‘The moment when life changes’: Harry Bruinius on finding the story (audio)

I met Harry Bruinius 20 years ago, when the self-described divinity school refugee came to the Monitor to edit for a summer. He and I both learned what it meant to be a Monitor journalist at the same time, and from the same people: then-national editor Scott Armstrong, who used to read aloud snippets of Raymond Chandler and extoll the poetry of Seamus Heaney (there was something about hockey, but I blocked that part out); and the much-missed Cheryl Sullivan, who mentored junior writers without ever raising her voice and believed that everything, even “Star Wars,” came down to politics.

Since then we’ve both left (me to take care of relatives, him to write a book and open a business) and come back to the Monitor family. Being his editor the past five years has meant getting to think about things like what it means to forgive the unforgivable, and what it means to

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