Q&A with Jaclyn Gilbert

  

 

 

Jaclyn Gilbert is the author of the new novel Butter Road. She also has written the novel Late Air, and she is the founder of Driftless Literary.

 

Q: Butter Road is based on a 2006 school shooting--why did you decide to focus on that event and its aftermath in your novel?

 

A: I grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on the borderland between Amish country and the suburbs. Observing Amish customs and traditions relative to my own was a part of my everyday experience.

 

As a child, I remember walking with my parents and grandparents through the covered bridges (one on Hunsecker Road and another on Pine Ridge), hearing the clop clop of horse-and-buggies on the way to church services, held in Amish homes across the countryside.

 

Sometimes you could hear the hammering of a barn raising, the bells of sheep grazing in the fields, or the panting of an Amish border collie eager to say hello along the road. 

 

Later, my parents hired a pair of Amish sisters and their daughters to clean our house. These women--especially the mother, Barbara—were open about their experiences as women in a closed, patriarchal community, curious about literature and “English” (or non-Amish) life.

 

Barbara spoke openly about the impact of Nickel Mines on her everyday life, sharing stories about the survivors she knew. She explained how Amish faith requires its community to immediately forgive an event, no matter how unimaginable the atrocity, leaving little room for individuals–especially women–to process their experiences.

 

I believe that grief is different for everyone, just as forgiveness is, and I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be forced to forgive an event before I was ready. 

 

In my novel, I wanted to explore what it would mean for a survivor like Emma Walsh, the protagonist of Butter Road, to need writing as a way to process her trauma, even though her community—especially her mother, Ruth—finds it unacceptable.

 

Because I am not Amish, I had to conduct extensive research and multiple interviews. I also had to consider the storyline from the perspective of a non-Amish person with separate, foreign ideas about female liberation.

 

This approach gave rise to the book's third perspective: that of Sara Caldwell, an "English" woman who hires Emma to help with her garden. Sara inspires Emma to rethink her relationship to her past by giving her books to read, taking her to the movies, and encouraging Emma to experiment during her Rumspringa year (the period before Amish teenagers are confirmed into the faith, during which they decide whether to leave or stay).

 

This timeline added urgency to Emma's decision-making as she finds her voice by writing her story from beginning to end.

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: I grew up on the real Butter Road in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, along the Amish borderland, which challenged me to see from multiple points of view (as an outsider of Amish culture curious about the reality of an insider).

 

After my stepfather died in 2020, and we had to sell our house on Butter Road, I also wanted to pay tribute to his life and influence on my life as a writer. Someone who always believed I could write and publish fiction, despite a deeply competitive industry challenged by the tech boom.

 

In many ways, just as Amish culture threatens to be displaced by higher land prices, greater industry and technology, so does my own memory; there is a fragility I feel about having left this place of my childhood and feeling unsure of when I will return again, and under what circumstances.

 

Butter Road signifies a kind of grief this way, but also the desire to preserve my memory and love for Lancaster into the future. 

 

Q: What did you see as the right balance between fiction and history as you wrote the book?

 

A: For me, the right balance is one that moves between rigorous, thoughtful research–across a variety of sources, historical, theological, and cultural–and my own personal experience to create an emotional true story.

 

I need the research to deepen the novel’s setting, the vivid lives of its characters–which are all different from my own–while also leaving room for me to connect to the loss at the heart of this story.

 

While I have never endured a school shooting, I have experienced out-of-body trauma that has taken years to heal from. My writing process has, over the years, allowed me to move through losses that otherwise threatened to keep me trapped in a chronic state of PTSD.

 

By searching for a shared language between the losses I’ve endured–of two fathers, one to addiction and another to cancer–I can better balance the historical impulses of the novel and the personal ones that allow me to expand the inner lives of my characters to, I hope, allow for a more universal reading experience. 

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: I hope readers can confront anxieties about school safety and gun control today in ways that open up meaningful conversations about our current climate.

 

By thinking about what it means for a community like the Amish to have open boundaries in a world that has become increasingly militarized we can begin to ask what kind of boundaries we need now, today, to protect our children and talk about our present reality with them, rather than deny that it is happening.

 

These are extremely difficult questions to confront, but as someone who has always believed that grief never goes away, only stews and re-expresses itself in other forms, I hope that encouraging more conversations can lead to a greater understanding about our current reality, inspiring different kinds of action, along with creation of more support groups for victims of gun violence.

 

In the process, I hope that readers can remember that it takes time–and faith–to heal from atrocity, that no road is clear or even, that we need lots of different individual ways to move forward without pressure for others to grieve in a particular way that feels more safe or acceptable. 

 

Q: What are you working on now? 

 

A: I am revising my third novel, Pauline, inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 19th-century short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

 

This novel, like Butter Road, blends research on the history of hysteria with my own experience of new motherhood during the pandemic. It explores themes of isolation–as an artist and mother–as well as the power of the imagination to transcend boundaries of time and space to create art in community with other women who share this experience in real time. 

 

Q: Anything else we should know? 

 

A: I have always been an avid distance runner—I grew up training for cross country and track in Amish country.

 

Running through this landscape has been fundamental to shaping my perspective as a writer. It gives me a way of moving through space, observing my surroundings peripherally in ways that inspire me to capture this state in my writing. The language feels rhythmic to me, matching the pace of my breath when I run, timing with my memory of place as I move forward across disparate landscapes. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Jaclyn Gilbert.