72395873289

identified a decent-size town just off the highway as a place called Colorado City. When I went
inside to pay, the girl who took my money was wearing a nineteenth-century costume that could have
been lifted from the set of a John Ford western. Even though the temperature that day was 104 degrees
in the shade, she was wearing a long dress, with a high collar and long sleeves. There were several
other women and girls inside the mini-mart and I noticed that they were all dressed in the same
distinctive style.
I decided to drive into Colorado City proper for a quick look around. Immediately I was struck by
how immense most of the homes were: many of them looked like large apartment complexes. About
thirty seconds after I entered the residential district, a police cruiser pulled behind me and stayed on
my tail until I left the city limits. A little ways down the road, I saw a National Park Service vehicle
and I pulled over to ask a ranger what the hell was going on back in Colorado City. He said, “You
don’t know? Colorado City is the country’s largest community of Mormon fundamentalists. They
believe that if you want to go to heaven you have to practice polygamy.” I’d lived in the West a long
time, yet until that moment I knew nothing about Colorado City or the several thousand polygamists
who lived there under the absolute control of an elderly tax-accountant-turned-prophet named Uncle
Rulon who had married seventy-five women, many of them when they were in their early teens.
Okay, so you have a general interest (faith, religion) and stumble onto a specific context
(Colorado City). How, then, do you develop a “story”?
I was raised among Mormons in small-town Oregon, and was fascinated by the power of their
belief. I grew up surrounded by kids who were utterly convinced that they were going to the celestial
kingdom in the afterlife, where each would become a god, ruling his very own planet. Coming from
an agnostic family, I was blown away by the intensity of their faith. I’ve wanted to understand the
roots of such faith ever since. Blundering upon Colorado City gave me my first inkling that the story
might be found somewhere within the shadowy culture of Mormon fundamentalism.
I’m a storyteller. I need a narrative chassis on which to assemble my ideas. If I determine that a
potential story is sufficiently fertile, and decide to go for it, I commence a feverish hunt for material
that will drive the narrative forward while simultaneously illustrating the points I wish to make.
What kinds of characters do you look for?
I look for interview subjects who not only play a central role in the story I want to tell, but also
happen to be articulate and complicated and outspoken. If they are angry, or unexpectedly brilliant, or
have an eccentric sense of humor—well, that’s huge. A single fascinating personality can make a book
—one can’t state this strongly enough. It’s an invaluable lesson for a writer of nonfiction—a lesson I
learned by reading Tracy Kidder, Janet Malcolm, and John McPhee.
How did you find the characters for Under the Banner of Heaven?
Relatively early in my research, I wrote to Mark Hofmann, a one-time Mormon missionary who
had lost his faith. Hofmann had gained infamy by forging some historical documents that were