Ted Conover got the idea for his new book, The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today, in prison. He was working as a New York State corrections officer at Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York. One day he found himself driving north on the New York State Thruway. At a truck stop, surrounded by idling big rigs, the prisoner he was transporting told him, “You know, CO, when I get out, that’s what I want to do… I want to drive one of those.” It made sense to Conover that the prisoner would envy the life of a truck driver. Conover’s own experience of prison that year, working undercover for a book, had included being punched in the head, seeing prisoners fling semen at female officers, and watching his marriage tested as he tried to juggle the demands of officer and writer, events which he recounts in his Pulitzer Prize-nominated Newjack (2000). So the urgent appeal of getting out on the open road, of getting as far from prison as possible, hit him too at that truck stop.

Conover has explored and documented the American romance for the road in each of his five books of nonfiction. This includes the hobos of 1984’s Rolling Nowhere, with whom the then-twenty-two-year-old Conover hopped freight trains for several months to explore the dying subculture of the American tramp; the Mexican migrant laborers of 1987’s Coyotes, in which Conover hooked up with a group of undocumented immigrants and followed them across the border, in and out of work in the U.S. and Mexico for a year; the cab driver Conover became for 1991’s Whiteout, in which he got behind the wheel in Aspen, Colorado, in order to explore the roots of his home state and the underside of the glittery ski resort town. And, of course, there are the prisoners and prison guards of Newjack—not, on the surface, a book about travel, but about its opposite, lockdown and immobility. Yet Newjack makes sense given Conover’s concerns with travel and freedom. Sing Sing, where Conover was in charge of hundreds of prisoners and had to pass through twelve different locked gates each day to get to work, represented what you might find if you went the wrong direction on the road his protagonists were always running, whether it was an actual prison they were fleeing, or a Mexico without any jobs, or a dead-end hometown. The prison is the flipside to Conover’s peculiar brand of investigative travel writing, the id to the ego of the American wanderer.

In The Routes of Man, Conover explores life on the road beyond North America and finds a globe zigzagged with paths both perilous and promising. From the routes and checkpoints that stitch across Israel and Palestine and the citizens and soldiers who travel and police them, to Peru’s Interoceanic Highway that slashes through the jungle so that products like mahogany can be brought to the U.S., from China’s new superhighways and explosion of American-style car culture, to the infamous AIDS highway of Kenya, Conover proves himself to be both a carefully listening passenger and an excellent tour guide. The book describes the tremendous economic opportunity presented by new routes for the world’s poor, as well as the potential problems presented by these roads. Yet, as much as Routes is a journalistic account of these roads, it is also a travelogue and meditation on the symbolic meaning of travel today, one that connects to Conover’s previous work in North America.

Conover makes the connections explicit in a chapter from Routes, “A War You Can Commute To,” about Israel and Palestine. In Nablus, he’s met a young Palestinian named Sameh. Conover will later cross through checkpoints into East Jeresulum with Sameh, and end up visiting the squatted building where Sameh lives—but here they are at a restaurant discussing Sameh’s semi-weekly commute to work via these checkpoints:

I told him about the Mexicans who sneak into the United States, seeking better-paying work, but noted the different quality of that migration—it involved an international border and raised questions about national sovereignty. Here migration looked different: the soldiers weren’t keeping West Bankers out of Israel, they were merely keeping Palestinians from moving around too much. It reminded me of the way officers run a prison like Sing Sing: by dividing it up into discrete pieces, and forbidding or restricting movement between them. The twin goals of such a policy, I believe, are punishment… and self-preservation…. I asked Sameh if I could go with him when he returned to Jerusalem the next day. At first he laughed, but then he saw I was serious….

I met Conover in San Francisco this March at the Hotel Adagio for a conversation about Routes and his prior books. He is trim, brown-haired, and an athletic fifty-two; he wore red cross-trainer sneakers with his jeans and dress shirt. He is soft-spoken and polite. When he greeted me in the lobby for the interview, he said, “There’s a little bit of Muzack in here, I don’t know if it will be a problem.” In the hotel’s cafe he said, grinning, “Oh, there’s a different kind of Muzack in here.” Toward the end of our conversation he finished telling me the story of how he got the idea for Routes during that drive back to Sing Sing ten years ago.
Then he added this, as a rumination on the complexity of roads as both reality and symbol:

“One way to look at it,” he said, sipping his coffee, “is that roads make travel possible but they don’t guarantee that it can happen. Just because there’s a road doesn’t mean I can afford a car to travel on it. Just because there’s a bridge across the border doesn’t mean I can cross it. And just because there’s a straight away between my town and the next one doesn’t mean I can reach my destination without being stopped by police or slowed by congestion. Every road is a promise that may or may not be realized. It holds out a possibility that’s not always in reach. So, yeah, roads are a symbol of freedom, but they’re a complicated and interesting one. It’s freedom with caveats, and asterisks, and depending-ons. To me, that’s what made a book about roads worth writing. They’re about the possibility of something transformative that doesn’t always work out in the way we expect, the inadequacy of our own plans, the fallibility of our intentions.”

-Wes Enzinna for Guernica

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Guernica: What was the most frightening experience you had while reporting Routes?

Ted Conover: There was a day in Nablus with a Palestinian hydrologist. He’d been walking me through the old part of town, and there was this guy selling knives. There are very few vendors left. There used to be Israelis and people from many nations who went through that city—it’s a beautiful city, medieval, very atmospheric. This guy came up and asked if I was interested in buying a knife, brandishing it at me, in a threatening kind of way. You know, kind of funny, kind of not. And my guy, Abdul-Latif, a big man, finally interposed himself between me and this guy, and told him to knock it off. There are all kinds of pathologies in the territories. Most people were hospitable and accommodating. But there really are a lot of extremists on both [the Israeli and Palestinian] sides. You’ve just never seen so many whack jobs in such a small space as I did there.

There was also an incident in Peru, when I was trying to take a picture of a Blue Morpho butterfly in the Andes. Taking photographs of nature is considered by certain politicized people as a bourgeois affectation and the Shining Path would, reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution in China, want to stamp out that activity. So this guy in Peru says, “If you’d been here a few years ago you’d be hanging in that tree right now.” I didn’t really think I was about to be hanging in that tree. But I got the feeling he might have liked to make that happen.

I think the most dangerous thing about the trip is the kind of danger none of us can prepare for, the car accident you see coming approximately one second before it arrives.

Guernica: What were the environmental issues you saw while reporting the book? Obviously, cars—especially in China—are a big part of that story.

Ted Conover: Being with the driving club I traveled with in China was like being a teenager again, with a group of middle-aged men acting like teenagers. It’s an infectious excitement and I enjoyed it. But always lurking in the background of this is my own experience of growing up in Denver in the nineteen-seventies, where the city had a terrible problem with smog. Wherever you came into the city from the Rockies, you would see this brown cloud that you would go into and know that you would soon be breathing this muck. The Chinese, they have to go home to the smog-shrouded city as well. And they know it causes grave pulmonary problems, it’s a public health crisis already, and locally, not to mention in a planetary sense, it is already a huge problem. Do they know that? Yes. Will it be some time before their concerns are able to moderate their exuberance over driving and building roads? I think it will. And I’m really sorry about that because it would be better for all of us if it were today and they were more worried about cutting the carbon footprint. But they’ve got lots of mass transit, they’re experimenting with alternative fuels, they have a far smaller carbon footprint per person than we do, and they make half of the stuff we use. This tape recorder, for example, this laptop, my laptop, my iPhone, they make it all. So it’s hard to blame them for making an environmental mess along the way. When you are there you feel your ability to criticize is limited by our enjoyment of the things they make.

