UNITED STATES
Huffington Post
Daniel A. Olivas
The email came early one Tuesday morning two years ago, the kind of email that makes a writer’s heart beat with excitement and just a bit of fear.
It began: “I’m an editor at the Times opinion section, and we’re looking for someone in LA to write an essay for us about the sex abuse scandal in the church there….” The email address included the editor’s name followed by @nytimes.com. Yep. That Times.
I wondered why the editor had contacted me. True, I am an LA-based, Chicano writer. At the time, I had six books under my belt and I sometimes touched on the Church abuse scandal in my fiction. So, after some thought, I figured a simple Google search could have brought The New York Times editor to my inbox.
But I tried to stay cool and wrote this simple response to the editor: “Thanks for the email. I would be interested. Please send the guidelines.”
She quickly wrote back and offered an explanation of her own: “So we often ask novelists or literary writers to write essays off of a news event. The idea is to get some good, evocative writing into the paper (often with some personal anecdotes or stories), but also to offer some interesting argument or insight about the news. We were thinking you might have something interesting to say about abuse, Catholicism and Latinos in LA, but the angle would be totally up to you (and of course it would depend on whether you grew up in the church/feel like you can offer a personal perspective).”
Made sense to me. So, I hunkered down and wrote it. After some back-and-forth with the editor, it ran online on a Thursday evening and in the print edition that Sunday under the title, “The Priest That Preyed.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.