12 Questions for a Writer: Mark Sullivan

Mark Sullivan is an author, journalist, hunter, and angler. His new book, All the Glimmering Stars is based on the 'best untold story' he ever heard.

1.     Who are you, what have you written, and why?

My name is Mark Sullivan. My new novel, All the Glimmering Stars publishes May 7.

I have written twenty novels altogether, including the historical works Beneath a Scarlet Sky and The Last Green Valley. I have also co-authored five novels in the “Private Series” with James Patterson.

I grew up on the outskirts of Boston and was lucky enough to work at Fenway Park selling souvenirs. I graduated from Hamilton College, joined the Peace Corps, and lived in a Saharan town on the ancient trading route between Tripoli and Timbuktu.

Writing about that experience got me into the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where I also met my wife, and launched my career as an investigative reporter.  

After two years in Africa, ten years as a journalist, and thirty years as a novelist, I felt prepared when a former U.S. Navy SEAL Team Six squadron commander and a former CIA station chief in Kampala, Uganda brought me the story of a lifetime.

They described Anthony Opoka and Florence Okori, two kids growing up in small villages in northern Uganda in the early 1990s. In Anthony’s family, great value is placed on being a “good human” and learning to navigate by the stars. Florence’s mother pushes her in school and teaches her from a young age that there is nothing stronger in the universe than the power of love.

They are fourteen and already leaders in their communities when they are kidnapped along with thirty-five thousand other kids by a ruthless warlord named Joseph Kony.

The warlord rules through fear and violence. He tries to dehumanize the children, puts them through combat training that would have buckled many special forces’ operators, and brainwashes them into fierce, robotic soldiers in his Lord’s Resistance Army. Anthony becomes Kony’s personal radioman and night navigator, a witness to the warlord’s increasing madness. Florence calls herself “Betty” and becomes a combat nurse. They are in battle almost constantly for a decade.

To survive and stay sane, Anthony and Florence keep secret the way they were raised, burying it deep within until, some five years into the ordeal, they meet by chance. They fall in love and the power of love saves them.

The strongest force in the universe enables them to resurrect what they were taught as children and rely on those lessons of life to survive, escape by the stars, and turn the tables on Kony, eventually testifying against him during the LRA war crimes trial at the Hague.

The SEAL Team commander and the former spy told me they thought the story could end the practice of child soldiering forever if it were properly told.

I said All the Glimmering Stars was simply the best untold story I’d ever heard and agreed to write it on the spot.  

2.     At Lethal Minds Journal, one of our goals is to offer exposure for artwork by active service members and veterans and give them a platform to write, think, and share their visual art.  Why are you a writer?

A six-foot, two-hundred-pound penguin forced me into it. No kidding.

Sister Mary Joseph, a parochial school vice principal who was built like a tight end, caught me fighting in the hall when I was seven. Back then, they could wallop you with a three-sided ruler. But she told me that my punishment was that I had to write a story and enter it in the grades one through eight short-story contest. I was in second grade and won.

I still have no idea what the big nun saw in me, but it turned out that writing and telling stories were the only pursuits that have ever come to me naturally. Along the way, I had other teachers and editors encouraging me, and I worked at the craft very, very hard.

For years, I wrote simply because I was good at it and got paid. But my historical novels are different. I write them to have an impact on the reader by illuminating the common humanity at the heart of all of them. I have firm criteria for my subject matter. I look for stories now that are inherently moving, inspiring, healing to some, and potentially transformative to others. If I don’t believe a story has those qualities, I don’t take it on.

3.     Tell us about the process you undertook to write All the Glimmering Stars. 

In the spring of 2019, my son, the novelist Connor Sullivan, called me up one morning to say that he thought he’d found my next book, that he’d listened to “a story of great humanity” the evening before, and that I needed to hear it for myself.

Eric “Olly” Oehlerich, the SEAL Team Six commander, and Michael “Mick” Mulroy, the spy, came to my home in Bozeman, Montana in the fall of 2019. Before they even finished their overview, I knew the story of Anthony and Florence met all of my criteria and then some.

Our plan was to travel to Uganda to speak directly with Anthony and Florence in June 2020.

The pandemic delayed us by a year. In the meantime, I read everything I could find about the LRA and Joseph Kony’s reign of terror and had several interviews with Anthony over Zoom. I also watched hours of footage Olly and Mick shot of the Opokas talking about their experiences in captivity.

We finally got to Uganda in June 2021. Due to a sudden outbreak of the Covid Delta virus strain, we had to trim our time there from three weeks to two. But we packed a lot into the time we had, including days of one-on-one interviews with Anthony in English and with Florence through an Acholi interpreter, who was also an expert on child soldiers and how they can be successfully rehabilitated and brought back into society.  