Guernica: Women don’t play a very prominent role in your book. Could you address that.

Ted Conover: One critic said, “Where are Thelma and Louise, where’s Nancy Drew?” Well, those are characters in fiction. Of course, there are women—in the Peru chapter, for example, there was the school teacher forced to ride the truck home because the price of airfare had gone up and she couldn’t afford the price of a return flight—so she’s riding in this truck, trying to keep clean in this filthy environment. Or in East Africa: the women you meet if you were to take a truck across the continent [as I did], it would be women who work at lodgings and restaurants. I talk about sex workers in that chapter because [many] of them happen to do that and it is tragic and it is a concern to people around the world because of what it wrought in the last thirty years [AIDS]. And so I wish I had run into, as I said, a Thelma and Louise. I was looking for them. But I did not find them. I don’t think it’s my shortcoming. I think they weren’t there.

Guernica: In a talk you gave recently you said that you thought anyone doing writing on undocumented immigrants should cross the border, like you did several times in the process of writing Coyotes. But obviously most people who write about immigrants don’t do that.

Ted Conover: I didn’t mean to imply that anyone who wishes to write about that subject should cross the border, just that if you aspire to the kind of understanding that comes from immersion and really participating in peoples’ lives for a while and you’re thinking of writing about that story, then that’s a big part of the story for immigrants—crossing the border. I think from the perspective of outsiders it’s the main event that marks the passage they make. That’s what I meant. There’s another book, Crossing Over, by Ruben Martinez, that makes Coyotes seem like a book written in a more innocent age, when a larger proportion of migrants were still headed for agricultural work and the world of Ahuacatlán that I wrote about was not as dark a place as the village Martinez wrote about. Or else the people he hung out with are in a darker frame of mind than my guys. But he did not cross the border. The border crossing is still the symbolic passage that is the root of the controversy, and as a writer, I want to do absolutely everything I can to bring a reader into the story and make the story complete for them.

Guernica: That sort of immersion—whether it’s with Mexican immigrants or Palestinians and Israeli soliders—seems to make punditry or the sort of easy truths of pundits difficult to swallow. It’s a much messier, more complicated picture.

Ted Conover: The kneejerk objection to undocumented immigration is that it’s illegal. It’s breaking the law, end of conversation, end of mental process. And, you know, it’s a valid point. But it’s one of many valid points regarding the phenomenon. Punditry often seems to be the art of distilling the valid points into a rapid-fire series of superficial arguments, rather than engaging with the complexity of the issue. And so I guess sometimes I look at what I do as a corrective to punditry. I want to have a serious conversation with somebody, which means I want them to admit it’s not black and white. And to arrive at an informed opinion you first have to acknowledge the many nuances of the debate. So that, I think, is a promise of the participatory approach—that you can see things from both sides. And it shouldn’t prevent you from arriving at a conclusion. What it will do is allow you to have a better-informed one. It will allow you to keep you from, well, sounding like a pundit.

Guernica: You said earlier how roads are about “the possibility of something transformative that doesn’t always work out in the way we expect; the inadequacy of our own plans, the fallibility of our intentions.” Are there any examples of failed intentions you saw on your travels?

Ted Conover: One of the most baldly failed examples of roads is the highway from Kandahar to Kabul in Afghanistan. On inauguration day, U.S. officials had to fly in because the road was too dangerous. So right there you have someone’s fragment of what a good idea might have been, but then the political reality makes it seem laughable.

Another example in New York: I benefit daily from the Henry Hudson Parkway, which was one of Robert Moses’s iron-fisted infrastructure projects that transformed New York City. I benefit from it several times a week, but I’d say I benefit equally as much from the fact that I can walk across Washington Square Park, which I wouldn’t be able to do in any similar way if his plan to put a road right through there hadn’t been stopped by Jane Jacobs and other community activists. He’s the big exemplar of road building unhindered by community concerns, by local concerns. But if Moses’s career was a symbol of our ambivalence [about democratic planning versus authoritarian planning], I think now, on a global scale, it’s a bit more democratic. I think, that, in the West at least, the era of despotic planners who wield the power to transform on the level of Moses is finished.

Guernica: And what has it been replaced with, from what you’ve seen?

Ted Conover: Something more technocratic, perhaps. More people with advanced degrees and much less political clout. I lived for two years in Aspen and it’s a very liveable place because of the planning. Things still get built and it’s a necessarily and—I think—appropriately complicated process, to build things that will change everyone’s lives. I think we’ve made progress in that way.

Guernica: In Routes you travel to this little village—Zanskar, India—where the only road in and out in wintertime is a frozen river, and you write how you saw the same Avril Lavigne poster hanging in one of the kid’s bedrooms in that village that your daughter had in her bedroom in New York. This made me think about how so much of the mythology of roads is an American myth, and comes from people like Whitman, or Kerouac, or contemporary pop culture like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Mad Max, all of which you reference in your book. To what extent did you find that there’s this shared road culture across the globe? Or shared similar perceptions?

Ted Conover: Yeah, I do think that a lot of the road mythos we grew up with is uniquely American, this idea of a common gathering, of a gathering place for the citizen, like the road in Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road”—a place to meet your fellow citizen no matter his or her station in life. The road is a democratic space, a town square practically, in a country that doesn’t have many town squares. And then moving ahead, the road, if driven upon properly, is a route to transcendence and ecstasy. But again, an experience of democracy, of being out there with everybody and anybody.

I think what you can say about roads universally is that everywhere I traveled, I ran into people itching to be somewhere else and most often it’s people hoping to improve their station in life, to find a job, to find a better place for their family, whether in Peru, or Zanskar, or East Africa. I think it’s a fundamental human drive to be able to try something somewhere else. It lets that drive manifest. And beyond that, I guess it might be a human universal that roads are both a path to opportunity and a way bad things can arrive. I mean, there’s fear of roads, there’s fear of strangers, of the implied obligations of having neighbors we don’t know. Maybe those are the Mexicans a mile down the road who can’t afford their healthcare and, well, now do we have to help them get it because they’re our neighbors? If they weren’t our neighbors it wouldn’t be a question. If our villages were separate, we wouldn’t have those ethical claims on us. But the road in a way extends this web we’ve built of mutual obligation.

Ted Conover may be one of America’s toughest nonfiction writers. For his book “Rolling Nowhere,” he illegally rode America’s railway system with drifters and undocumented farmworkers. In “Coyotes,” he disguised himself as an illegal immigrant and twice crossed the Mexican-American border, and for his 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning “Newjack,” he spent a year working as a prison guard at Sing Sing.

His latest book, “The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today,” is no less ambitious. A mixture of travelogue and essay, Conover’s vivid, smart and evenhanded book chronicles his journey down several of the world’s most perilous roads — ranging from frozen rivers to hyper-modern highways, from India to Peru — to discover how these roadways are changing the world and the lives of people who live along them. He drives past elephant roadkill on Africa’s notorious AIDS highway, gets pelted by rocks in the West Bank, and, on one particularly memorable occasion, is trapped on the outside of a stalled minivan in Nigeria, while a group of “area boys” converge on his position.

