Moderator (Becky Cooper): ‘Shibai’ is, among other things, a memoir, and a true crime story at the same time. And it weaves together so many different threads: running and photography and your work with the Nagovisi. And meditations on memory, and your reflections on Jane. How did you weave all these threads together? How did you decide to structure it?

Don Mitchell: Originally, in the fall of 2017, just a few months after Becky had come to Hilo and the detective Sergeant Peter Sennott was there too, I thought about those four or five months and realized that I'd been in a whirlwind. In a storm, and I was off balance. I didn't know what I knew. Were there some smokescreens happening? I didn't think anybody was lying, but I wondered, 'Is what seems to be happening really happening?' This needs to be book length, because I need to weave so many things together.

And so I thought, well, I'll just [focus on] the things that have been with me for most of my life. You know, my field work, the people that I met there and I'm still in touch with, the murder itself, my own issues, concerns, uncertainties. And Ruth Thompson kept saying, 'You've got a spiral going here.' And I realized, well, I do. So I began to think of it as if all these threads were a candelabra or tree branches. And I, at the top, was trying to grab them, weave them all together, and see what I could come up with.

Becky Cooper: One of my favorite phrases is what you call the "contortions of the I". There's the 'you' in 1969, remembering the events leading up to Jane's death. There's the 'you' over those years, remembering that grieving period and experiencing it simultaneously. There's the 'you' in 2014 when we met, etc. And there's this constant self-reflection over who gets to tell the story, what stories, the true story, and how you relate to yourself over time, as the story is also changing because of your shifting relationship to those memories.

Don Mitchell: In case the people out there don't know, the whole book is written in the second person: 'You this', 'You that, 'You the other thing ...' I was looking for some distance. And also, although I don't think I said that to myself when I began it, it became a kind of self-interrogation as if I were saying to myself, 'Why did you think that? Why did you do that? What did you miss?' And I was, in a way, distancing myself from the horror of the murder. It was a murder, you know. It's important to keep that in mind. And the mystery of it. And I kept questioning my own interpretations. And I thought that second person was the best way to do it. There's even a chapter called "You decide to write in second person", which is where I talk about these things.

Over the years that I was actively working on this, it was all very much a sense of, 'What is going on here?' And this was especially the case when you appeared on the scene, Becky, because you were finding out things and some of them were things I knew, or at least had an idea about, and some of the things were new to me, something that I hadn't known at all. And I remember sitting at my desk saying, "What's going on here?", which is a strange thing to say when you're talking about a murder that's almost half a century old. 'What's going on here?' No, 'What's going on there?' But I kept thinking about it and, 'What's going on in me?'

I realized, 'Whoa, you know, you've been spinning around in a locked room, as far as this is concerned, for a great many years. And now the door's open. [...] Becky has opened a door in which I'm going to receive new information and work with it as I can. It was a blossoming, in a way. A blast of information.

Moderator: How did you develop the book's structure?

Don Mitchell: Originally, Shibai existed as an 8,000 word piece that I submitted to a journal for a contest. [...] It foreshadowed the structure of the book in the sense that some of it was in 1969 and some of it was in 2017. What I was trying to do, and then I did do, in the book was a spiral. But then, in the end, it was almost like something circling a drain. Although a tornado would be better -- sucking things up. But, actually, the mess is up at the top and the mess is where I was when I was writing the book and all these old things were down the funnel of the tornado.

Some of the chapters are a page and a half, and some are 10 pages long. And the idea was that the reader would, herself, be rocked back and forth. At one point, I got nervous and decided I better just see how long these chapters are. So I put them in an Excel spreadsheet, with the number of words. And I just kind of looked at it: 600, 700, 900 ... 1800. 'Oh, oh, oh, have to do something there.'

And I moved stuff around like that and I color-coded, you know, anyway, so the structure was, to the extent that I could pull it off, meant to seem like a vortex or a tornado and take the reader and spin that person around just as I was spun around.

Many times, I said, 'I can't do this. You know, not only is this a piece of crap, I can't even finish this piece of crap.' [...] And then I would go back to it, of course. But one of the things I would do after I got done freaking out -- I would go back and either start at the beginning or start at some of my favorite parts that were already written, as if I were catching a wave again (even though I'm not a surfer, but you know), and say, 'Now this part worked. Let me read this part. Let me speak a little bit of this out loud. Let me wave my hands around.' And then maybe I'll see that I can ride that wave someplace else. And most of the time I was able to do that.

But, oh, definitely. Sometimes I said, 'This is it, man. It's all over. It's done. I'm so done with this book.' And I did always come back, and that's the thing: You've got to go back. You've got to always go back.

I would love to have had more time, I've had it in other projects but, you know, I decided to write this book in July and it hit the streets in November. So when I decided to step away from it, the away time had to be measured in hours or maybe one day. And I would say, 'I can't. I can't step away from this for any length of time, because then I have absolutely no chance of success.' I was trying to get 'Shibai' out into the world not long after Becky's book (We Keep the Dead Close) hit the streets.

Becky gave me an advance review copy when I was still working on mine. So it was like my carrot. I said, "There's no way I'm reading this." So Ruth had it and it was sitting around the house. I could go out of my workroom and there's Becky's book, you know, and I can't read it. I can't read it until I finish mine.

So finally I finished mine. I picked up her book and read it in two settings, and I called Becky. [...] I called her and I said, "This is a wonderful book." And what also struck me was that she and I had done the same kind of thing.

My book is like 260 some-odd pages. It has 55 chapters, many of which are short. And I wasn't prepared to open up Becky's book and see that she had decided that a way to tell the story was basically the same -- some very long and complicated chapters about things that she had found, and then some short ones. And I hopped around in time. She hopped around in time. We both sometimes use present tense, sometimes (mostly) past tense. All these things were delightful to me. That's the only word I can think of. I was just laughing with delight when I read it.

Moderator: What if the case had not been solved?

Don Mitchell: If the case had not been solved, I don't think I would have written this book. I would have stayed with a relatively short piece that ended with me in the fall of 2017 discouraged and thinking that, well, I've learned a bunch of stuff, but this is going nowhere and I'll never find out what happened.

And then, as Ruth said, 'You ended on a minor key'. And that's true. You know, it was difficult to come to the end here. And the only way I did it, I didn't plan on it -- I went for a walk in the woods and my cat came along with me. How that played out, what I said into my phone, that was the last chapter. And it's called "Catwalk", which as we all know has multiple meanings.

Moderator: How do you feel now?

Don Mitchell: When I got to the end of it, I thought, 'Okay, it's over now. I've put this to rest.' I said goodbye to Jane and, indeed, that's what I feel. So now I'm calm. I mean, I miss her. I love her. And she was a wonderful person, but I'm not ripped apart by that thing anymore.