame
.

This novel has a long and interesting history—if you're fascinated by me and my life, that is. The short version, for folks who don't share that fascination, is that I wrote the first draft of this novel during the early '90s, around the time when it is set. I loved the characters but didn't feel like I'd mastered the art of writing a novel yet. So I put it away for what I thought would be a short time, but, given the adventures you would learn about in the long version, it turned into years. After I wrote my novel
Free Bird
I felt I had broken through and finally learned how to be a novelist. So a couple of years ago, when I found myself with some writing time on my hands, I came back to
Shame
, rewrote it using everything I know, and, with my editor Steve Parolini's help, turned it into something I was really proud of.

Wow. And that's the short version. Maybe we should just stick with that.

Q: Is this novel particularly autobiographical?

John Tilden is less like me than any other main character I've written a novel about, although there are certainly some autobiographical elements. As I mention in the acknowledgments, the book is set in a place I've known since childhood, a place where you could find my mother, grandmother, and many of my relatives. Our actual farm outside Watonga, Oklahoma, is where John Tilden lives, and that was important in writing about John. Our day-to-day lives are so different that I really felt like I needed the grounding of knowing exactly where John was brushing his teeth, feeding his cattle, sitting by the pond, because I had been there myself.

In most of the details of our lives, we're different, though. I left the small town where I graduated high school, got ridiculously overeducated, and live now in Austin, Texas, a large city that has foreign films, sushi, and Episcopalians. I teach at a major university, I travel all over the world. I guess if John were real, I'd be living his dream life. Maybe I'd have to arm wrestle him for it. Perhaps we're more alike than I thought.

Q: What made you want to write a novel about a farmer and small-town coach?

The superficial details of John's life—farmer, coach, husband, father—were actually less interesting to me than the sloppy inner life—his wants, hopes, desires, dreams. John has been deeply unhappy, wishes his life had turned out differently, and wonders whether it's too late to make a change. I think all of us wrestle with that “road not taken” question at one time or another. I was certainly wrestling with it in my own life when I was writing the first draft of the novel, and so I really resonated with John's story.

But what I loved most about telling John's story was that, restless as he is, unhappy as he sometimes is, down deep at his core John is a genuinely good person. I admire him, I like him, and I hope readers will feel the same. I had written about lovable scoundrels in my first two novels; in this story, I wanted to talk about what it takes to be a solid family man—to do the right thing, as unflashy as that might sound.

Q: You've published a number of short stories set in and around Watonga. Are they related in any way to
Shame
?

Over the years I've published about a dozen short stories about Cheyenne Indians who live in and around Watonga. Ellen Smallfeet is a recurring character in those stories, and Michael Graywolf was in one of the very first I published, in the
South Dakota Review
. Phillip is also in several stories. He's one of my all-time favorite characters, because I see a lot of myself in him (dating back to all the stuff I left out of the short version awhile ago). In particular, I think the long story
Bridges
is one of the best things I ever wrote. It retells the action of
Shame
from Phillip's perspective. That story shows us John and Michelle through Phillip's eyes, which is cool if you love those characters as I do, and it's a story that breaks your heart for Phillip all over again because you hear in his own words what he's been through.

I guess you could say all the Watonga things I wrote in the 1990s were early stories investigating what William Faulkner said every writer needed, a little postage stamp of land to call his own. Watonga, the farm, small town life, and the mix of white, black, and red people were things I knew about from my earliest childhood, and I thought they were elements I could write about in a way that nobody else could. Writers need material, and the Cheyenne stories showed me that I could tell great stories about this land and the people who walk it. When it came time to write a novel, I knew I could set it in rural Oklahoma and write something universal that people would want to read about.

Q:
Shame
is your third novel, following
Free Bird
and
Cycling
. Those novels received some critical attention and even acclaim. It certainly wasn't like people suggested you should stop writing fiction. So why has it taken you six years to publish another novel?

After
Free Bird
achieved some pretty considerable notice (Top Ten lists, film interest, that kind of thing),
Cycling
came out in 2003 and was well reviewed, if (
sigh
) generally misfiled by booksellers next to the latest book by Lance Armstrong in the sports section. I heard from angry guys who bought it accidentally thinking I was going to help them with their road training or something, but instead, there was all this stuff about this guy who couldn't seem to get his life together. Suffice it to say that the book never really reached its target audience, although I also hear from people who have read and loved it. I think the wait would not have been quite so long if
Cycling
had found the audience we expected for it, because there would have been a desire from more than just a few readers who happened to stumble across it.

But the bigger reason is that over the last six years I've been doing a lot of new things: I went to seminary full time for three years, wrote a number of nonfiction books, taught, lectured, and traveled, and my life started taking me in a number of different directions. When I published my first two novels, writing fiction was the primary demand on my writing time. Now there are a number of demands. But I don't ever want to stop writing fiction—I love telling stories about characters who interest me, and being taken away into their worlds.

Q: What stories do you want to tell next?

I don't know. I've been writing pretty hard for the past couple of years, and one of the things I'd like to do is slow down a little and let some stories unfold in my head. You can't rush a novel into being—or, at least, I can't. I'd like to write a children's novel—or several of them—with my son Chandler. We've been throwing ideas around and plotting a series. I've given thought to a literary detective novel and a novel about a shipwrecked sailor fished out of the sea. And I have a novel finished, I think, about an oncologist who makes some very bad decisions involving one of his patients, a Dallas gangster. Mostly I just want to keep listening for the voice that's going to start speaking into my ear and telling me about somebody's life. That's how all three of the published novels started—I wrote down a first sentence that came to me. And then a second. And then I was off to the races. So to speak.

I've got nonfiction projects that people want me to write, and so it looks like there will be Greg Garrett books on the stands for the next few years. The novels are just for me, though, and they take as long as they take.

But not, I hope, another six years.