What emerges from his stories is an idea that roads can serve multiple purposes: fostering development while destroying the environment; providing livelihoods while spreading deadly diseases; providing safe passage to some while endangering others. In the case of China’s rapidly expanding highway system, they also serve as a foreboding reminder of our stark environmental future.

Salon spoke to the surprisingly soft-spoken Conover over the phone, from the Detroit airport (where he was waiting for a flight), about his riskiest moment on the road, America’s highway obsession, and why we’re right to be afraid of China’s car-buying revolution.

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Given that so much focus now is on digital communication, it seems almost nostalgic to talk about roads. Why did you decide to write a book on them?

There are newer networks but none so fundamental: 1.5 percent of the continental surface of the U.S. is now paved. We often cease to think about the existence of roads, and yet it’s the largest human artifact and the one thing that makes possible all the other things.

They’re integrating regions in Southeast Asia and in Latin America, in particular, and little by little in sub-Saharan Africa. And, as you know, China is sort of a separate case. China is set to equal our interstate miles within another 20 years.

Roads are a yardstick of the growing complexity of the world. They are one of the essential connections between people, and through them you can look at both the ways connection propels us forward and the ways it sets us back.

You spent a lot of time on China’s new highway system with a group of Chinese driving enthusiasts. How are these roads different from our own?

In China they’re a source of national pride, so extreme attention goes to keeping them spiffy. Many of them are designed quite beautifully — the guardrails and the reflectors have a stylishness to them, especially between the major cities. But the maintenance is very human labor-intensive, so instead of big brushing machines you’ve got squads with brooms made out of twigs. It’s quite a striking juxtaposition: the latest engineering and beautiful landscaping and stylish accoutrement and signage and the guardrails, and then next to that, the peasants doing the dangerous roadwork, and beyond the shoulder, the peasants whose land was confiscated to make way for the road. I think it’s a symbol of progress, but it’s also a symbol of unequal progress.

What kind of unequal progress?

The people who can afford to drive these roads in their own cars tend to be a class of wealthy people you didn’t see 20 years ago [in China]. It helps the nation progress, but they’re also conduits of envy and resentment. They are a potent new force to be reckoned with — many people have asked me, Why didn’t you write about an American road? — and it seems to be other places where the meaning of roads is playing out in the most dramatic fashion.
It’s like a frontier space. If you’re used to creeping over the speed limit in the U.S. it’s amazing to see that in China, police don’t pull over speeding on highways or people are never penalized for bad driving — for passing over the shoulder at high speeds, or driving drunk.

To me, it’s terrifying from an environmental standpoint that the Chinese are getting into the car culture. Am I right to be scared?

In India and China, we can’t say no. We’ve had our cars. We’ve enjoyed them, We have no moral or practical basis for saying no. I think [Americans] see the writing on the wall better than people in a lot of places, and as you say, it’s frightening. The environmental cost of that many internal combustion engines is gigantic, and I think the best hope is in a cheap new technology. I don’t know what it is, but some affordable, less-polluting technology that can be adopted by these millions of people who are about to buy their first car.

You visited Central Africa’s so-called AIDS highway, whose truckers and prostitutes supposedly helped spread the virus to the Western world, in 1992. You went back 11 years later for the book. What changed?

The tragedy remains extreme, but the level of sophistication and dialogue has increased greatly, and you can see now that there will be life after this epidemic. When I was there before, that was kind of uncertain. The rate of infection was over 50 percent for the drivers and sex workers. Many of the men I knew from before have passed away.

There’s still plenty of denial of AIDS, but now it’s part of everybody’s vocabulary, and people use the English word for it. There’s such a stigma to death by AIDS that the battle is still being fought, but it’s much more part of the common discourse. I think women in particular are speaking up about it.

I spoke with sex workers, and when I visited, they were not at all shy about telling me they had the virus. They asked me what they should do about it, which was the hardest question I was asked while researching this book. I’d assumed that when they realized they were positive they’d stopped their sex work, and they had not. I understand why they didn’t. They had kids to feed and they feared destitution.

The highway has become notorious for its role in bringing AIDS to the outside world. Are the people who live and work on it aware of its notoriety?

They know of its fame. There’s very much a sense in African fiction that the road takes this terrible toll, but with the guys I was with, it’s not singled out or tainted because of that. It’s the source of everything. Yes, bad things happen on the road, but that’s because everything happens on the road. That’s how they get their work. That’s how they move from their family to the coast. There’s a lot of belief that bad spirits transit the roads, and you have to watch out for flying snakes and spirits of ancestors.

What’s the scariest moment you had on the road?

Many of the people who die on roads have no idea 10 seconds beforehand that that was about to happen, and I was acutely aware of that — especially driving superfast in places like China. I had to adopt a sort of fatalistic attitude about that, and just make my peace with the fact that death on roads is hard to see coming.

The most frightening moment I had was probably in Peru. There are a lot of remnants of the Shining Path in the Andes, and one day, I was sitting on the side of the road when a blue butterfly landed on my knee. It was bigger than my hand and a lovely iridescent blue. I brought out a cheap plastic camera I’d bought, to take a picture of it, and a campesino came up to me. He said, in Spanish, If you’d been doing that 10 years ago they would have found you hanging in the tree right there. He meant it was such a bourgeois affectation. Something as innocent as photographing a butterfly!

Five days later, I passed a kid wearing an Osama bin Laden T-shirt, and I said, I’m from New York, and I knew people in the towers that day, and your T-shirt upsets me. He said, Bin Laden is a champion of the world’s poor. And I said, Well maybe of the Muslim poor, but I don’t think he’s a champion of you.

Maybe it’s because it was so near 9/11, but those two incidents gave me a feeling of passing through an unfriendly place, and it’s not a feeling I often had.

Obama’s most high-profile public works projects is the construction of several high-speed rail corridors. Do you think this is a sign that the American love affair with highways is ending?

I don’t think their centrality to American life is going to fade anytime soon, but I think the rise of concepts like carbon footprints spells the end of some of the unrestrained excitement which we have long attached to American highways.

So much American mythology deals with the road — from Jack Kerouac to Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Why are Americans so obsessed with roads?

In the old country, you’ve got town squares and city centers, and in the United States you have roads. If you think of Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road,” it’s a long list of all the people he’s going to meet as he walks down the road and how happy he is about that. Those things are very American, this idea that the road is where you meet people, not at home or downtown. It’s the democratic space, the common place for us. Roads knitted our country together.

Kerouac and the beats and the whole 60s counterculture had this idea that the road is a place for discovery and exploration and even self-realization. There’s also the idea that if it’s not working out where you are, you can move, and that’s how we express our drive for something better.

When Ted Conover wanted to interview corrections officers (COs) at the infamous Sing Sing prison, he was told to get lost. His solution? Become a CO. When he was interested in the lives of hobos and illegal immigrants, he lived with them. Just writing about other people’s lives isn’t enough for him–he prefers to immerse himself, to feel the pepper spray in his own eyes and the dirt underneath his own fingernails.

His research has materialized into five books: Rolling Nowhere, which originated as his senior thesis, Coyotes, Whiteout, Newjack, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the coveted Pulitzer Prize, and The Routes of Man, his latest book (Knopf 2010). His most recent book is about roads, so, naturally, Conover traveled them with the people to whom they mean something. Of the book, he says, “It’s about the power of roads to change a place and to change the people on them.” His writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and National Geographic. He currently teaches at New York University.

