[ more about me ]
I feel lucky to do what I do. I write about real people, often by living their lives for a while-visiting their lives, you might say. Trying them on for size. Though there are easier ways to make a living, I suppose, none strike me as a fraction so interesting. My first real adventures were cross-country bicycle rides, and a summer's work in a sausage factory in Pamplona, Spain. During time off from college, I did community organizing in Dallas as a VISTA volunteer. Then came riding the rails (Rolling Nowhere), which originated as another escape from college, but doubled as research for a senior anthropology thesis." A transcendant moment occurred in a freight yard in Bakersfield, California, where, as I spoke with a guy my age named Enrique Jarra, it dawned on me that Mexican illegals were the true, modern-day incarnation of the classic American hobo. Coyotes, my second book, recounts a year of work and travel with these men. A friend commented that I had "made a living sleeping on the ground," which worried me enough that I moved to Aspen and wrote Whiteout, which I consider an ethnography of hedonism. And now Newjack, an immersion in a world that is tough and dangerous and—if a person's not careful—soul-shrinking. The experience was harder than any research I've ever done, but also paid the greatest dividend of knowledge. I don't like to categorize my subject matter, except to say that my favorite kind of story is one that others have overlooked. Not that I like "small" stories, but I like to find people whose lives matter more than they might think, or more than others think. I have a bad habit of skipping the big stories on page one and looking for the interesting little stories tucked further back in the paper. I like writing where the writer has something at stake; where he doesn't depend too heavily on "experts" but rather has had time to think and research and transform himself into an expert; where his caring and the urgency of the subject can transform the writing into something that matters, an act of witnessing.
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