Annie Dawid, an English professor and director of creative writing for 15 years at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, lives and writes in South-Central Colorado. Her sixth book, “Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown,” was just published in the UK by Inkspot Publishing after a 16-year journey through hundreds of rejections. She teaches creative writing for the master’s program in writing at the University of Denver, University College.

The following has been edited for length.

SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory. What inspired you to write it? Where did the story/theme originate? 

Dawid: In 2004 at Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, I fingered the spines of various non-fiction books about communes, in preparation for my upcoming sabbatical, during which I planned to write my next novel. The “communes” on the shelves gave way to “cults” as I moved down the aisle.  There, I find a cluster of tomes with Jonestown in the title.

I immediately recalled being at the University of North Dakota Writers’ Conference the month before, giving a reading from a work- in-progress, in which some parents go to a cult deprogrammer in an attempt to rescue two daughters who’d fled to a community in New Mexico in the 1980. 

After the reading, a friend came up in tears, telling me about his colleague, whose two sisters and nephew died in the Jonestown massacre. Reading these titles and remembering his grief for his friend, I thought, I must write about Jonestown. Here was a story that felt urgent — the story of the people who believed in the fight against racism, who died because they followed a dangerously charismatic and narcissistic leader. 

SunLit: Place this excerpt in context. How does it fit into the book as a whole? Why did you select it?

Dawid: I chose the beginning, a radio reporter interviewing Watts Freeman on the 30th anniversary of the massacre, because the reader is put in the same position as the anonymous listener, coming to the story of Jonestown with a limited understanding of what took place. The interviewer, Kenyatta Robinson, working for the Black Bay Area radio station, is careful to draw out of her subject enough background for the uninitiated to learn about what happened that day in the Guyanese jungle, from someone who was there.

SunLit: Tell us about creating this book. What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write? And once you did begin to write, did the work take you in any unexpected directions? 

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Dawid: I knew I wanted multiple protagonists to tell such a complex story, but it took a year or more to figure out who they would be and how many. I was well informed by all the research, which included listening to many cassette tapes of Jonestown meetings and music, reading everything I could find, and changing my mind often.

I read a Guyanese author’s novel of Jonestown and knew I needed a Guyanese voice among my crew. Unable to find more than the most basic info on Jones’s wife, Marceline Baldwin Jones, I knew she had to be one of my protagonists. They were both real characters who were dead, so I could write about them without worry. Then I made composites of two other characters, a Black man who was one of the inner-city residents who joined the Peoples Temple to get clean and stayed. The other was a white woman who dropped out of college her first year to join up and found sudden acceptance and community in a world from which she had felt estranged all her life. 

Both these characters came from multiple memoirs of various Jonestown survivors. What’s varied over the years is which character feels closest to me, which I empathize with the most and the least.

SunLit: Are there lessons you take away from each experience of writing a book? And if so, what did the process of writing this book add to your knowledge and understanding of your craft and/or the subject matter? 

Dawid: This book, my sixth published volume, showed me the beauty of research and the pleasure of writing about experiences not my own. Much of my first five books, and two plays, has been autobiographical in nature, and it was pure pleasure to leave myself behind. The next book and the one after that will also be research-based.

SunLit: What were the biggest challenges you faced in writing this book? 

Dawid: For me, the challenge was more in the publishing than the writing. I had it ready for 2008, the 30th anniversary of the massacre, after four years of writing/researching. I had a New York agent who loved it, but failed to pick up a publisher and so gave it back to me, with regrets. 

For the next 16 years I tried to get it published myself, was a finalist 17 times, but no one picked it for publication. I think the subject matter is very distasteful to Americans. It showcases the worst of American behaviors and racism — not that those two are exclusive to the U.S. However, when my UK publisher accepted the work, I concluded that UK publishers could simply accept the subject matter as interesting because it did not reflect on their own history. 

Since I’d achieved finalist status so many times, I believe the decision in those 17 American competitions came down to personal taste, and everyone who was alive in 1978 remembers all those dead bodies piled atop one another and says, “Yuck! Who wants to read about that.” 

SunLit: If you could pick just one thing – a theme, lesson, emotion or realization — that readers would take from this book, what would that be? 

Dawid: To recognize that each human being has agency, in most cases. Using one’s agency to help others is paramount. So many in Jonestown failed to do so.

SunLit: In a highly politicized atmosphere where books, and people’s access to them, has become increasingly contentious, what would you add to the conversation about books, libraries and generally the availability of literature in the public sphere? 

Dawid: We need more access, not less, and in rural Custer County, where I live, while we have a wonderful library, internet access is very limited. I believe access to the internet should be free and part of ordinary infrastructure, like bridges and roads. 

SunLit: Walk us through your writing process: Where and how do you write? 

Dawid: When I was working on “Paradise Undone” back in 2004-6, my son and I lived off-grid at 9,100 feet in the Sangre de Cristos. Weekdays, I got him to the school bus at 6:30 a.m., then spent the rest of the morning reading, taking notes, organizing my research. 