Given security restrictions in place at the time, we traveled to as many of the major settings in the story as we could, including the villages where Anthony and Florence grew up, and where we interviewed their families about their lives before and during Kony.

We climbed to the top of Awere Hill, where Joseph Kony first preached and where he was said to summon thunderstorms. In the town where he grew up, we spoke to Kony’s cousins and his childhood church minister.

We interviewed former Ugandan Army officers who had hunted Kony for years. We met dozens of victims traumatized by their violent, often-lethal interactions with the kidnapping forces of the LRA. Fifty former child soldiers performed a silent play for us in one town, reenacting their abductions, their cruel treatment at Kony’s hand, the endless marches they were forced on, their sorrow at the loss of family and time, their eventual escape and reunion with their loved ones.

Given the threat of civil unrest in South Sudan at the time, we did not cross the border to enter the Imatong Mountains where Anthony spent much of his training and in combat. But, given that he had been Kony’s personal radioman, and had to stay within fifteen yards of the warlord at all times, Anthony had precise memories of where, when, and how events took place. Based on his recollections and transcripts of Anthony’s testimony at the Hague, I was able to use Google Earth to study the terrain as it influenced various battles and troop movements; and other websites devoted to the history of weather, which gave me a solid understanding of the extreme conditions they often faced.

I was blessed that Florence became comfortable enough with me to open up about her difficult experiences in the LRA, including the incredible tale of how she gave birth to their second son during a firefight amid a rainstorm in the Nile River bottom after crossing the swollen, raging waterway at night, holding her firstborn between her legs, both hands on a rope while suffering contractions.

All the people, all the stories, all these voices we heard, helped create the texture of the novel as I wrote, which at its core is the tender, unexpected story of two genuinely good people fighting to hold true to themselves as they grasp for light in unimaginable darkness.

4. What did you learn in the process and what surprised you?

I knew next to nothing about the issue of child soldiering when I took on the project. I had no idea, for example, that the U.N. Secretary-General considers the subject so important that he created a special envoy to closely monitor the practice around the world. Why is he so concerned? Multiple studies have shown that without intervention, today’s child soldier will become tomorrow’s hardened terrorist.

I write stories where people struggle with hardships beyond belief and yet manage to triumph. But listening to descriptions of the sheer brutality Anthony and Florence endured, I was amazed they’d survived much less prevailed against evil. More importantly, I was stunned by who they’d become, not victims wallowing in past miseries, but vibrant, interesting people who think their lives have been miracles.

5.     What do you want people to take away from this book?

I want readers to close the book feeling like they’d lived a story of great humanity through Anthony and Florence, sat right on their shoulders during the unlikely and harrowing journey of their lives, their trials, their tribulations, and ultimately their triumphs. 

6.     You’ve been a journalist, a novelist, a short story writer, and a “credited writer”. Your resume is perfect to ask of you, “What advice do you have for aspiring writers?”

Don’t tell anyone you want to be a writer and don’t wait for someone to fire the starting gun. If you share your dream, people, even close friends, will try to dissuade you. Ignore them, hide from them, and start immediately. The earlier the better. Remember, the nun got me going at seven years old.

Once you are committed, work daily, and work steadily, a little each day at first. This is like working out physically. A routine helps. If possible write in the same place and at the same time. That said, if you’re like me and travel a lot, you will have to eventually learn to write anywhere and at any time the opportunity presents itself.

Again, do not tell anyone you’re writing. And do not show what you’re working on until you know it is good. In jazz, this approach is known as “woodshedding”. You play away from people who may criticize your early efforts until you know you have something polished.

My son, Connor, took this last piece of advice seriously. After graduating from USC, while working for me and another writer as a researcher, he did not show or talk about the novel he was working on for more than three years. When he finally did, it was solid enough to show an agent. He published the novel, “Sleeping Bear” with a big publishing house and a dream editor a few days before he turned thirty.

7.     In All the Glimmering Stars, you got so deep into such a complex and emotional human story, plus you have spent time in Africa as a humanitarian. Do you see yourself involved in Anthony and Florence’s lives going forward?

Absolutely. Not only do Anthony and Florence share in whatever the novel earns, but Olly, Mick, and I are all committed to paying for their children’s education. The Opokas are also involved in “End Child Soldiering”, the non-profit Olly and Mick formed to keep the issue alive and to contribute to the rehabilitation of kids abducted, brainwashed, and given guns. I now serve on the board of directors.

