Peter Grandbois, author of The Gravedigger

There's an anonymous Spanish folk song called "La hija de Juan Simon" about a gravedigger who has to bury his daughter. In the version I have, the song is sung by the legendary Juanito Valderrama. The song gave me goose bumps, and I told myself that one day I would write the story of that gravedigger. Since then, I've played the song over and over, probably a thousand times, and I still get goose bumps every time.

A few years later, while attending the low-residency MFA program at Bennington College, I was having coffee with my teacher, the writer Elizabeth Cox, and she asked me about my relationship with my three-year-old daughter, Elena, (my second being just a baby at the time). I began to tell her the story of how each night as I tucked Elena into bed I would tell her a story. Only before I finished nearly every line, Elena would interrupt me, saying, "No, Daddy, that's not how it goes. It goes like this." And then she would proceed to send the story in a new direction. Like a good father, I would adapt and attempt to take the story in that direction but after another line she would interrupt me again and do the same thing. I was in the process of telling Elizabeth that this would go on for as long as I told the story, when she looked at me and said, "I think you have a story in there."

Her words stuck in my gut, not allowing me to concentrate on any of the lectures that day of the residency or to sleep that night. But the next day I remember sitting in the back of the lecture hall once again unable to concentrate when the idea hit me: Of course! The father would be the gravedigger in that anonymous folk song and the stories he would tell would come to him from the ghosts of the people he buried. I raced back to my dorm room and sketched an outline for a short story I would entitle, "The Gravedigger."

I wrote the story over the next few weeks and sent it in my monthly packet to Elizabeth. I remember writing in my letter that it felt like I hadn't told the whole story, that there were gaps that needed attention. She wrote back, "You bet this isn't the whole story, you've got a novel here." I distinctly remember the simultaneous fear and excitement engendered in me by that one word: "novel." I hadn't written a novel before and wasn't sure I was up to the task. How does one go about writing a novel? I wondered.

Well, having recently completed the first draft of my second novel, I can say that the process of writing one is different every time. With The Gravedigger, it was a matter of opening up the short story and telling the various stories that seemed to be embedded within, waiting to get out. Writing went relatively smoothly, as I felt as if I were my protagonist, Juan Rodrigo, and the ghosts were speaking directly to me. In six months I'd finished the first draft of the novel and then spent the next six months revising it, but once again, even the revision process was a matter of listening to the stories whispered in my ear. The result is a novel without a linear plot line but one that spins and spirals back on itself with each new story told. In that way, the structure plays out the theme, for the novel is, above all, about how the stories we tell define and even remake us.

The first epigraph in the novel is from Garcia Lorca, and it states: "Everywhere else, death is an end. Death comes, and they draw the curtains. Not in Spain. In Spain they open them... A dead man in Spain is more alive as a dead man than anyplace else in the world." I think this quote gets at the heart of why the novel had to be set in Spain and why it is that we need stories. In life, we often take our loved ones for granted, failing to understand the multiple stories that make up who they are, but in death we are forced to confront those stories whether in the form of memory or, as Juan Rodrigo must do, in the form of whispered confessions from the ghosts of our past.

Peter Grandbois, author of the The Gravedigger, has recently accepted a post as Professor of Creative Writing and Contemporary Literature at California State University in Sacramento.