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Did you always see yourself being a writer? What was the first piece of writing you published?

No, I didn’t. Being a writer didn’t seem like a realistic thing to wish for. I didn’t know any writers. I was daring in different ways, but I wasn’t daring in thinking that I could be a writer. I had a lot of random jobs; I worked in a Spanish sausage factory and a spice warehouse, I was an aerobics instructor, and I taught an SAT prep class, all just to make money.

My first published piece was an essay in Bicycling magazine called “Finishing.” It was a description of the last hour of a coast-to-coast bicycling ride my friend and I took from Seattle to New Jersey the summer before college. College was the first time I wrote about my experience; until then, my experiences were more important to me than writing about them was. Once I sold the piece, I saw how writing and my experiences could go together.

What writers were/are inspirational to you? Were you inspired to write immersion journalism through reading other people’s work, such as Tom Wolfe’s?

Yes; I read and admired George Orwell, Jack London, and Bruce Chatwin. Those were three writers who had interesting lives that they wove into their writing. When I rode the rails, I didn’t even know that Jack London had done that; I learned that later.

In Newjack, you say that you are fascinated by walls. Is this a metaphor for not only that project, but for all of your projects?

I’m fascinated by places I can’t get into, places I’m not supposed to go. Maybe it’s a private club, maybe it’s a neighborhood in Nigeria that’s dangerous for a person who looks like me. Those are the places I want to go, so the idea of a wall works for me.

A statement in the beginning of Newjack explains that some dialogue has been recreated. What are your feelings on the much-talked about issue of author honesty in nonfiction books lately? How do you ensure that you are recreating dialogue honestly?

The dialogue in a book like mine can’t be 100 percent accurate because I can’t record the conversations and I can’t take notes during them. Truman Capote claimed he could remember nearly 100 percent of the dialogue; I don’t know anyone who can do that, but with practice, you can commit to memory several lines of dialogue. I would often find myself thinking of my mind as a series of drawers, and in each drawer was a line and I’d try to keep it alive until I got alone and I could get it down. While the dialogue in the book is not verbatim, in most cases it is close to it. That’s not good enough for a feature article in The New York Times Magazine or The Atlantic–you need verbatim quotes for those–but for a book based on personal experience, I think the standards are different.

What do you think the recent controversies surrounding truth in nonfiction have done to the nonfiction genre? How do you think the nonfiction genre is viewed by readers now? Is there a trust issue? How has this issue shaped and affected your own reporting and writing?

The trust issue is more pronounced in memoir than in my work; while it’s first person and based on my experience, it’s less memoir than it is reportage. I was trained first as a reporter, and that’s different from James Frey who first considered himself a novelist. I think that nonfiction is a contract with the reader in which you say, “This really happened,” not, “Something like this happened.” In a way, I’m glad for this controversy because the lines were becoming blurred. The net result of the controversy is that writers and publishers will be more careful about the truth.

You choose to live the subject about which you are writing. Do you think this is necessary for writers of nonfiction, or do you think that stories can be written successfully through reporting and observation?

There’s fabulous nonfiction without immersion, and there are degrees; it’s not all or nothing. But I think that participation offers a way to go beyond what’s possible in an interview. If you were to hang out with me for the next 24 hours, even if I didn’t talk to you, you’d learn things about me that didn’t come out of an interview, and some of those things would be interesting. Not everything you might want to know in a nonfiction story is something a person will tell you; some of it could be what you hear, see, smell, or think about while something is happening. We’re not just recording machines; the more ways you can research something, the better.

What is a subject you would love to write about but haven’t yet?

I think about that a lot but I don’t have an answer. It would be fun to be a rock star, a girl, a fighter pilot..

You’ve done some amazing things: you’ve crossed the border with illegal immigrants, you’ve lived with hobos. Is there a subject you would never want to live, never want to write about?

I came close to it with Rolling Nowhere, but I think it could be homelessness or mental illness. To come closer to those subjects could be very frightening. I want my work to be serious but I don’t want it to be depressing. Also, I only want to research a book that I think would be fun to read. I’m not sure every writer has that test for their projects. Could you imagine your best friend being interested in this? I think all writers should answer that question “yes” before starting something.

You tend to write about the underdogs, the overlooked, the people with bad reputations. What inspires you to do this? What fascinates you about these people more than, say, public figures?

Coming from the middle class and being well educated has given me access to all kinds of interesting lives, but I think that simultaneously, because of the world we live in, it’s cut me off from others. Many nonfiction writers are attracted to power, and I’m kind of the opposite. I want to know more about people you wouldn’t normally hear about.

What advice do you have for writers who are interested in emulating the kind of writing that you do?

Talk to strangers. When it’s safe, go places alone, because you’ll meet more people that way. A good exercise is to think of yourself as a character in a story, to think of yourself in the third person.

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Read more at Suite101.com: An Interview with Ted Conover: Journalist and Award-Winning Author

I guess that, like a lot of college students, I was seeking insights about human purpose, the meaning of life. Philosophy is where I expected to find them but my classes seemed to be mainly about conversations between great Western thinkers, polysyllabic and somewhat arid. Anthropology took a while for me to discover but I immediately took to it: ethnography, in particular, is life on a page, life as it is lived and witnessed, an attempt to explain how groups of people can look at the same object and see something completely different.

Can you talk about the process of transforming your anthropology thesis at Amherst into your first book? Were there ways that your studies in anthropology helped or hindered the process?

My undergraduate thesis was titled, "Between Freedom and Poverty: Railroad Tramps of the American West." It was written in the third person, as I understood it had to be, and had sections on topics such as hobo concepts of time and space, the role of alcohol in social life, and status calculations. At the end, I tucked in an appendix called "A Field Experience in Retrospect"–I borrowed that title from a chapter of Elliot Liebow’s Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men, which I much admired. That part was first person and practically wrote itself, I had so much to say about the personal experience of riding the rails.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the stuff in that section was also what people tended to ask me about. They weren’t so much interested in "risk and distrust as cultural themes" as they were in what it had been like for me to live on the rails. I wrote an article for a student magazine about a morning with one tramp in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The piece was reprinted in the college alumni magazine as a cover story, and that in turn was picked up by the Associated Press. Lots of national media started calling after that, and so for the first time I dared to think, maybe I could sell a book about this.

As far as writing the book: the experience of writing an undergraduate thesis first definitely helped. It really made me organize my ideas about hoboes, and think about their world analytically. But it was probably my experience as a journalist (I had worked summers as a reporter) that was most useful when I sat down to write Rolling Nowhere. Journalism is all about clarity and communicating effectively to a general audience. No jargon, no high-falutin’ arguments; the job is to tell a story, a true story about real people in difficult situations. My editors welcomed the idea of me using myself as one of them–in other words, of me writing in the first person.

Do anthropology and ethnography shape the kind of journalism and writing that you do now? How?

I think a lot of my best writing might be called "topical ethnography." Two examples are pieces I did on the AIDS epidemic in the 90s. When I heard that East African truckers had been implicated by scientists in the spread of HIV, I thought I could travel with them. When I met a MacArthur Fellow who was trying to plan for the adoption of the orphans she expected the disease to produce in the United States, I thought, I could write about a sick parent about to lose their child. The research for stories like that takes a lot more time than the research for more normal stories–you have to get to know whole worlds of people. And it’s not really ethnography–it’s just inspired by ethnography. But not very many journalists attempt it, and I think it’s a rich vein.

