Shafter Girl Quotes

“Though Shafter Girl is a novelette, or short novella, I felt its raw beauty and tenderness deserved a slim paperback of its own. It is for those who have known and perhaps loved a Darcy. It is one of my Shafter stories, the small town in Kern County where I grew up. Shafter is in farm country and Shafter Girl retains Shafter’s rural feel and ambiance, and the heart’s leanings of those who grew up there. Shafter Girl is set in a time before cell phones and social media, before the hardening of the heart and capacity for love had been so severely diminished. It was a time when we could love deeply and wear our hearts on our skin, as I believe poet Sylvia Plath once suggested. Where there is poverty and hardship, as there was for some in Shafter, including myself, all that doesn’t really matter in life is stripped away, leaving only love, someone with whom to pour our souls into and whose happiness we put before our own, as is done here. Some will say Shafter Girl is too sentimental and therefore unrealistic, but those who say such things are either hardened of heart, or have never truly loved someone as Billy does Darcy. Like in one of my other Shafter stories, Not Dark Yet, Shafter Girl is about loving a girl completely, which in our time seems to be cause for ridicule. But as in my forward to Not Dark Yet, there are ghosts that come calling on rainy windy nights to remind us that once upon a time, love could be given, and returned tenderly and deeply. Even when the circumstances, whatever they were, were not ideal.”
― Bobby Underwood, Shafter Girl: A Love Story