{"id":30803,"date":"2013-07-25T15:49:13","date_gmt":"2013-07-25T15:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alternativejonestown.com\/?page_id=30803"},"modified":"2014-01-22T23:56:41","modified_gmt":"2014-01-22T23:56:41","slug":"dawid","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=30803","title":{"rendered":"Jonestown, a “hard sell”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The thirty-year anniversary of Jonestown came and went without my four protagonists having their say. Five years into my obsession with writing a novel about Jonestown, the book has gone through multiple drafts and titles: Fathom These Events<\/em>; Jonestown Perfume<\/em>; Resurrection City<\/em>; and, finally, Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown.<\/em><\/p>\n

It had an agent for a while, and was under close consideration by a major publishing company, only to be rejected because the sales staff wasn\u2019t \u201con the same page\u201d with the editor, who said he really liked it, but he was new to the house and didn\u2019t want to \u201cforce the book down their throats,\u201d he informed me, in an ill-chosen Kool-Aidesque locution. The book might have interested another major company, but that publisher was already contracted for a non-fiction book about Jonestown, and didn\u2019t want to handle two books simultaneously on the same subject.<\/p>\n

A small press accepted Paradise Undone<\/em> in January of this year, but\u00a0 the deal ran into trouble, and in September finally came\u00a0 undone. The collapse may or may not have been precipitated by my versions of Jim and Marceline Jones, and the fictionalized characters of Truth Miller, a Peoples Temple member who remained in the Bay Area, Virgil Nascimento, a Guyanese ambassador to the United States, and Watts Freeman, a composite based on the young men who escaped from Jonestown on November 18th, 1978.<\/p>\n

One section of the novel, \u201cI<\/em> Will Never Let You Down,\u201d was a finalist in Glimmer Train Stories\u2019 <\/em>\u00a0\u201cFamily Matters\u201d contest. Yet another, \u201cKnowing What I Know,\u201d was published in Driftwood: A Literary Journal of Voices from Afar<\/em> (2006), and sent me to a writer\u2019s workshop in southern France on a partial scholarship. Most promisingly, the first chapter of my book was a semi-finalist in last year\u2019s inaugural Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest, receiving nearly 50 super-positive reader reviews \u2013 some of them written by complete strangers! It recently received an honorable mention from the Writer\u2019s Workshop\u00a0 in North Carolina.<\/p>\n

But about 40 publishers have said no, and all of them say Jonestown is a \u201chard sell.\u201d Maybe it\u2019s the subject, or my treatment of it, or possibly \u2013 probably \u2013 both that have made Paradise Undone: A Novel Of Jonestown<\/em> so difficult to offer to the world in book form so that readers may experience for themselves my idiosyncratic version of the rise and fall of Peoples Temple as well as the aftermath of Jonestown.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, artists keep making art about Peoples Temple, scholars keep studying, and survivors keep telling their stories. Each year now, documentaries and plays, operas and memoirs, academic articles, scholarly volumes and visual art emerge to inform those who know about Jonestown and those who are only now learning of this most profound moment in 20th century American history.<\/p>\n

Whether\u00a0\u201chard sell\u201d or no, the truth will out \u2013 sooner or later.<\/p>\n

(Annie Dawid may be reached at annie@anniedawid.com<\/a>. Her website is at http:\/\/www.anniedawid.com\/<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The thirty-year anniversary of Jonestown came and went without my four protagonists having their say. Five years into my obsession with writing a novel about Jonestown, the book has gone through multiple drafts and titles: Fathom These Events; Jonestown Perfume; Resurrection City; and, finally, Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown. It had an agent for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":30912,"menu_order":11,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-30803","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30803"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54946,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30803\/revisions\/54946"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}