To answer your question another way: I think my writing has a lot of ethnographic detail. Anthropology influenced me a lot as far as what to notice and what to ask. Ethnographers can also teach journalists about depth and empathy. Journalists can teach ethnographers how to reach a larger audience by eschewing jargon and thinking about narrative and topicality.

Do you read ethnography/anthropology now? If not, did you have favorites in college?

Besides Liebow, I was influenced by James Spradley (You Owe Yourself a Drunk), Edmund Leach (Political Systems of Highland Burma), Evans-Pritchard (The Nuer), Colin Turnbull (The Mountain People), Marvin Harris, and the book When Prophecy Fails (Festinger, et. al). Three years ago I began to teach at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. We’re starting a graduate program called Literary Reportage, and I’m developing a course that may be called something like "Ethnography for Journalists." I’m researching a possible syllabus now, and besides Liebow have been reading books like Striffler’s Chicken, Bourgois’s In Search of Respect, Duneier’s Sidewalk, and some books on field work.

Do you see a distinction between ethnography and participatory journalism?

Yes. Ethnographers, it seems to me, typically have a longer time horizon, arrive with a specific universe of questions (and constraints), and are freer to pursue questions just because they’re interesting. A participatory journalist is mainly after a smart, entertaining, and socially significant story, and might not even know what it is when he or she arrives. The reason for taking notes is different, the audience is different.

Did anyone ever say to you in college–anthropology! What will you do with that? Do you remember how you answered? Or ideas for how other students of anthropology might answer this question?

Well, they certainly did ask. And a good answer might have been, "I’d like to become an anthropologist!" But I wasn’t sure I’d have patience for the highly specialized nature of the training nor for the rigors of academic life–nor was I confident that I was the canniest of the anthro majors I knew. I guess I figured I’d head toward journalism or law. My mind was eased by the number of people who said that liberal arts education is all about broadening your mind; graduate school is for real world skills.

Can you say a little about your most recent project?

Sure. It’s called The Routes of Man and it’s a book about roads–their power to change the places they’re in and the people on them. In some ways it’s a response to Newjack, my book about prison–after that experience of confinement, I just wanted to move. I figured the way to properly research this book would be to do just that: it’s a series of participatory narratives about people on roads in six different places. Each road has a theme: in East Africa, where I traveled with truckers in 1992 and 2003, it’s about roads and disease. In the West Bank, where I traveled with Israeli soldiers and then Palestinian students, it’s about roads and occupation. In the Peruvian Amazon, it’s about roads and development v. the environment.

I’d personally be interested in knowing if you’ve considered doing some kind of follow-up to your book Coyotes, and if you have, what you might do.

Coyotes was my most rewarding book to research–the Mexicans I was with were mainly guys my own age, on the sort of adventure I’m sure I’d be taking if I were in their shoes. They looked out for each other and they looked out for me. If the right follow-up presented itself, I’d definitely be interested in pursuing it. But so far it hasn’t!

Conover was a guard at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, New York state’s toughest prison, for just shy of a year, but the job marked him. Like a soldier returning from war, nearly a decade later he says the unusually brutal prison visits him when he sleeps. Yet, unlike tight-lipped vets who often refuse to talk, Conover has, for the past two years, taught a class of New York University journalism students from his troubling book about Sing Sing, Newjack. He not only discusses the violence that he witnessed, but the violence he condoned as a rookie guard. The graduate seminar is called “The Journalism of Empathy,” and it seems a class long overdue.

During spring 2007, the seminar met on Mondays in the Carter Building, a block from Washington Square Park. If the building was a bit rundown — worn carpets, creaky elevator, and gloomy stairwell — the journalism students inside it were generally not. The half dozen lingering outside the classroom and those walking up and down the halls had surprisingly fresh faces. They all seemed a little young, a little undergraduate.

Conover arrived at the classroom carrying a brown shoulder bag, dressed in a black jacket with a black knit cap, looking like a merchant marine arriving from the docks. Sophisticated, even savvy, he didn’t seem to have one ounce of guile. But this gentle bearing was misleading.

In the 1990s, Conover asked New York corrections officials if he could write a story about a trainee going through boot camp. When they refused, he quietly applied for the job. On his resume, he noted a bit of journalism experience, but left off his ties to The New Yorker and the two books he authored. He turned in the application and forgot about it. Two years later, a letter arrived ordering him to report for training in three days, and while Conover knew being a corrections officer (CO) would be tough, how bad it actually became was shocking.

At New York University, Conover sat with his students at a long, brown table, with a cup of coffee and a pen. Behind him were a large whiteboard and a jumble of audio visual equipment. He had an unshakable cold. He said quietly, “I apologize. I hope I don’t lose my voice.”

Using first person, or “I,” in narrative nonfiction to empathize with the subject can be quite tricky, said Conover. A writer has to get uncomfortably close to the person, the subject. And the subject can often feel misled or betrayed, or can suck the journalist into his world, blurring the lines to an impossible degree, sometimes destroying the writer’s integrity. So Conover, who has an anthropology degree, relies on an ethnographic technique called “participant observer” to help his students negotiate the line between “I” the journalist and the subject.

Curious about their work’s legal and moral complications, a young woman at the end of the table was worried. What if she witnessed something clearly illegal? As a journalist, do you get involved?

“I mean, what do you do? Would you be considered an accomplice?” she asked. “I mean you’re not including it in your work, but if you’re aware of it and you’re taken in for questioning, you can get in a lot of trouble.”

Conover started nodding even before she finished her question. Does a journalist stop being an outside observer when witnessing, say, child abuse?

“So I guess I’m just wondering,” the girl went on. “My question is: Where is the line?”

“Yeah,” said Conover, his voice becoming more raspy.

“… Is there a line? Do you flirt with the line? …”

“There’s gotta be a line,” he said, still nodding. “You have to have a line.”

Bizarro World Romper Room — with guns and iron bars

Conover’s own line blurred to an impossible degree while at Sing Sing, but a year after leaving the prison, it finally disintegrated. Just months before Newjack was published, in September 1999, he had begun recovering his life with his wife and child. He was lying in bed at home with the television on, his eyes closed. Exhausted. That’s when he was confronted with the past that he was trying to leave behind.

Sing Sing had done a tap dance on Conover’s psyche. In those winter mornings before going on duty as a guard, he sat in his car steeling himself before walking through the frozen gates. Guessing when the day-to-day violence particular to prison might boil over was unnerving and agonizing. He hated the job.

One guard Conover wrote of in Newjack, a real bastard by most standards, had once been taken hostage and tortured by inmates who seized the prison many years earlier. Conover later discovered that the guard’s rigorous, insulting, and unbending professional ethic partly arose from the fear of that happening again. Prison was basically “Bizarro World Romper Room” with guns and iron bars. Relationships with prisoners were stark and authoritarian, and the inmates challenged the guard’s authority daily in a thousand maddening ways.

Sometimes, they were relentlessly childlike: begging to take a shower, refusing to lock up, hanging sheets on the bars, breaking the little rules — “Oh please, come on CO! Come on, pleeeeeaaasse!” Or the inmates would give him a long stare that promised murder. Sometimes the bitterness would cross over into random assaults. Conover was sucker-punched in the head once when he walked past the cell of an infuriated inmate. Women COs had sperm flung on them. One inmate squirted piss from his mouth onto passersby.

