r. r. bryan, a lawyer, formerly of Madisonville, Louisiana, now lives in Edmond, Oklahoma with his wife of 29 years. This is his first published novel. He is working on his second.

(1)  How did you come up with this story?

I have been asked on multiple occasions how this story came to mind. While I touch briefly on the answer in the book’s Acknowledgments, this is the complete version.

While living in St. Tammany Parish from 1988 to 1996, my family attended St. Anselm Catholic Church, in Madisonville. In 1994, while reading the Times-Picayune, I ran across a story embedded deep in the A section about a large number of nuns and priests having been brutally murdered during the violent Hutu uprising in Rwanda, and I wondered at the time how the Catholic Church could have left their own in such a position of peril.

A few weeks later I was sitting in St. Anselm, at a Saturday Mass, with my young daughter, and instead of the usual homily we were being treated to a slide show by a priest who had just returned from serving a lengthy mission in Guatemala. His photographs of the native Indians were striking in both color and imagery; it was easy to see that these natives were a peaceful, loving people, despite their poverty and abandonment by the government.