“Embrace Your Madness”

What pulled him out of the spiral, this time, was an image, an idea. He began to envision a new character, a mythic creature tear-assing across the dogbane and jimsonweed and plasticine tarpaulin domiciles of Lancaster County. An Amish werewolf. The werewolf would be the protagonist for his third book, his return to form — his next Great American Novel. By the time Skirt and the Fiddle was released in the U.S., in 2002, Tristan had already written it off. “It’s a piece of shit,” he told his friends. “Wait until the next one comes out.” And pretty soon, he had more than an idea. He had a whole new family, a new life. He had a second chance to get everything right.


THE NEW GIRL'S name was Kara. She was a barista at Square One, a coffee shop in Lancaster. Short brunette hair, skinny hips. She wasn’t old enough to drink.

The first time he saw her, he was sitting in Square One. He put his hand over his mouth and said to a friend, “I think I love her.”

They chatted.

He took her to New Orleans, just to show her a good time, and when they came back, she was pregnant.

Orla Story Dimitris-Egolf was born on October 12, 2003.

This time, he stuck around. The three of them got a little place on Lemon Street, a few blocks from the main drag. Kara waitressed. Tristan washed dishes at a small café called Wish You Were Here.

Money was tight, granted. That was nothing new. But Tristan looked for all the world like a happy man. He kept his new family close, even when he seemed to stray off into new passions; on the day in 2004 that he got arrested — the day he stripped down to a skimpy thong and re-created the Abu Ghraib “torture pyramid” along with six similarly bethonged buddies, all for the edification of George W. Bush’s passing motorcade — Kara was standing next to the pyramid, pointing at the men’s butt cheeks, acting the part of Lynndie England.

“It was good times over there,” says Dave Stauffer, a longtime friend. Of course, it helped that Kornwolf was coming together beautifully. Tristan loved his Amish werewolf. He loved how the character churned up the social rot of the honky tundra in his wake. He loved smoking pot with Dave and driving all around Lancaster, taking notes on the landscape, trying to find the bars where the rebel Amish kids drank. Kornwolf was more than just a book. It was proof that he could write well without ditching his loved ones or going insane, the vessel for everything he cared about most — his wordplay, his thoughts on Amish puppy mills and Blonde on Blonde, on religious hypocrisy, on chaos — and also a way for him to enjoy the town he thought he hated, to turn his new life, his more balanced life, into art. He liked the book so much that he told his friend Frank Heibert, the man who had translated both of his prior books into German, that he wanted to write a cycle of five werewolf books, each one exposing a different slice of American sin. His next 10 or 15 years, work-wise, were all plotted out. Kornwolf was everything he could have hoped for as a fiction writer.

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