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Q:
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How did you come across the story of John Kaiser?
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A:
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In a three-sentence squib buried in the "World in Brief" section of the LA Times in August 2007, under the headline "Priest's Death Ruled Homicide." The news got buried because [of] the collapse of the interstate bridge in Minneapolis. But the intersection of elements hinted at in that 61-word brief—faith, doubt, courage, political intrigue, and a forensic and psychological mystery—got me curious.
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Q:
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How much time did you spend on the ground in Kenya for the story? Were you already familiar with its history and people?
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A:
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I was in Kenya for three weeks in early 2008, mostly in Nairobi, Naivasha, Kilgoris, Lolgorien and the Mara—places Kaiser spent a lot of time. I read everything I could about Kenya before my trip—news stories, scholarly essays, histories, novels—but this was my first trip to East Africa, so most of what I learned I found out when I got there.
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Q:
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How did you make choices about keeping Kaiser coherent as a character versus allowing some of the discrepancies in his character (or how others perceived him) to stay in the piece?
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A:
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I think people are most interesting in their contradictions, and Kaiser's in a sense defined him—the duality represented by the collar and the gun. He's a man of faith and obedience who rebels against authority. He's a man of peace who goes everywhere with a shotgun and forces confrontations. He's a man of fellowship who needs solitude and enormous open space. And he's found a setting in which it's possible for these opposite selves to coexist, in a way it's hard to imagine elsewhere.
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Q:
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Narrative writing requires a conclusion, but reporting doesn't always offer a convenient one. Please describe how you went about fashioning a resolution despite the inconclusive facts in Kaiser's death.
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A:
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When Kaiser's brother told me the story of visiting the church and discovering all these kids named after the priest, it seemed like the only possible ending. My editor, Marc Duvoisin, was unswerving on this. We needed an emotional payoff. We cut and moved and tweaked huge masses of copy, but that scene we knew we were keeping. We're asking readers to stick with an 11,000-word story that's framed as a mystery, and we know we're really not going to solve the mystery. We're not about to force tidy answers on an untidy case. But since we're ending with all these unanswered questions, the risk is that readers will feel angry and frustrated and betrayed. So narratively I was in a bind until I heard the brother's story. It lets us conclude on an affirmative note: When you strip away everything else, this is the story of a hero who mattered. But the scene doesn't follow chronologically from the rest—it happens way before the inquest concludes—so I had to frame it as a flashback and figure out a way to write toward it.
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Q.
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Is there anything you wanted to include in the story but didn't—or couldn't?
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A.
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The first draft of the story was at least twice as long—what one editor called "the Atlas Shrugged version." It got better as it got tighter, but we had to be ruthless in deciding what our story was, and every sentence had to justify itself. So Kaiser's pre-priesthood existence got just a sketch, and decades of Kenyan history that you could easily devote whole sections to had to be radically compressed. A colleague of mine would say, "You need a book for this story—you can't possibly do it justice in a newspaper," and so trying to do it became kind of a dare.
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