It’s likely that journalists Micah Garen and Marie-Helene Carleton have come to appreciate the importance of timing. Take, for example, the fact that after working on a documentary about the looting of Iraqi archaeological sites, Marie-Helene returned home safely to the United States just days before Micah was kidnapped at gunpoint. Aiming to call attention to the appalling loss of world cultural history that was taking place there, Micah and Marie-Helene had been careful to hide their nationality as they traveled together for six months in 2004 near the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah. They dressed in traditional Iraqi clothing in order to blend in, which for Marie-Helene meant wearing a hijab that covered her from head to toe.

Micah was not as fortunate with the timing of his misuse of Arabic that ultimately gave him away as a foreigner. He was in Nasiriyah’s central marketplace, attempting to get some footage of gun sellers for his documentary, when he made a verbal slip that drew unwanted attention and aggressive behavior from the locals. In the maddening crowd that swarmed him was a supporter of Muqtada al-Sadr — a leading Shiite cleric — who, with a group of armed men, led Micah and his Iraqi translator away and held them hostage for 10 days.

Micah and Marie-Helene have chosen to tell the compelling and, at times, terrifying tale of Micah’s kidnapping and Marie-Helene’s efforts to secure his release by using a dual narrative told with alternating points of view. Timing again played a role in their work on this project during their residency at MacDowell in late January of this year. They had a fast-approaching April deadline for their book — a deadline that felt perhaps even more oppressive due to the very sensitive nature of the book’s subject matter. “The privacy, space, and support at MacDowell were instrumental in completing our memoir,” says Carleton. “The nurturing aspect of both the place and the people here was indispensable to our frame of mind and the ability to work on this very personal, very emotional project.”

During Micah’s imprisonment, time and how little there is of it in life became a focus for him, and he wasted none of it once he was released: Within hours of obtaining his freedom, he called Marie-Helene on her cell phone and asked her to marry him. “While I was in captivity facing the possibility of being killed, I had plenty of time to think. One thing that became clear to me was that I needed to refocus my priorities,” Micah relates. “Marie-Helene and I had been so focused on our work. I wanted to spend more time focusing on her. Life is so short.”

Micah and Marie-Helene will return to Peterborough to talk about their ordeal and the catharsis they experienced while writing their story at the November 4th presentation of MacDowell Downtown. American Hostage: A Memoir of a Journalist Kidnapped in Iraq and the Remarkable Battle to Win His Release was published by Simon & Schuster on October 11th.