“It will take more than small minds, reporters’ minds, to fathom these events. Something must come of this. Beyond all the circumstances surrounding the immediate event, someone can perhaps find the symbolic, the eternal in this moment – the meaning of a people, a struggle – I wish I had time to put it all together, that I had done it. I did not do it. I failed to write the book.
Someone else, others, will have to do this.”
(attributed to Richard Tropp, Jonestown, Nov. 18, 1978)
I followed Richard Tropp’s mandate and published one book, Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown (Inkspot Publishing, 2023, UK). It was not enough. Too many untold stories remain. Consequently, I am returning to my favored form, the short story, for the next book, which I hope to publish on the 50th anniversary in 2028.
For all of 2025, I have been reading new Peoples Temple and Jonestown books released during the last two decades. Rereading some of the books published prior to 2004, when I began my research, has also proved enlightening. New information, names and nuances of causality and chronology have entered my consciousness, demanding to be voiced in narrative.
Structurally, I am more comfortable with the short story cycle than the novel. My first book, York Ferry, and my third book, And Darkness Was Under His Feet: Stories of a Family, both fit the definition of this genre, sometimes called a “novel in stories.” The sections of a cycle can be read independently, in microcosm, each with a beginning/middle/end, as well as cumulatively, where the book as a whole offers meaning on the macro level, characters’ individual stories fitting into a larger narrative arc and historical scope.
Many short story cycles focus on a group protagonist, such as family – as do both of mine – or a physical space, like a town or community. Peoples Temple is both, with Indiana, California and Guyana serving as key geographical centers, and the Temple an extended family from 1955 to the present.
Gloria Naylor’s Women of Brewster Place, Russell Banks’s Trailerpark, Louise Erdrich’s Love, Medicine and Greg Sarris’s Grand Avenue are all worthwhile examples and some of my contemporary models. Reaching back to the 19th century, Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs. Looking farther into literary history, one can include Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Bocaccio’s Decameron in this organic genre, with some scholars including the Bible, Old and New Testaments.
The stories in Fathom will be of varying lengths, some vignettes of a page or two, others with ordinary short story word counts (3,000 to 10,000 words), and possibly one novella. Some will focus on members of PT, some on people adjacent to the larger story.
As of Fall 2025, I hope to include, in no particular order (yet):
- Julie Ann Runnels, to whom I will dedicate the book, a 12-year-old girl who spat out the poison multiple times before being overpowered by two adults.
- The George siblings of Port Kaituma, three of whom were “adopted” into Peoples Temple and looked after by Joyce Touchette, because their single mother, disabled, could not feed them.
- Attorney Charles Garry, who fled into the jungle on Nov. 18, 1978, with the other Temple lawyer, Mark Lane, who published his own book, The Strongest Poison, shortly after the massacre.
- Jim Cobb, member of the Eight Revolutionaries along with his sister Theresa, who defected in 1973. His large family had joined in Indiana, moved to California with Jones, and then to Guyana. Jim and Terry did not accompany their mother and siblings to Jonestown. However, Jim was one of the Concerned Relatives who visited the compound on the last day.
- John and Barbara Moore, parents of Annie, Carolyn and Rebecca, grandparents of Kimo Prokes, who traveled to Guyana earlier in 1978, and engaged with the press before and after the 18th of November.
- Bob Houston Jr. and his extended family. In 1976, Bob died in California, his death deemed an accident. Bob Houston Senior, a friend of Congressman Leo Ryan, urged him to check on his two teen-aged granddaughters, Judy and Patty, who were living in Jonestown without their mother. Bob’s sister, Carol Houston Boyd, aunt to Judy and Patty, was also in Ryan’s entourage on the 18th and was injured in the shooting on the runway.
The list of characters will probably grow and possibly shrink during the next three years. Likely, the tale will not be told in chronological order, as our view of events is always impacted by both before and after.
As T.S. Eliot put it in Four Quartets:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
[An English professor and director of creative writing for 15 years at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, Annie Dawid left full-time teaching for full-time writing in her home in Colorado. She can be reached at annie@anniedawid.com. Her website is http://www.anniedawid.com/.]