Day one in East Texas. Left Harlingen at 9:30 AM, intending to be in Dallas by 1:00 and in Athens by 3:00. Instead, I pulled into Athens at 8:30 PM. Long, long day. But the beginning of what I hope will be a productive week.
Eventually I'll edit the first post to lay out the story of the East Texas church arsons a little more clearly. Right now, suffice it to say that my connection to this story is that my Uncle David and Aunt Julie live in Athens, one of the towns in East Texas where three of the churches were torched. Over the course of this next week, I'm going to be staying with them while I traipse around researching the arsons and interviewing members of the community.
I'm not alone in this endeavor, it turns out. Two guys from California named Trenton and Theo were out here in March and April shooting a documentary about the arsons, and they have a feature film in the works too. I talked to them this week. They're both really cool guys, and since we're working in different media, they don't see my project as a threat to theirs. While they were here, they conducted 64 (!) interviews and amassed something like 90 hours of raw footage that they're now whittling down in post-production. I can't wait to see what they end up with.
As for me, I'm going to be conducting interviews of my own. I have two set up so far: one tomorrow with Bill Parr, pastor of Little Hope Baptist Church (the first church to burn); and one on Monday morning with Brenda and Bob Steele, grandparents of Jason Bourque, one of the arsonists. Still working on setting things up with some of the other key players--it's hard to find contact information for people around here, especially since I'm not used to finding it. But Trenton and Theo assured me that people around here are very open and willing to talk, so I somehow don't think it'll be that much of a problem.
So what does this mean for you, devoted reader? Well, you can expect a blog post about every interview, that's for sure. Whether or not they come in time with the interviews is another matter, as they may take quite a while to write. But they will happen.
Stay tuned.
