Interview by Tim Patterson

How to introduce Ted Conover?

He’s a writer, perceptive and eloquent, motivated by boundless curiosity. He’s a journalist who pursues in-depth stories with unmatched tenacity. He’s an intrepid traveler who once took a year off from college to live as a
railroad hobo.

A typical journalist assigned to cover illegal immigration in America might fly to the Mexican border, interview a few Homeland Security agents, file the story and hit the hotel bar by 6 pm.

When Mr. Conover grew interested in illegal immigration, he went to Mexico, lived for a time in a village, then traveled North alongside his Mexican friends. He risked his life by paying a ‘Coyote’ to smuggle him across the Rio Grande, then spent a season working as an illegal migrant in fruit orchards from Florida to Idaho.

Finally, he returned to the library, placed his personal experience in academic context and produced a carefully balanced and evocative book that will not only make you think – it will make you feel.

Most recently, Mr. Conover turned his eye to the American prison system (excuse me, Department of Corrections). When his initial request to shadow a guard was turned down, he signed up for the job himself and worked for one year as a corrections officer
in New York’s notorious Sing Sing prison.

The resultant book, Newjack, was excerpted in the New Yorker and won the National Book Critics
Circle Award.

Ted Conover is one of my heroes. It was a great honor to interview him, and I encourage all of you to check out his
work.

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Tim:

Mr. Conover, thanks so much for taking the time to chat. You started your writing career as a vagabond, writing Rolling Nowhere after living for a time as a hobo. It seems that even when you’re based in one place – whether it be Aspen or New York – you approach the experience from the perspective of a traveler, constantly exploring foreign ground. Do you consider yourself a travel writer?

Ted:

Yes, if you accept that there is a traveler’s way to look at the world–as new, fresh, interesting, needing interpretation, full of enlightening history. Full of people you might gain something from striking up a conversation with. Wherever you go–and it can be in your own town–you can be there wanting to know.

That said, I do love to travel, and have often felt most at home in the world when I’m somewhere else. My next book will be about roads and their power to change the places the connect and the people on them. The research for it has taken me to eight or nine countries, where I’ve traveled with people to whom the roads mean something special.

But, as I said, I often think I’m traveling even when I’m not, in the usual sense.

My book, Newjack, was about a place only twenty miles from my home in the Bronx–but that place, Sing Sing prison,
was like another country to me. Many people live in circumscribed worlds that are hard up next to other interesting worlds. You don’t have to
travel far to find places that are new and interesting.

Tim:

I’m glad to hear your next book will be about roads. Of your articles, two of my favorites are about roads: “Trucking Through the AIDS Belt” and “Capitalist Roaders,” the one about car culture in China.

I’m curious how you react to the idea of roads personally, what emotions they generate in your gut. You’ve spent years researching roads – but can you give us an idea of what stimulated your initial interest? What is it about roads that made you curious, made you want to know?

Ted:

A road to me has often meant a promise–of adventure, of something new. More than anything else, I look at roads the way an explorer might, as a means of getting to the unknown, a route toward experience and knowledge.

From Walt Whitman to Jack Kerouac, roads in the United States have had a meaning they don’t have in other countries. They’re like a commons, a place where one kind of person might meet any other kind of person and be better for it. Fences are bad; roads are freedom–there’s a deep strain of that in American culture. That’s the romantic side of roads, and I, who grew up in the West in the 60s and 70s, certainly feel it.

But of course, roads are even more than that. They are ways into the city from a suburb on a Saturday night, ways out of a small town. They are conduits of food, killers of animals, mixed blessings for bicycles, places where too many people in too many cars spend too much time. They are expressions of desire and of frustration. Ways to achieve a dream and places a plant can’t grow. Each of them is good and each of them is bad. They are paths of human endeavor.

Tim:

Wow. That was a perfect answer.

I’ve got a dozen questions on this road tangent, but I also want to get back to the question of how journalism and travel writing fit together, and where your work falls on the spectrum of reporting.

Have you read Robert Kaplan’s excellent essay ”Cultivating Loneliness?”

Kaplan criticizes mainstream journalism as too superficial, unable to convey context or truly describe a given place. His main point is that the best reporting is often found in travel books, produced by writers who take the time to watch, listen and truly understand. Here are a couple great quotes:

“Journalism desperately needs a return to terrain, to the kind of firsthand, solitary discovery of local knowledge best associated with old-fashioned travel writing.”

“The best writing, literary or journalistic, occurs under the loneliest of circumstances, when a writer encounters the evidence firsthand without anyone of his social, economic, or professional group nearby to help him filter it, or otherwise condition his opinions.”

Kaplan’s definition of “the best writing” seems a perfect description of your work, and I’m interested in the mechanics of your style of reporting.

When you return from a journey, set your notebooks on a desk and begin to consolidate your experience into a feature article or book, how do you filter your impressions?

How do you take your personal experience and place it in an academic context? What challenges are involved in that process?

Ted:

The filmmaker Todd Solondz was once quoted saying, apropos of nothing in particular, “It’s not what you love, it’s what you remember.” What do you remember? That’s my first filter.

If you’re a writer like me, and you went to East Africa to travel with truckers and write about AIDS, hopefully you’ll remember some things that help you tell that story.

It might be something that somebody said in an interview, or it might be a sign you saw on the wall, or a question somebody asked you–as a reporter, you’re trained to ask questions and write down the answers. But sometimes what people want to know about you can be very telling. A group of prostitutes in Nairobi, for example, asked me an unsettling question that will be part of the third chapter of the roads book.

The insights, and vivid ways to explain them, often come in ways you don’t expect. It’s like when a therapist asks a client, why do you remember that? What is it about that remark that made it stick with you?

You need to be conscious and aware when you travel, and take a ton of notes. You need to think of ways to tell the story that involve people and events and insights. But when you’re finally home and sitting down at your desk, don’t make the mistake of thinking everything you need for a great piece is something you took a note about. Think back about your experience, browse your memories, almost like waking from sleep, and then say: here’s something important that needs to be in there. Here’s something I’d tell not my editor, but my best friend, about the experience I just had.

I take Solondz to mean: it’s not just the things you’re trying to evoke, or the things you’re expected to say. You went to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower and it was beautiful, but what you remember more vividly, come to think of it, is the coffee in that particular café, or the woman you spoke to on the Metro, or the clouds on that second morning. The stuff you neglected to snap a picture of, or couldn’t snap a picture of.

Tim:

I’m curious about how you see your earlier books now – especially Rolling Nowhere, Coyotes and Whiteout. Are there any parts that, looking back with experience, make you want to take that young Ted Conover aside and tell him a thing or two?

Ted:

Oh my God, yes. Isn’t everybody that way–wanting to disavow some silliness of a younger self?

Not long ago I re-read Rolling Nowhere for the new Vintage Books edition, and I’m not sure there’s a page in there that I didn’t want to rewrite in some way. How much smarter I’d sound if I were to write it now! But a friend of mine said leave it alone: that was you then. That was a young man’s book, and that’s what makes it good.

It was hard, but I listened, and restrained myself from trying to Photoshop the past. You write and you edit but at a certain point you must finish. Those are your successes and those are your mistakes and they made you who you are.

So here’s to always trying new stuff and flubbing it sufficiently that I learn enough to look back ten years from now and think, oh, Christ, why did I ever say that to Tim Patterson?

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