Michelle Dally is eminently qualified to write a satire that skewers Colorado politics, media and the religious right. She holds a J.D. from Georgetown. She’s written political stories for Westword, been a member of The Denver Post Capitol Bureau, a legislative aide to Rhode Island Sen. John Chafee and a lobbyist for a children’s mental health hospital. She was part of the Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Columbine.
“A Highly Placed Source” is her first novel. In it, 12-year-old Denver middle school student Peter Banks is caught in an embarrassing moment. When one of his classmates tells him he’s destined for hell, Peter thinks the punishment sounds a bit extreme. But just to be sure, that night he asks God what He thinks. The next morning Peter awakes with a message as clear as a voicemail: God has more important things to worry about; enjoy yourself as long as it doesn’t hurt others.
It should have ended there, but a fight lands Peter in the principal’s office, where he repeats his message from God. Peter is suspended – not for fighting, but for lying. His father, a bombastic and lawsuit-happy lawyer, prematurely jumps to his son’s defense. The envisioned constitutional case evaporates when he gets the whole story, but not before he’s called in the media.
Peter and family are at a press conference when Peter says, “I have had another message from God. One week from today at four p.m., there will be three confirmations of His presence. There will be witnesses to these confirmations. Two of them I can name here: Sherry Setliffe Anderson and Jake Abraham Herron. God told me to tell you to remember that the miraculous is often personal, and always present.”
The story has legs, something both Denver papers hope to keep on the front page for the coming week. The Sentinel assigns journalist Gail Abernathy, a woman in need of a miracle or two of her own, to cover the story. It is a story that transforms, for better or for worse, all the people involved.
Drawn from real life
In a recent interview, Dally said the story largely grew from her own experiences. “I had been on the inside of both politics and media. I wanted to tell people some of the funnier aspects of that. People take the media and politics so seriously; if they knew what a circus it was sometimes, maybe they’d be more discerning,” she said. Also, “Both in my career in politics and in the media, I had been horrified by the religious right, and its claim to speak for God, for any kind of spirituality.”
If there is a what-if question behind the book, she said, it would be “What if God really spoke for himself? And just how stupid it would make the religious right, the politicians and the media look?”
Given Dally’s work as a statehouse reporter, it is natural to wonder whether “A Highly Placed Source” is autobiographical. “This is fiction,” she said, drawing the words out for emphasis. “However, everything that Gail sees or does, I have seen happen in that arena. Not necessarily to me, but I have seen it happen.”
Dally said she “is a spiritual person, but not a religious person.” It’s an outlook that shapes her novel’s miracles, which are central without being showy. “My view of miracles is that they can be very small, and they’re very private and they don’t play well on the 6 o’clock news. But that doesn’t make them any less significant,” she said.
A fully drawn cast that includes Peter’s parents, a conservative state legislator, church leaders from evangelical and mainstream churches and the witnesses, Sherry Anderson and Jake Herron, populate “A Highly Placed Source.” Dally said the parents were the most difficult to write, because they had to place their son in this difficult spotlight, “and they had to have done it for believable reasons.” Her favorite character is a Catholic priest, Father Gil Chavez, she said, “because he believed but he was not part of the hierarchy. He didn’t play the political games. And he cared desperately about what happened.”
She said, “Of course I love Peter because Peter was so precise and didn’t have an agenda. Which made him the perfect spokesperson, don’t you think? If you were God and you were trying to find somebody, you’d want him to be precise and without an agenda. Which pretty much wipes out all the religious leaders we currently have.”
Getting “A Highly Placed Source” published has been a long road. Dally said, “The thing you have to know about the publishing industry today is you can write a very good book and it may not get published. In fact, it won’t be published because of the way the industry is organized. Having religion in my book the way it is, the way I skewer it, turned off many publishers because the number one booksellers are Wal-Mart and Kmart, and their number-one clients or customers are those of faith.
“On the other hand, the counter-market to that doesn’t want to have any faith in (their books). So I received some letters from publishers saying ‘you can’t have it both ways.”‘ She describes working with Ghost Road Press, a small house that focuses on Colorado writers, as “an absolutely wonderful experience. They had absolutely no doubt that they wanted the book.”
Dally is working for a partnership she describes as “a media relations business for progressive nonprofits.” There are more novels in her future, though.
“I think I have a couple of other books, though I’m not a spew-them-out, one-a-year kind of person,” she said. She said it’s unlikely that the next one will be any kinder or gentler than this one.
Robin Vidimos reviews books for The Denver Post.
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FICTION
A Highly Placed Source, by Michelle Dally, $19.95
