The Amish and the Apocalypse: An Interview with David Williams

The book follows Jacob, a father of two and member of an Amish community in Pennsylvania, in the aftermath of a cataclysm that lays waste to most modern technology. The Amish, of course, already live a life largely devoid of the gadgetry of the modernity, so its failure in the larger world, the world of “the English” as we are called, doesn’t register very strongly at first. They harvest; they build; they meet in fellowship.

But this small community is not and cannot remain apart from its neighbors; there are so, so many of us, and so few of them. And when the lights go out, the English get hungry. Jacob, and everyone in his community, will be tested as the English fall around them—not so much in faith, as that is bedrock—but in the subtler ethical considerations of their Amish community.
We recently had a chance to discuss with Williams this remarkable slice of apocalyptic fiction.

This is your first published work of fiction, but you’ve already written extensively on matters of faith. What made you turn to fiction?
Though I’ve written books of theology and books about faith, my first love was always fiction. As a little kid, I was an obsessive reader. I lived and breathed books. I was the kind of kid who got sent to the principal’s office because I just wouldn’t stop sneaking my library books out to read during math. I journeyed through Narnia and Middle Earth, trudged through the wet horror of Bradbury’s Venus and through Niven’s Ringworld, and soared with the dragons of Pern. 

 I was also a dedicated daydreamer as a pup. I’d lock myself away in my room for hours on a Saturday morning, and just tell myself stories, tales of wild adventure that tended to star a particular spindly, asthmatic second grade boy as the hero. “Imagination Minutes,” I used to call it. As I got older, I realized I could capture the magic of that time, and those tales, on paper.

My early efforts, well, they weren’t great. Some of the stuff I published in my high school literary magazine is, huh.  Let’s just say I’m glad it pre-dates being able to search for those things on the web. But I had some wonderful teachers, and I kept reading and writing, short stories, mostly, which I’d share with friends and when the ‘net came along, publish on my blog. In 2013, after finishing up a theology e-book, I decided there was a novel idea that I just had to attempt. So I tried National Novel Writing Month for the first time, and after the dust of that month settled, I had the first draft of When the English Fall.

The cause of the widespread technological failure in When the English Fall is a modern day Carrington Event, a massive solar storm that occurred in the mid 1800s. What happens in a solar storm of this magnitude? Why did you decide to use this specific catastrophe as the catalyzing event in your novel?
The Carrington Event, the largest observed solar storm of the modern era, was an impressive thing. Like most major solar events, it was a coronal mass ejection, where our G-type main sequence yellow dwarf star blorts out a vast stream of charged particles. That one was immense, and so back then telegraph systems were blown out. People touching metal farm equipment were given electric shocks. The resultant aurora were so bright that people came outside, thinking the sun had risen. It was a big deal, and would be a major concern in our technological society.  That sort of catastrophic event could completely devastate our vulnerable electronic systems…and it seemed just the sort of thing that would be the grist for a realistic story contrasting our culture and the less-tech-heavy Amish.

I feel like most people’s conception of the Amish is imagistic: bonneted children, horse-drawn buggies, and hand-built furniture. Could you describe the basic Amish philosophical structure? How did you research the Amish way of life?
Getting away from the pastel hues of our Amish fantasies was important to me in telling this tale. Because they’re a pretty intense religious community, as personally and socially demanding as any monastic order.

The Amish are governed by a few vital principles. Three are key. There is hochmut, which means human pride, arrogance, and selfishness. There is demut, which describes actions defined by humility, humbleness, and mutual service. And there’s gelassenheit, or nonviolent spiritual detachment. Central to that ethic is that you do not grasp, or seek your own advancement. You maintain a gentle contentment with whatever lot you are given. The Amish see these principles as as central to living a life of faith uncompromised by the distractions of our cluttered, grasping world.

Outside of visiting Lancaster County (which is intentionally “blurred” in the story; I didn’t want this to seem like I was singling out one particular Amish settlement, as they cherish their privacy), I also listened to Amish voices, and read Amish and Mennonite writing. I also used more scholarly, unromanticized sources, ones sympathetic to but objective about their way of life. Sociologist Donald Kraybill’s The Riddle of Amish Culture was one of the best of those sources.  If you really want to get a deep sense of Amish life, community and history, his work is as good as it gets.

The narrator of When the English Fall, Jacob, left the community of his birth ten years prior to the novel’s events, due to emotional and religious fractures with that group. They behaved uncharitably and judgmentally during a difficult time in his life, and the life of his family. I imagine there could be a very different novel written from the point of view of that community. Is that something you’ve worked out for yourself: what his father and uncle would think of the fall of the English?
An excellent question. My suspicion is that they’d be secretly pleased at the collapse of the culture around them, viewing it as evidence of their own rightness and the inherent corruption of the culture around them.  It’s the cruel shadow-self of that kind of intentionally separate community, where separation leads to pride and a peculiar arrogance. You’d think folks who followed Jesus would be a little more driven by compassion, but…heh. Yeah. That doesn’t always work out, does it?

Which brings me to the question of sequels: While Jacob has set down his pen at the end of When the English Fall, there’s definitely room for a continuing chronicle of the lives in this community, and their English neighbors. Is that something you’ve considered writing?
That’s a tough one, because I wrote several endings for When the English Fall.  The first ending, written when I self-published it back in 2013, is actually a part of the novel now. Without getting too spoilery, that scene, where the leaves fall and Sadie looks to her father and says, “Oh, Dadi?” That’s where it originally ended, with those words. But that left the book at just barely more than novella length. That, and it was utterly and intentionally ambiguous. So my editors said, hey, give us some options here.
The ending of the book is one of them, and was the first one I wrote up and sent to my editor. Totally solid, and very much open-ended for a sequel. I like it. My editor liked it. My wife loved it. But years have passed, and the story kinda doesn’t end that way for me now. There is another ending—grimmer, darker, harder, and yet strangely more hopeful. That one is how it ends in my mind, and it doesn’t work for a sequel. So I’m not sure if my muse will let me write one. I’ve also written three complete novel manuscripts (all sci-fi) since then, with characters and stories I really enjoy, and I’d like them to see the light of day.

I totally want to know that alternate ending now, you realize. But rather than press that question, my only followup would be: Can you tell us a little about those manuscripts? 
 I daydream about doing an Alternate Ending Edition one day. Not that I don’t really like the way it concludes now, and I totally trust my editor’s instincts. It’s just, well, stories don’t necessarily have to have one single perfect canonical ending. One of the joys of living in a infinitely branching quantum multiverse, I suppose.

As for my other writing, in the nearly four years since I finished When the English Fall, I’ve drafted three full novel-length manuscripts, all of which I feel pretty good about. I map ’em by working titles: There’s From the Water, a telling of the rise of AI, spun through the lenses of the Biblical Exodus story..think extraterrestrial AIs as Hebrew midwives, arrived on earth in secret to help “birth” one of their own. There’s The Destroyer of the Gods, a post-post-apocalyptic tale, about an event that brings down the machine intelligences that conquered humanity. And there’s The Evangelist, a story of an earnest rural evangelical who becomes the point person in our first contact with a species of pan-dimensional beings (think a beneficent spin on Lovecraft’s Elder Things.)
When the English Fall is available now.