8.     All the Glimmering Stars is “inspired by a true story.” Tim O’Brien talks about the difference between “story truth” and “happening truth” and how the real truth may be revealed by fictionalizing some aspects of a story. How did you construct this story and what were your focus concerns?

I was lucky that after creating a master timeline, I could see that the two stories naturally unfolded in parallel. Even though Florence was kidnapped after Anthony, there was enough drama going on in her life pre-abduction to provide a strong counterpoint to his story. Once they met and their fates entwined, I stayed with the rhythm of telling the novel from their alternating points of view.

I think Tim O’Brien is correct in his assessment of truth. Some themes inherent in a given story hit home harder if certain aspects are fictionalized. There are also questions of coherence involved.

In All the Glimmering Stars, I added historical facts to the narrative that did not directly impact Anthony and Florence, but which illuminated what they were going through at the same time. And I deleted characters, or rather took several people who all had the same role or the same name and combined them into one or two characters to reduce confusion and increase dramatic effect. For example, in reality, if kids tried to escape the Lord’s Resistance Army, there were multiple teams of trackers who could be sent after them. In the book, however, I compressed those teams into one, led by the most ruthless tracker of them all.

As a result, when Anthony and Florence finally run, the reader feels palpable terror because they’ve seen the tracker multiple times in the story and know his capacities.

9.     Everyone hates this one: What is your favorite book and why?

“A River Runs Through It” by Norman McLean. It’s a novella really, less than one hundred pages, and yet Mr. McLean manages to tell an epic tale of biblical proportions, reinventing the age-old story of conflicted brothers and fathers through events from his own life. The language is masterful, using the metaphor of fly fishing to subtly comment on what just happened on one page and then evoking the Montana landscape in the next with words that provoke mind paintings that unfurl and linger like personal memories. The ending is devastating. I have read the story at least eight times and each time I face those final paragraphs I am crying so hard I can barely see the print on the page. It’s moving, inspiring, healing, and transformative. Just the kind of tale that I love.

10.     You’ve been featured on multiple best-seller lists. Does that sustain you or do you wake up hungry the next day?

--By some miracle, writing has sustained me for forty years. I have not had a “real job” since quitting the newspaper business. I freelanced for magazines for a while, but novels have been my focus and main form of income for at least thirty years. Like I said, a miracle.

For years, and despite my successes, I woke up every day hungry and disciplined. I had quotas and deadlines to meet. I wrote no matter what. Tired, sick, whatever, going into my office was like getting pumped up for a football game.

I wrote a lot of books that way. One year I wrote three and finished feeling like a zombie, unable to imagine taking on another project.

Shortly afterward, I went to India and spent a great deal of time chatting with monks. One asked me how I’d gotten into writing, and I told her the story of the big Catholic penguin. Later she asked what it was like for me going to work every day, and I gave her the spiel about quotas, discipline, and getting pumped up for a football game.

She stared at me for a long time with this knowing little smile on her face, and said, “You don’t see it, do you?”

“What’s that?” I replied confused.

“You treat writing as discipline, which is another word for punishment,” she said. “Writing has been a form of punishment for you since you were seven years old.”  

I was shocked and then angry. I left the monk and swore that night that I’d never write again. When I told her that the next morning, she laughed at me, and that got me even angrier.

“Why should I punish myself more?” I asked.

“You’re asking the wrong question, Mark,” she said. “The question you need to ask is what if you could learn to write out of joy and inner reward instead of punishment.”

I couldn’t imagine it. “Is that possible?”

She nodded and taught me. The entirety of All the Glimmering Stars was written in a state of joy and inner reward. It took me less than six months in the woodshed to draft the novel, beginning to end. Not much changed in the story since.

11.  Why should someone read All the Glimmering Stars?

It is based on the best untold story I’ve heard in four decades of searching for and writing tales that intrigue me. You will be challenged by this novel. You may be shaken by some details. You may feel emotionally wrought at times and overwhelmed at others, in paralyzing fear for what might happen next to Anthony and Florence.

But you will also develop a deep affection for them and feel their dizzying victories as your own. And if I’ve done my job right, and I think I have, you will shut the book feeling moved, inspired, healed perhaps, and potentially transformed by a story with characters who are simply unforgettable.

12.  What have I not asked that I should have?

I forgot to mention my interests. I love to powder ski, bow hunt elk, and flyfish big rivers, which is why I call Montana home. I live in Bozeman with my wife of forty years near my children and wonderful granddaughter. I also study, follow, and teach a spiritual philosophy and meditative practice called Oneness.

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You can get All the Glimmering Stars here or at your favorite independent bookseller.