Recently I interviewed Julia Scheeres. She wrote Jesus Land, a memoir about our reform school, Escuela Caribe, and A Thousand Lives: the Untold Story of Jonestown.
One of my favorite aspects of the Jonestown book is how Scheeres captured the day to day tyranny of life under Jim Jones’ rule. I was intrigued to discuss how living in captivity at Escuela Caribe helped inform her Jonestown work, but I came to understand so much more not only about Jonestown, and racism, and religion, but also about myself. Like why I shut down emotionally. And why one of my integral values as an adult is living in an open-minded community. But this is just why I’m interested personally. There’s so much more to be gleaned (such as how Jones used deceptions like the King Alfred plan and staged shootings to trick people into following him, his theory of revolutionary suicide, or details of racism in the heartland) in Guernica Magazine.
