Buy Artifact : Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives at wvupress.com
Interview by Justin Hargett
Sadly, mass shootings touch every aspect of our modern life, but your book specifically focuses on educational institutions. As someone who started high school the year of the Columbine shooting, and who was enrolled at a major public university during the Virginia Tech shooting, these specific tragedies still carry such a visceral, emotional weight for me. I’m curious how your own experiences in Montreal weighed on you as you researched the L’École Polytechnique shooting?
I was seventeen when the Montreal Massacre took place. I remember learning about it from the television news at home in the suburbs of Toronto. I moved to Montreal about eighteen months later to study at McGill University. Canadian culture and politics were deeply affected by those events, though, as I write in the book, diverse communities and regions had different responses to that terrible event. My generation of young anglophone (i.e., English-speaking) women understood the attack to be rooted in misogyny. We sounded the alarm about gendered violence and took part in (by then, longstanding) movements like Take Back the Night. In my first year at McGill, I joined a campus student group called “Walk Safe.” It was less political than Take Back the Night—quieter. Once a week, a friend and I made ourselves available to accompany anyone who felt unsafe walking home from campus in the dark, whether from the library or the campus bar. The idea was for students to look out for one another and to take responsibility for each other’s safety. Only in retrospect have I understood that this initiative, too, was a response to the Montreal Massacre. We young women wanted to claim our space on campus, our right to professional and intellectual ambitions, and to be safe regardless of how we looked or dressed.
Working in the archives for the Polytechnique chapter was difficult. It was, by far, the most challenging chapter to write, because I identified and continue to identify so strongly with the young women who were killed there. We were so close in age and in temperament. Like them, I too was a driven, ambitious student, exhausted by early December after a long semester of work. I remember in my bones how it felt to trudge to campus (even if it was a different campus in the same city; even if we studied in different languages) through snow, ice, and frigid winds. Reading the Montreal coroner’s report affected me deeply, as did reading Colleen Murphy’s beautiful and devastating play, The December Man.
In your closing to the story of the Fabrikant Affair—the 1992 shooting at Concordia—you make a point to highlight Ken Whittingham, the PR professional who urged the University’s leadership to practice radical transparency rather than retreat into institutional self-protection. Can you elaborate on what you think his role reveals about how universities—and perhaps all large institutions—should respond to moments of crisis, scandal, or violence?
Ken Whittingham was the biggest surprise to me in my Concordia research. As you say, my unlikely hero was the university’s PR guy who played a central role in guiding the administration through the aftermath of the 1992 shooting of engineering faculty and staff members at Montreal’s Concordia University. After he retired, Whittingham donated his papers to the university archives. The collection comprises memos, press clippings, and drafts of conference presentations. It’s a fascinating record of his advice to administrators in the immediate aftermath of the shootings as well as his later reflections. Concordia conducted several inquiries into the Fabrikant Affair, whose findings reflected terribly on the university. They were brutal. Perhaps understandably, some members of the administration instinctively moved to suppress the most damning and embarrassing parts of those reports. Whittingham’s advice was simple and courageous: tell the truth.
One line I trace through this book is the power of and necessity for radical honesty in the wake of such terrible events. Against all odds, Whittingham succeeded in convincing his institution that transparency was the best policy. Only because it agreed to an open and public series of investigations into what had gone wrong could the university undergo a true cultural transformation. Looking back now, I think it succeeded in leading by example and modeling a process of institutional healing.
There’s a chapter in the book that interrogates forgiveness in the face of extreme violence. You quote political philosopher Michele Moody-Adams, who says that the cycle of forgiveness cannot be complete “unless it also involves hope that the future will be better…” You add: “There, as I see it, is the rub. Is it possible for us to see a better future in America?” And I wanted to ask you the impossible question—is it?
The only way I know to write about such difficult events and materials is by paying attention to the glimmers of light that I find in the darkness. Whittingham’s call for honesty and transparency is one such glimmer. Debra Moriarity’s introduction of forgiveness into the conversation is another. Moriarity survived the University of Alabama, Huntsville, shooting by chance, when the gun pointed at her head jammed. I visited her on her campus, and we had been talking for a couple of hours when she brought up the notion of forgiveness for her attacker. As someone raised in the Catholic Church, I spent much of my childhood thinking about and learning to practice forgiveness, so the theme felt both familiar and challenging. What does forgiveness look like in these circumstances? How might it operate? I wondered. I then did what I always do when I’m stumped or confused: I went to the library and started reading everything I could find on the subject, from psychologists to religious studies scholars. That’s how I came across this idea you cite of Moody-Adams: that forgiveness can only be complete if we are able to imagine a better future.
Despite my glimmers of light, I must admit that the book’s final outlook is bleak. If forgiveness means letting go of the right to vengeance, then how to proceed when we live in such an extraordinarily vengeful time? Moriarity’s forgiveness, alone, is not enough to change the future. This book, which I am nonetheless proud of and believe in, is not enough to remake the culture. How do we build a better world for our students amid such oblivion, vengeance, and violence? I don’t know the answer to this question.
The last chapter of the book is about a shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, in 2015. You noted that on your own campus in Missouri, “mere weeks later, the story of what had happened in that Oregon writing class appeared to have slipped away into collective oblivion. It disappeared not only from headlines but also from campus conversations.” Can you elaborate on the collective amnesia we’ve experienced from mass shooting violence as a society?
I was profoundly troubled by the events in Roseburg because, again, I found myself identifying with the victims so strongly. Larry Levine was a professor of writing. His classroom could easily have been mine, so when I encountered this weird, widespread, and almost immediate forgetting around that event, I was both puzzled and troubled.
I first started thinking about this kind of collective amnesia when I was writing my very first book, Silence is Death (2007). The book is about the life and work of a writer named Tahar Djaout, who was killed in the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s. The conflict that took his life was called the “War Without Images,” because armed groups targeted journalists and other storytellers. What happens to a society without storytellers to record its history? It forgets. After the 2015 Umpqua shooting, I experienced a curious sense of déjà vu. Here was another example of mass amnesia surrounding violence. As I circulated on my campus, going about my work, I was surprised to find that, if I mentioned the shooting in Roseburg, I got puzzled looks. No one seemed to remember it. I’ve come to believe that this kind of mass forgetting isn’t malicious. Rather, it’s a coping mechanism. We can only take on so much grief and sadness and fear before something breaks, and before our brain steps in to shield us. I think the collective forgetting we experience is a form of unconscious self-protection.
Final question: what’s next for you?
I’m a passionate gardener (flowers and landscape, more so than veggies) and, like so many others, I found that digging, planting, and cultivation saw me through the darkest, saddest days of the pandemic. So now, I’m curious to see what I might be able to do with this subject. I’m starting to work up a project about gardens. I want to spend some time thinking about beauty, time, and how to live on the planet more lightly. No doubt, the project will pull in some of my perennial themes (bad pun, sorry…): rootedness, uprootedness, notions of home, exile, and displacement. And even though I am hoping finally to write a book that’s not primarily about human (self-) destruction, I will admit to being drawn to books, essays, and other works about war gardens, refugee-camp gardens, and AIDS-era gardens. We’ll see where it all takes me.
Join Julija Šukys in conversation with Lisa Moore at Alienated Majesty Books in Austin December 2, 2025, 7-9 pm.
Buy Artifact : Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives at wvupress.com