GOSHEN — Book signing

• When: Author Lucinda Streiker-Schmidt will be signing copies of her book, “A Separate God: Journal of an Amish Girl,” from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday at Starbucks, 4536 Elkhart Road, located along U.S. 33 in Dunlap. She is also working on a second book called “Spirit Damaged: A Journal of Three Amish Sisters.” Her goal is to do a whole series of journal books, she said.
• Her book, published by Tate Publishing, can be purchased at any national retailer or online at amazon.com.
• For more information, go online to www.aseparategod.com.

At 10 years old, she was reading Hemingway and Capote from her father’s library.

Remarkable for any child, but for Lucinda Streiker-Schmidt it wasn’t supposed to even happen. She was Old Order Amish, a girl, and her father was a bishop of the church.

“He pretended he didn’t know I was reading his stash,” she said.

Streiker-Schmidt, who lives along Simonton Lake in Elkhart, loved reading, writing, learning — and questioning.

Those questions led her to make decisions about her own life — divorcing her abusive husband, taking her two children and leaving the Amish church. Along with her came years of journals that she have now turned into a fictional account of one Amish woman’s life.

“A Separate God: Journal of an Amish Girl” is billed as fiction, but Streiker-Schmidt said it was copyrighted as such to “protect the innocent still in my former culture.”

“I tell my publicist, it’s not about bashing my people, because I love my heritage. I love the Amish,” she said. “It’s about exposing something to a healing. The only way to fix a problem is to acknowledge it.”

The problems are many, especially where it concerns women, Streiker-Schmidt said. Like any culture, there’s domestic abuse, incest, rape, but it’s not acknowledged.

She wants the Amish church to start recognizing how its women are treated. “It bothers me,” she said.

“Empowering women completely goes against the rules,” she said.

Her family still lives in the south central Indiana Amish community Streiker-Schmidt is from — one her father homesteaded about 35 years ago. At the time, there was just a small group of Amish living in the area. Today it has grown to be a good-sized community, though not as large as the community in Elkhart and LaGrange counties.

Streiker-Schmidt still has a number of Amish girlfriends, whose confidences, she said, she won’t betray.

But all is not as it seems, she said. “They (the Amish) are as riddled with hypocrisy as the outside world. They don’t talk about it. They keep it quiet. It’s far more complex than the somber clothes they wear or the horse-drawn carriages they drive.”

Streiker-Schmidt said she is the first person, most certainly the first woman who has talked about it, much less written about it.

That openness has created a few troubles.

She was a guest on a talk show in Florida talking about her book — “I actually got censured by my Amish family and by people in the community.”

What she relayed on the show was a conversation she had with a young Amish woman at a gathering. The young woman said she read the book and related to it. The young woman then asked if it was a good idea to write about these troubles.

“I asked, ‘Why would I want to keep these things a secret? Why wouldn’t you want to address them?’” Streiker-Schmidt said.

“Because it just causes too much trouble,” the young woman responded.

“I got in trouble for describing this situation on the talk show,” Streiker-Schmidt said. The piece was picked up by a national cable station and aired nationwide. A young Amish bishop found it on YouTube and became incensed, she said. He told her parents about the interview and in turn, her parents became upset with her.

They wanted to know why she was talking about the secrets of their culture.

“Why wouldn’t I,” she responded. She also wanted to know why the bishop was watching YouTube.

“I love my heritage. I have a deep, deep love for my culture,” she said. And because of that, she wants the Amish church to start recognizing the problems that exist and the marginalization of women.

Her leaving the church was done with “great trepidation and retribution.” But it was also the “beginning of an enormous period of spiritual growth. I am deeply, devoutly Christian,” she said. “I love God. I love my Savior.

“I realize more and more that’s not synonymous with Amish doctrine.”

Streiker-Schmidt also said that her children thank her to this day for leaving.

“My son is noble, sweet, a mechanical engineer who designs components for the NASA launch system,” she said. Had she stayed in the Amish church, her son would never have had that kind of opportunity. He would have quit school in the eighth grade and gone to work on a farm or at a trailer factory, according to the author. There’s nothing wrong with those professions, she said, but her son, like her father, is a brilliant man. “It would be a shame to waste it,” she said.

Her daughter, Streiker-Schmidt added, is also accomplished.

They fully supported her with the book and wondered what took her so long to write it. Schmidt said she didn’t want to hurt the people involved in her life.

There have been hurt feelings, though, she admitted. Some of the people who have come to the book signings have been very hateful. And then some come and applaud her for her bravery and courage. “It’s the full spectrum,” she said. “It’s very, very interesting to me.

Also interesting are the numbers. After her Florida interview, the publishing house’s demographics showed that the area her books were selling strongly in were areas most densely populated by the Amish. “So they’re buying my book,” she said. “I found that to be so fascinating.”