How I Came to Write "Changing Light"

Submitted by Nora Gallagher on November 22, 2006 - 9:02am.

We are pleased to welcome to the roster of Beatitudes Bloggers author Nora Gallagher. She is the author of Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith and Practicing Resurrection: A Memoir of Work, Doubt, Discernment, and Moments of Grace. An astute observer of faith and culture, Nora's writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and beliefnet.com. For a fine example of her compelling witness to faith in our time, read her Memorial Day sermon about the complicity of silence around war. Her next book is a novel, and her words about this story give us the promise of a book written in the spirit of the Beatitudes. Blessed is this peacemaker.

How I Came to Write Changing Light

I grew up in New Mexico, a short distance from Los Alamos, where Robert Oppenheimer and his team built the atomic bomb. Guard towers were still in place, and the city had an aura of secrecy, isolation and guilt. From my college dining room in Santa Fe, I could see the lights of Los Alamos suspended in the sky. My novel unfolds in this remote place that was very near the heart of the 20th century.

My generation grew up with bomb scares, drills in school, and bomb shelters. I remember fearing that the Russians would wipe out New Mexico and Colorado Springs (where bombs were stored in the mountains), first before other targets. While many American children feared the bomb, those of us in New Mexico had a double anxiety: we were afraid of a weapon in the hands of enemies far away and also feared the bombs next door.

My novel is not a polemic, but I realized in the writing of it that we've never come to terms with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our history books teach us that the use of the bomb was inevitable, but it turns out that it was not. One hundred and fifty scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project signed petitions to President Truman in the summer of 1945. They called atomic bombs "a means for the ruthless annihilation of cities " and continued, "Our use of atomic bombs in this war would carry the world a long way further on this path of ruthlessness." Robert McNamara said in the documentary The Fog of War that had the United States lost WWII we might have been tried for war crimes. Because we won the war, we have neither admitted our crimes nor understood them.

My novel posits the chance of a different outcome: what would have happened had one of the physicists from Los Alamos decided to leave the project and work against it. It came to me one day when I drove from a piece of a land I owned near Santa Fe to the Rio Grande. As I looked across the river to the mesa that rises up on the other side, I realized that Los Alamos was right behind that mesa, just out of view. Someone could have left the secret city under cover of night, and swum across the river. Who might have found him and what would have been their story?

» Nora Gallagher's blog