Civility inside Sing Sing was not an option. And Conover, a thoughtful man searching to illuminate life’s daily contradictions, could not afford to be scared. To a prescribed degree, COs were allowed take down violent inmates, and Conover found that sometimes he longed to inflict undue pain.

“Guards don’t dare admit that all of us at times feel like strangling an inmate,” Conover wrote in Newjack. “That inmates taunt us, strike us, humiliate us in ways civilians could never imagine, and that through it all the guard is supposed to take it.”

Conover had not anticipated Sing Sing’s brutality. But he embraced it, slowly, immersing himself in the prison system’s logic both as a guard and as a journalist. Conover’s immersion journalism came from his study of anthropology at Amherst College (Massachusetts) in 1980. There he mastered the techniques of the participant observer, which ethnographers rely on to study their subjects, often living with them for extended periods of time. But while engaging a native is fine, going native is a bad idea. Using a set of research strategies — informal interviews, long-term immersion, self-analysis — the participant observer method helps keep the anthropologist oriented and aware of his ever-evolving relationship with his subjects.

One day, a well-read prisoner named Larson passed Conover an outdated book about anthropology through the bars. The book hailed from the days when the science tried to break down people into racial categories.

“Ah yes,” I said. “They used to worry about this stuff a lot.”

“Who?”

“Anthropologists.”

Larson stared at me. “What’s your story Conover?” he asked a moment later. “You’re not like the other COs here.”

“What do you mean? You mean because I’m not from upstate?”

“No, it’s something else. The way you think and the way you walk.”

During his nine months at Sing Sing, Conover told a few friends what he was up to; otherwise, he kept his mouth shut and stuck it out until New Year’s, when he felt he had a natural ending to tie up the book. He held on for the spectacle of inmates celebrating the holiday with controlled fires set ablaze throughout the prison. And he also held on to satisfy his pride. Then, to the relief of his wife, he finally left.

But Sing Sing had seeped into his private life — a civilized world where education and kindness were not considered weaknesses. His marriage had become strained. He was physically exhausted and mentally divided in half. Every night, when he returned home from the prison, he retreated to his office through the back door, without telling the babysitter or his wife. He would type up his day, he understood later, to escape the brutality and peaceably reconcile his double life as best he could.

Though Conover quit Sing Sing, there was one prisoner he couldn’t leave behind: Habib Wahir Abdal, who was serving 20 years for rape, his second prison term. Abdal was one of those poor clichés, the prisoner who swore he was innocent. Whenever the two chatted, Abdal insisted he hadn’t done it. After a few looping conversations, Conover became weary and disappointed at Abdal’s denial. There was no point in arguing, and so Conover just nodded and would say, “okay, okay.”

Then, almost a year distant from the nightmare, free from the daily lies and deception, while lying in bed in the flickering glow of late-night television, Conover stirred to watch the breaking news. He opened his eyes. And he suddenly discovered he was in fact on the far side of a line he hadn’t seen.

“They didn’t even get around to mentioning his name until the end,” says Conover. “I looked at the TV, and out of Green Haven comes Habib and his lawyer, Eleanor Jackson Piel, and Barry Scheck. And I thought ‘Hoooooly shit! He was telling the truth.’”

Mama Piel

As literature, Habib Wahir Abdal’s life story was knitted together as tightly as a Dickens novel. It even had a perfect, melancholic ending. Abdal died in his bed, a free man, in 2005.

His body was found, still warm, by his lawyer, Eleanor Jackson Piel, who had fought his legal battles on and off since 1969. Piel traveled to Lackaw, New York in 2005 to discuss Abdal’s ongoing civil suits, and found him lying in his bedroom. She laid her hand on his body. His eyes were closed. He used to call her “Mama Piel.”

“Yeah, it goes back a long time,” Piel says fondly, while sitting at her desk in her Upper East Side law office.

In a black suit with a silver butterfly brooch on her lapel, Piel’s dark hair was pulled taut into a bun, giving prominence to her handsomely creased, hawkish face. She recounts Abdal’s life as if it were a long-forgotten gem rediscovered in her jewelry box.

She first met Abdal years before he was falsely convicted of rape, before he converted to Islam in prison, back when he was named Vincent Jenkins, a young hustler arrested for homicide in New York City in 1969.

“Evidently he won a large bet, and other people knew he had money and were chasing him. And I think they found him in a house. They came after him. And one of them slit his arm. He ran away and he got a gun,” Piel says, describing the circumstances of Abdal’s manslaughter conviction after he killed a woman and shot a man. “And there were witnesses who saw these people chasing him. I contended he was not guilty because it was self-defense.”

Piel fought the conviction for years.

“I was very emotional. I was very upset,” says Piel, and then she smiles as if a little embarrassed. “Oh, I was younger then.”

After serving his manslaughter sentence, Abdal moved to Buffalo, New York in 1982, where police snatched him off the street and falsely charged him with rape. They manipulated the victim to choose Abdal from a line-up, Piel says angrily, and convicted him in 1983.

Plot twist: Piel’s husband, Gerald Piel, was the publisher of Scientific American. After reading a few articles on DNA testing, Ms. Piel decided to have samples from the rape kit tested. But DNA testing in the late ’80s was “shaky,” Piel explained, and if Judge Elfklin, a federal judge in the Northern District — notorious for slow rulings — hadn’t sat on the case for years, premature testing might have failed to free Abdal.

A first round of tests in 1993 was inconclusive. But five years later, Piel, ready to try again, asked Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, who specializes in DNA exonerations, what he thought of the Boston lab she had used previously and whether she should do so again.

“Barry Scheck said, ‘Oh that’s a terrible laboratory! Don’t send it to that laboratory!’” says Piel, laughing. “He said there’s only one man who can do this, and that’s Ed Blake, and he’s out in Northern California!”

Within a year, Abdal was free. Under the fair compensation laws in New York State, Abdal’s attorneys, Scheck and Piel, sued for $4 million dollars. When the state offered a $2 million settlement, Abdal said “no way.”

Abdal wanted his day in court and a jury to proclaim his innocence “and that was that!” Piel said while laughing, “We had no idea what to do! Then Barry Scheck had the idea to start a civil suit for the year Abdal was in jail before the trial, and so Abdal finally took the money.”

Six years after leaving Sing Sing, Abdal died of lung cancer, and his surviving family members contested his will. He had left his millions to his mosque and to a close friend, cutting his family out completely because he didn’t trust them.

“They thought there was some skullduggery going on,” says Conover, who found himself somewhat drawn into the legal battle. The siblings hoped that he would testify that Abdal couldn’t read, to prove that he could not possibly understand any legal papers he may have signed.

“And it was kind of an amazing question to me because I’d always assumed he could,” adds Conover, who had stayed in touch with Abdal over the years, but learned of Abdal’s death months after the fact.

“It was galling when I realized I wouldn’t make a reliable witness about that. I wasn’t sure,” says Conover. “He’d never sent me anything in writing.”

Even the most thorough of journalists can miss an obvious fact. This is true, in part, because presumption is instinctual, a necessary skill in a blindingly hectic world. Likewise, Conover failed to recognize Abdal’s innocence out of necessity: prisoners had to be guilty to justify Sing Sing’s degrading ruthlessness.

Abdal’s role in Conover’s work couldn’t be second-guessed. It was a bruising epiphany for the author to realize his complicity, and so later, when asked to testify against Abdal’s wishes, Conover respectfully declined.

