Interview: “Columbine” Author Dave Cullen

By Corrine White

I don’t often tear up, but I cried while reading the last chapter of Dave Cullen’s bestselling novel “Columbine” (2009), which was recently released in an expanded paperback edition. My own emotional reaction to the account of the 1999 Colorado school shooting is not altogether surprising, however, given Cullen’s emotional approach to writing the book.

“I hear all this talk about journalists having objectivity, but I’m like, ‘What are you talking about? I am emotionally involved.’” Cullen said in an interview with The Dartmouth.

In “Columbine,” Cullen paints an entirely different picture of the shootings than was portrayed by the mainstream press, including many details he gathered during his 10 years of interviewing those affected by the tragedy. Delving beneath the surface of the media’s portrayal of the events and even exploring the minds of the killers, Cullen’s novel is poignant, affecting and a truly remarkable read.

Cullen, who lives in Denver, said he found out about the shooting just like anyone else: by turning on the news.

“I was sitting down to lunch … It must have been about a quarter to noon when I turned on the TV, and they were just getting reports of shooting … when I started to see helicopters circling, that was the moment where I realized, ‘This is more serious than I thought,” Cullen said.

The notes Cullen took at Columbine High School that day — the people, the smells, the reactions — are used in his book, but he said it was not until the day after the shooting that he decided to invest himself in writing about the event.

“The scene that really got to me was how the kids had literally changed overnight,” Cullen said. “The day after the shooting, they had all stopped crying. I was really unnerved by what happened to these kids. For the first 22 hours since I had heard about the shooting, my focus had been on the kids who had died. But the morning after, that really changed. There’s 2,000 kids that are in incredible emotional danger. ”

While writing “Columbine,” Cullen said he experienced two bouts of secondary post-traumatic stress disorder, an affliction he had been unaware of before beginning to write the novel.

“I do something called method writing where, when I write a scene, I picture myself in that room, and picture myself inside of each of the people involved, and try to feel what it’s like to be them … Writing that way turned out to be really debilitating,” Cullen said. Cullen added that he was surprised to find that it was much easier to write about the killers than the survivors.

“I thought [writing about the killers] would be psychologically dangerous, but it wasn’t — it was fine … What was hard for me was talking to the survivors — I would absorb so much of their grief,” he said.

“Columbine” does more than explore the psychological trauma of the events, however it also reveals many facts about the shooting that were not as heavily popularized in the mainstream media before the book’s 2009 release. For example, the killers had set up bombs on the school grounds that failed to detonate. Their intention was not to kill 11, but the whole school.

Cullen cited this as an example of the public’s willingness to believe what they are told without investigating events for themselves, which he said is what he attempted to do in his book.

“People didn’t accept it because they still wanted to believe that the killers were targeting jocks,” Cullen said. “We remember a storyline, and if there are parts that don’t fit into what we want to believe, we’ll ignore it. If the garbage makes sense, we’ll take it. And that to me is quite scary. It really makes you think about how much responsibility the media really has.”

Read more here: http://thedartmouth.com/2010/05/18/arts/columbine/
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