A big sister – The nun who wrote Dead Man Walking defies labels and critics

Sister Helen Prejean is committed to the mighty detail.

It’s the details that make good writing, she says, that bring forth the humanity of those who have done vile things—and that build court cases.

It’s the lack of details that makes those cases fall apart.

Details, too, have to be assembled by activists to bring about change in the world.

Twenty years ago, Prejean, who grew up in Baton Rouge, was hard at work, living in New Orleans, weaving together the details that made a bestseller out of her first book, Dead Man Walking.

The book is Prejean’s account of counseling two men sentenced to death by electric chair as they lived out their final months at Angola. Released in 1994, it put Louisiana and the death penalty in the spotlight. It was later transformed into the Academy Award-winning film Dead Man Walking starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon.

With increasing celebrity—and, on occasion, controversy—Prejean has become a leading advocate for the abolition of the death penalty.

She’s also a highly sought-after and effective public speaker.

Prejean spoke last November at the Developing Dreams fundraising breakfast for the McMains Children’s Developmental Center (MCDC).

“On one end of the line is despair, and on the other end is the McMains Children’s Developmental Center,” she told a packed and attentive room at Boudreaux’s. “Be generous, so that we can keep this journey going.”

People responded to her call. After Prejean’s 15-minute appeal, checkbook covers flapped open. The breakfast pulled in $100,000 for the center.

“She sees so many men who have cognitive and learning disabilities that were never addressed,” says Janet Ketcham, executive director of MCDC. “She sees the work we do providing intensive therapy to children, as well as support for their families, as preventative in nature, and that’s why she said she was so happy to have the opportunity to speak to the crowd that attended.”

After her speech, Prejean, who is currently working on her spiritual memoirs, sat down with 225.

The 73-year-old graduated from St. Joseph’s Academy in 1957 then joined that school’s order, the Sisters of St. Joseph. For many years Prejean was a contemplative nun and teacher, quiet and prayerful in her practice of her faith. But after a 1980 retreat that called the nuns to become involved in social justice, Prejean experienced somewhat of a career conversion.

“It changed the spiritual trajectory of my life,” she says. “It took me awhile to wake up that the gospel is about doing justice.”

Working with the poor led Prejean to the men living on death row. Most of them had grown up in poverty. After witnessing the execution of Elmo Patrick Sonnier, Prejean says she felt the best way to tell the world about what was happening on death row was to write a book about it.

“I learned how to write when I was living in the St. Thomas Projects,” Prejean says. “I read about 20 books on how to write. You work on your craft as you go along.”

Jason Epstein, a celebrated editor at Random House who worked with literary giants including Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth, told Prejean that the only way she would grab audiences with her book was by keeping a tight tension in the writing.

“The reader has to know that you are in horror, too,” he told her.

“You wait too long to talk about the crime,” he instructed, and be told Prejean to move the grisly description of a murder and rape up to page four. He was willing to bet that readers wouldn’t shut the book but would stay on to find out how Prejean managed to locate something good and pure in the men she met on death row.

“I wrote it in present tense,” she says. “As it happens to me, it happens to you.”

Epstein also advised Prejean to “shingle” the facts about the death penalty into the book’s action instead of putting the information into footnotes, which few people will read.

“He helped me shape the book,” Prejean says. “He said, ‘Walk a tight line on every page of it.”

Depending on the person you ask, Prejean is labeled the “Mother Teresa of Death Row” or the nutty nun who is overly obsessed with criminals.

The truth is Prejean consistenty defies either label.

She’s hardly a saint.

“She would just absolutely pooh-pooh that,” says DePaul University Professor Susanne Dumbleton, who interviewed Prejean extensively for a new book she is writing about female activists.

Prejean’s not a nut either.

Her arguments against the death penalty, which she has made to Pope John Paul II, bishops, newscasters, judges and just about anyone else who will listen for a moment, are logical, spiritually sound, influential in shaping the current Catechism of the Catholic Church, perfectly punctuated and laid out in a soft, steady, patient Cajun drawl.

It’s not easy to change the system, but Prejean has been at it for more than 30 years—long before and long after Dead Man Walking hit shelves and theaters.

“To get people to actually change their minds means they have to say it’s wrong,” says Dumbleton, who has access to all of Prejean’s papers, donated to DePaul University by the nun. “And most of us don’t like to say that.”

It took a few drafts for Dead Man Walking to morph into the bestseller it is, and all of the drafts are housed at DePaul, along with letters and mementos from Prejean’s time with death row inmates.

“The little book is gonna go where the little book is gonna go,” Prejean chuckles.

It ended up in the hands of actor Susan Sarandon, who begged then-partner and filmmaker Tim Robbins to turn it into a movie.

The story resonated with ?Robbins, too, and he agreed to help get the film made.

“This was going to be a film about someone who’s guilty,” recalls Prejean, who spent time on the set while the movie was being filmed around Baton Rouge.

During her work on the film, which came out in 1995, Prejean became friends with Sarandon, who played her onscreen. Last year Prejean officiated the wedding of Sarandon’s daughter, Eva Amurri.

Prejean is also quite fond of Hollywood bad boy Sean Penn. But she’s quick to deny that she’s become a spiritual advisor to Hollywood stars.?

“They’re my friends,” she says. “That’s all.”