Yet, to this very day, nearly 40 years after they met, Mama Piel is still fighting Abdal’s legal squabbles.

The unseemly production

It was early spring — March — a month after his class discussing the line between reporter and subject. Conover sat looking at his hands as he lectured from Newjack, struggling to be precise as he spoke softly. He seemed to avoid telling the horrific story completely by rote. He said that he often felt guilty for bringing Sing Sing into his wife and child’s lives, but he never mentioned the anguish he felt over helping to imprison Abdal.

A young woman raised her hand. How had the compassionate intellectual sitting at the end of the table become the taciturn disciplinarian of the book? Were there two Ted Conovers? Was the hardnosed, matter-of-fact narrator a literary device? Conover, a bit rattled, explained that even today some part of him was still a CO.

The class was skeptical.

Conover stood up and stepped into character. He became a guard again, returning to a time when Sing Sing COs were outnumbered by the prison’s inmate population and Abdal was still guilty. When Conover had discovered he was as much prey as predator.

A guard needed to control the prisoner and himself — no doubts. This illusion of control was a brutal paradigm his psyche had suddenly recovered, as if he had gone back to the crux of that founding contract between man and state. Egged on by the class, he demonstrated his frisking skills, recalling the days he sometimes found himself at odds with Sing Sing’s violence, reluctant to dehumanize a man. He picked out his tallest student, Michael Tedder, directing him to assume the position. In Newjack, during a horrific frisk, Conover’s worries if a prisoner is ill:

He stood in front of me on a small square of carpet, briefs in his hands. He offered them to me, and I checked them quickly. There was some blood in the seat. “You okay?” I asked. He nodded, and I began directing him through the obligatory motions. But he knew them better than I did and was always a step ahead.

Jackie Barba, a cherub-faced, sharp-witted student sitting in Conover’s classroom, who had studied literature in college, wasn’t completely buying it. Her professor was obviously acting out a role, a humorous facsimile, she thought. “It made me wonder,” Barba said after the class. “You know, whether when he was in it, he was always acting and always a little amused to see himself in that role?” When Tedder looked around, Conover snapped “Face the wall!” The class giggled.

Later in Newjack, while being frisked by a guard, an inmate mutters, “You fucking OJTs are a pain in the ass.”

“What?” The officer asked.

The inmate took one hand off the wall and began to repeat the phrase, but was immediately jumped by the frisking officer and several others. When I heard about it, I was proud, because it showed we weren’t wimps.”

To endure Sing Sing, Conover reluctantly embraced its logic, both as a reporter and as a guard. Proud of the violence and embarrassed by his power, it split his psyche in two. But when forced to, he chose to exercise the brutal requirements Sing Sing demanded.

“I think taxpayers are quite happy not to know the details of all the dirty work that is done in our names,” says Conover over the phone in a soothing voice, “just as we’re happy not to know the details of how our hotdogs are made, or everything that’s going on in the kitchen. In fact, we pay not to know about that. So I’m always interested in the work that seeks to narrow that distance and implicate consumers in the unseemly production of something we need.”

Yet, even as Conover taught Newjack with his “prisoner” in a pat frisk stance, his thoughtful students — some amused, some unsettled (“It was kind of weird,” one said) — had trouble wrapping their heads around their professor’s post Sing Sing rationale. Though none ever doubted their professor’s sincerity, a few still had trouble accepting his willingness to embrace an authoritarian self.

Being one of the few male students in the class, Tedder later noted it was likely why he was picked for the frisk. That Conover got into fistfights or was beat up while working at Sing Sing surprised him. “How could this sweet man do this?” said Tedder, adding “but people really are multifaceted.”

After Tedder sat down, Conover drew a long black line on the white board. He wrote “participant” at one end and “observer” at the other end. His students took turns discussing where their semester’s work placed on the numbered line.

One woman had entered a beauty pageant, but few had come close to full “participant” to report their stories. Allie Zendrian, writing about a self-proclaimed ghost hunter, chose to observe her subject without involvement. Barba observed a class of budding comics take to the stage, terrified to try out stand-up comedy herself. Most students weren’t prepared to cross the line, but all of them now knew better where theirs was.

Conover says he would never do it again, immerse himself as deeply as he had to report Newjack. And frisking down his students, even in jest, suggests that his line is still blurred. An innocent man suffered, and Conover did nothing — could do nothing — because he couldn’t afford to doubt. In fact, it was shortly after Conover finished Newjack — after Abdal was freed and Conover realized his role in the injustice — that the nightmares began.

“There are people who think it’s immoral to be a prison officer. I’m not among them,” says Conover, “and I think it needs to be considered honorable work if it’s done in an honorable fashion. But I never anticipated that the work would involve something clearly as illegitimate as locking up an innocent person.”

Lackawanna

It is not as if Conover hadn’t tried reconciling his role in Abdal’s incarceration. He took time with Abdal when he visited New York City, and they roamed the city together: “I remember him looking around for the fragrant oils he liked to rub on his head,” says Conover. And when six American Yemeni men from Lackawanna were arrested for training with al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Conover, looking for a story, stayed as a guest at Abdal’s house in Lackawanna: “I ended up sleeping on his couch for a couple nights and spending whole days with him.”

He even wondered whether there was a book about Abdal’s life — it was never written. But Conover did appear with Abdal at the bookstore Talking Leaves in July 2001, shortly after Newjack came out in paperback.

“I went up to Buffalo and saw him the morning of my reading, and he asked if he could come. So he did. He ended up being a part of the whole presentation,” says Conover. “He brought his prayer rug and his tape player to my room at the Hyatt when I changed, so he could do his evening and afternoon prayers.”

Talking Leaves employees pushed back the bookshelves, sliding them away and putting chairs in where they could fit them. With 30 seats and standing room, perhaps 100 people attended the modest reading. At the front of the store, at a small table, sat Conover and Abdal, ready to take questions. Conover wore a blue shirt with his sleeves rolled up, and Abdal was in Muslim garb with his silver whiskers, polished bald head, and knotty walking stick, looking every bit the elder wise man. Conover gave his short reading and answered questions. Some he deferred to Abdal, who launched into respectful, if biting, monologues on the prison system, even as the corrections officers in the audience squirmed in their seats.

“It was a very interesting mix,” says Conover, “and my book, I think, attracts a readership that’s somewhat the same. It’s, on the one hand, people concerned about prisons as a social problem, themselves intrigued by prison reform and what my book might suggest for it. And then on the other side, there are people in corrections or law enforcement who know that this profession is sort of a degraded one, and a stigmatized one.”

Post-traumatic stress disorder

The afternoon was all that Conover had hoped for: that Newjack wouldn’t preach to any choir, but would rather “narrow the distance” between natural antagonists, forcing them all to face an uncomfortable truth of the prison’s complicated nature — at the blind spot of reason.

But his deep-immersion, first person reporting, his participant observer methodology, cost him as he sought that dangerous ground. In Newjack’s paperback afterward, Conover wrote that he had discussed his nightmares with psychologists at a medical convention. They supposed his nightmares were post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Conover respectfully shrugged and wrote:

That seems rather a grand name for it, and I don’t want to suggest that I went through anything like what soldiers who saw combat in Vietnam did. But I do think that if you repress something regularly (in my case, fear), it’s going to come back to haunt you.

