Life, and Death, and Giants
Life, and Death, and Giants
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Ron Rindo on Life, and Death, and Giants
In their own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why they wrote it
A real giant, a fictional twinThe character at the center of the novel, Gabriel Fisher, an Amish boy who grows to an extraordinary size, did not arrive from pure invention. Rindo found his physical template in the historical record: Robert Pershing Wadlow of Alton, Illinois, born 1918, eight feet eleven inches tall at his death at twenty-two from an infection caused by a faulty leg brace, still the tallest documented person in history. That documented life gave Rindo a growth curve to calibrate Gabriel against, but what absorbed them was something less measurable than inches.
Though Gabriel Fisher is an entirely fictional creation, I based Gabriel’s growth on Wadlow’s reported size at various states of his life, and I think of Gabriel as Wadlow’s spiritual twin, a fellow traveler in the rarefied, preternatural realm of giantism.
The phrase ‘spiritual twin’ does real work here: it signals that this novel is not a roman à clef of Wadlow’s biography but an exploration of what it costs a person to inhabit a body the world cannot accommodate.
What drew Rindo to Wadlow, and by extension to Gabriel, was not spectacle but its opposite. Wadlow’s historical record included a period with the Ringling Brothers Circus, and promotional work for the International Shoe Company, details that could have made him a figure of curiosity. What Rindo held onto was the resistance beneath those facts.
For a time, Wadlow toured with the Ringling Brothers Circus and promoted shoes for the International Shoe Company, but he seems to have sought a normal life, resisting efforts to define him exclusively as a circus attraction.
How they wrote it
A sun and its planetsThe most consequential structural decision Rindo made was also the most counterintuitive: Gabriel Fisher, the character the entire novel is built around, never speaks for himself. Four narrators, Doc Kennedy, Hannah Fisher, Billy Walton, and Trey Beathard, carry the story from the outside. Rindo articulated the logic of that arrangement in his own discussion questions for the book.
One way to consider this is to think of Gabriel as the sun, and the other primary characters as planets circling him.
Removing Gabriel from the narration means readers never get his inner life directly; they know him only through the distortions and illuminations of people who love him or are changed by him, which is precisely the experience of encountering someone whose existence exceeds ordinary categories.
Emily Dickinson’s poetry enters the novel when Hannah Fisher discovers a hidden book of Dickinson’s poems in her mother’s storage chest, and the title of the novel itself comes from a Dickinson poem. In his discussion questions, Rindo asks reading groups to trace how Hannah’s engagement with the poems ‘gradually influence[s] her view of the world.’ That framing treats the poetry as structural engine, not decorative atmosphere: the poems drive Hannah’s arc as reliably as any plot event does.
Fiction writing teachers often say that when it comes to creating fictional characters, where you are is who you are. In other words, place—a novel’s setting— is crucial to understanding the people who live there.
Rindo sets the novel in Lakota, a fictional Wisconsin backwater, and has spent more than thirty years living and teaching in rural Wisconsin himself. When he frames place as identity in his discussion questions, it reads as personal conviction as much as craft principle.
Before this novel, Rindo had published three short story collections and a previous Wisconsin novel. Writing has run alongside a full teaching career at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh for decades, and in a 2009 faculty interview Rindo was direct about why stopping was never an option.
The writing life is difficult. It’s inefficient, it’s messy, it’s filled with rejection, but if you’re a writer, it’s as essential to your life as eating and drinking.
The personal thread
A notebook under the mattressRindo’s literary life did not begin in a graduate workshop or a university classroom. In the same 2009 faculty interview where they described the difficulty of the writing life, they traced the habit back to childhood, to a practice kept hidden from everyone around them.
As a young boy, I read in bed every night, and I also used to keep a little notebook under my mattress. Sometimes I’d wake up early in the morning and write stories in that notebook. So reading and writing, and teaching others to read and write, are activities central to my life and have almost always been.
That early private practice eventually became the center of a public professional life. Teaching fiction writing at UW-Oshkosh for more than thirty years, Rindo has maintained that the two activities cannot be separated, that the classroom requires the desk and the desk sustains the classroom.
I’m a fiction writer, and it would be impossible to teach others to write fiction if I didn’t also write regularly myself.
What they want us to sit with
How Gabriel’s life changes everyone around himThe ensemble structure of four narrators, each with their own arc, might look like a stylistic preference. Rindo’s discussion questions make clear it is something more deliberate: a formal argument about what fiction is actually for.
the secret theme of all literature is change
Every question he poses to reading groups asks how a character was altered by contact with Gabriel’s extraordinary life and death. The structure does not just reflect that principle; it forces readers to measure it four separate times.
Two of the tensions Rindo built into the novel are left unresolved by design. Gabriel’s Amish community prizes anonymity as a religious value; when video of his athletic performances goes viral, that anonymity collapses publicly. Rindo’s discussion questions ask readers to weigh what the characters make of each side, without signaling which side he comes down on. He treats the parallel tension between faith and agnosticism the same way.
Fiction writing teachers often say that when it comes to creating fictional characters, where you are is who you are. In other words, place—a novel’s setting— is crucial to understanding the people who live there.