We did not have the internet, so I ordered books from all over the world, which came to my post office box in town. After lunch, I hiked around my 35-acre property with my Walkman, listening to various books on tape, especially Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus,” multiple times, in French and in English, and to Jones’s terrifying voice on the “Death Tape,” over and over, followed by my faithful dog, Rafe, who kept me company and made me feel safe, as did the impressive Crestone Needle which I could keep in view at all times.

“Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown”

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SunLit: If it was so bad in Jonestown, why didn’t people leave?

Dawid: This question would make sense if the Peoples Temple had remained in California, where you could walk out and hitch a ride on Route 101. But Jonestown was a 23-hour boat trip from the capital of Guyana, Georgetown. Jones took everyone’s passport upon arrival and locked them away. He told everyone the surrounding jungle was full of dangerous, poisonous animals to scare them. (It wasn’t.) 

He staged phony attacks on the compound so that people remained in great fear 24/7. Finally, on the last day, he had his “security forces” — young men with guns — stand around and threaten those who didn’t want to take the poison voluntarily. They forced some with injections and ensured parents gave the babies and toddlers the miniature syringes full of Fla-vor-Aid laced with cyanide, courtesy of the Jonestown doctor, Larry Schacht.

SunLit: Tell us about your next project.

Dawid:  I have a draft of a novel I wrote immediately after my Jonestown book failed to sell in 2008. It concerns another moment of important African-American history of the 20th century unknown to most contemporary readers. In 1938, after Kristallnacht, many Jewish professors sought to leave Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia immediately, but needed the promise of a job in order to flee. Black colleges in the USA eagerly gave contracts to nearly 1,000 of those professors. 

Most of those professors did their year or two in the South and then came North, horrified to discover the Jim Crow world which so resembled the Nazi Germany they had fled, with different trains for Blacks and Whites, certain areas and facilities off limits to Black Americans. But a few of those Jewish professors stayed at their all-Black colleges for their careers. My novel, “Standing Beside Love” (“Standing beside love is always justice,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said) tells the story of a German female French professor who ends up in a fictional college in Georgia and falls in love with her chair, a married African-American scholar. They orbit around one another for decades, raise children with their respective spouses, and lament the state of their world. But the Civil Rights movement changes everything, and we follow the parents and their children into a better world, though one fraught with violence and danger.

“Lightning Round:” Just a quirky collection of quick questions:

SunLit: Do you look forward to the actual work of writing or is it a chore that you dread but must do to achieve good things?

Dawid: Both. Sometimes I love the process of writing, inventing at the keyboard, and often I dread beginning.

ISunLit: What’s the first piece of writing – at any age – that you remember being proud of?

Dawid:  I wrote an anti-Vietnam war poem in 6th grade that my father, who was a political person but not a writer, was impressed with, which made me proud.

SunLit: When you look back at your early professional writing, how do you feel about it? Impressed? Embarrassed? Satisfied? Wish you could have a do-over? 

Dawid: Some of the early autobiographical writing is cringe-worthy, while the work I did where I distanced myself from the personal, even while following “true” narrative details, ended up quite good, like “On Crete,” which Richard Ford awarded a prize in the Writers-at-Work contest of 1988.

SunLit: What three writers, from any era, can you imagine having over for a great discussion about literature and writing? And why?

Dawid: George Eliot (Maryanne Evans), Cynthia Ozick and Russell Banks. All three are writers I’ve admired for decades because they wrote the truth about the world, without regard for professional success, which sometimes came and sometimes did not. Full disclosure: the late Banks was my teacher at the inaugural N.Y. State Summer Writers’ Institute for a month in 1987.

SunLit: Do you have a favorite quote about writing? 

Dawid: “The beauty of the world has two edges: one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.” V. Woolf

SunLit: What does the current collection of books on your home shelves tell visitors about you? 

Dawid: Obsessive collector of classics, contemporary and research materials, including 100 volumes about Jonestown.

SunLit: Soundtrack or silence? What’s the audio background that helps you write? 

Dawid: Silence.

SunLit: What event, and at what age, convinced you that you wanted to be a writer? 

Dawid: When I was 23, I sat on the shore of Lac DÁnnecy, reading a letter from my professor, Michael Rubin (my first book is dedicated to him), with whom I was engaged in an independent fiction writing study (at San Francisco State University) while I traveled around Europe. I knew, from his words and his example as a writer and a professor, that I wanted the life of the writer, which I knew would be very difficult.

SunLit: Biggest fear as an author?

Dawid: An emptiness inside dictating I have nothing to say. At 64, it hasn’t happened yet.

SunLit: Greatest satisfaction?

Dawid: My goal is to write a beautiful sentence, like Flaubert.

Type of Story: Q&A

An interview to provide a relevant perspective, edited for clarity and not fully fact-checked.

This byline is used for articles and guides written collaboratively by The Colorado Sun reporters, editors and producers.