The general thinking on PTSD is that writing down horrific events helps the traumatized to recover. In a way, the balm is almost too obvious. But only recently has this thinking been recognized in newsrooms like CNN International and the BBC. Frank Smyth, an investigative journalist captured during the first Gulf War in Iraq, suffers from PTSD. Smyth says that much more is needed to support journalists who suffer the disorder. Smyth also happens to be the Washington representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, and writes for the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma. He recommends that journalists, who often booze it up to self-medicate, instead confront their emotions by expressing themselves through art or memoir. It seems the brain can literally heal itself through self-expression.

“The act of articulation — writing, drawing, painting, talking, or crying,” writes Smyth with co-author Joe Height, “seems to change the way a traumatic memory is stored in the brain, as if it somehow moves the memory from one part of the hard drive to another.”

Conover, to a degree, instinctively embraced Smyth’s counsel. Typing up his notes night after night while working at Sing Sing, Conover turned them into a Pulitzer Prize–nominated book. If he hadn’t, certainly his PSTD would have been far worse.

But even today, Sing Sing draws Conover back across the line he stepped over many years ago, with it shifting around here and there and undermining his peace of mind. Having sought to narrow the distance between people who often violently disagree, to illustrate the blind spot of reason, the filthy work of being both a guard and a journalist lingers.

“In the dreams, I’m almost always a prisoner myself, not a guard,” says Conover over the phone, his voice always a little distant. “And part of the nightmare I’m involved in is the need to get out of that prison because I’m not supposed to be there. I’m not serving a just punishment. I’m there mistakenly.”

Suddenly, he pauses as if to stop his thought, as if reluctant to say it aloud to a stranger. “And so, so in a way, Habib’s situation goes to the root of some of my worst fears about prison: that a person, that I — that any of us — can end up there wrongfully and have to endure.”

1) What are you working on?

There’s a moment in “Newjack” where I’m driving a prisoner from Sing Sing up to a different prison upstate. We eat dinner at a service area on the Throughway and he comments that once he’s out, he wants to be a trucker. In other words, after confinement he wants to move, constantly.

And once I finished at Sing Sing, I felt the same way. I took an assignment for National Geographic about a new road between the east and west coasts of South America, and got to thinking there was a book to be written about roads – their power to change the places they connect and the people who use them. Now I’ve finished the research and am completing the writing of it. There are five roads, in five different countries, and I traveled each one in the company of someone to whom the road means something special. So it’s passages through some cool parts of the world as well as a meditation on the meaning of roads, now and in the past: how the same road that brings medicine allows for the spread of AIDS, how a road that helps develop the Andes speeds destruction of the rain forest. Every road is an intention; each is a path of human endeavor.

2) How much time – if any – do you spend on the Web? Is it a distraction or a blessing?

The information superhighway is also pretty interesting to me – sometimes too interesting. Wasting time, for me, used to be all about the phone, the refrigerator, the mail, the garden. Now it’s about the Internet. I recently moved the “new messages” indicator on my e-mail program off the screen so I won’t be distracted. That’s the curse. But being able to send out a question and hear back within hours, or even minutes, from somebody in Lagos, the West Bank, China – that’s the blessing.

3) Whose books are generally shelved next to yours in bookstores? How does it feel to be sitting between them?

Denver’s Tattered Cover, my hometown bookstore, lately shelves my books in “Cultural Studies.” There you’ll find Newjack between Bill Bradley’s “New American Story” and the “New York Intellectuals Reader” (ed. Neil Jumonvilla). “Whiteout,” my book about Aspen in the 80s which I’ve always thought of as a kind of ethnography, is nicely bookended by “White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Effort to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good,” by William Easterly, and “Who Really Cares: Who Gives, Who Doesn’t and Why It Matters,” by Arthur Brooks.

“Rolling Nowhere,” about my months of riding freight trains with hobos, is presently sold out at the Tattered Cover; most bookstores place it in travel writing, if they have such a section, or even next to guide books. Usually “Coyotes,” about my year with Mexican migrants, can be found in sociology or current affairs. As long as they keep it out of biology (I’ve seen that twice), I don’t complain.

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.

_________________________________________

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?

What are you working on now?

I’ve been working on a novel ever since I finished Newjack. And I’m about to begin a new nonfiction project about roads around the world. Roads, and the good and bad that they do. I have a handful of roads that I’m going to be writing about, and that will be my next work of nonfiction.

One of my questions was going to be why you chose non-fiction over fiction, and now it turns out you’re doing both. Can you talk a little about the fiction, how that came about?

I guess partly to keep life interesting and keep in my writing a sense of exploration and discovery. I love nonfiction writing and I’m scrupulous about sticking to the facts, but you know, in your idle moments, it’s fun to think how the story might have turned out if you hadn’t stuck to the facts. There was one situation in particular, an article I did several years ago for the New York Times Magazine where I just thought, what if it hadn’t happened quite that way, what if it had happened this way? So that’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and after Newjack, I felt it was time–it did well, I made some extra money and I thought, this is an opportunity. It is not finished yet.

Can you say what it is generally about?

I cannot! (laughs).

And the new nonfiction is about roads. Did that come out of the story that you did in Central Africa where you followed the trucks?

I wrote a story for The New Yorker about travels with a convoy of trucks in East Africa along what’s been called the “AIDS highway,” between Mombasa on Kenya’s coast and Rwanda and Burundi. Recently I was having dinner with a friend, and I told him about another story I’d done—it’s in the June, 2003, National Geographic, about a new highway in Peru that will connect the Pacific and the Atlantic when it is done. And he said “you’ve written a lot about roads.” And I said “I have?” And he reminded me of one I wrote about the Texas-Mexico border for Outside years ago, and there are a couple of others. Sometimes it is just a comment like that that makes you understand some of your interests and desires and helps you to organize your thoughts.

Will you use those pieces you’ve already written?

I might re-visit a couple of those roads, but I won’t use the same pieces. It will be a brand new book.

Can you talk a little bit about the research phase? Once you decide on that road, how do you start with the research, how do you figure
out where to go?

The research starts when you figure out what road. So you have to think about the whole world, and my idea is to focus on roads that represent certain ideas. So there is a theme for each road; in Peru it’s the environment, in East Africa it’s disease, and so on. There are about five which are thematically linked, that offer a larger statement about the power of a road in human history. It’s a bit wide ranging, but it’s also very specific. On each one I will travel the road in the company of someone to whom the road means a lot. So, it will follow the participant observation method I’ve used before, but it will just be a bit varied.

Once you get all that together, what’s the next step? How do you organize what you’ve done?

I believe in the possibilities of narrative journalism, so I look for stories. The stories materialize along the way when you find a person who can be a character in the narrative, and then you watch what the person is trying to do, and you go with them, often sort of complicating the plot. So I’m a character as well, but generally, I’m a minor one. I try to cast each experience as a story in its own right. So you look at your raw data and you imagine how to organize it so that it will be most intriguing to a reader. That’s something I’ve done since my first book, and I’m still working on it….

Your first book Rolling Nowhere — as I recall, that came out of your honors thesis at Amherst, is that right?

Yes, it was based on the same research as my undergraduate thesis.

How did you take that and make it into a book? How did that process go?

When I came back from riding the rails, I prepared to write an ethnography of railroad hobos. Traditional ethnography does not feature a first person narrator, but I also wanted to write about the personal experience, because it was so interesting. I had worked on a student-run magazine and I proposed a story about one morning with one hobo. They liked it, and then the college alumni magazine reprinted it as a cover story; a week or two later, an Associated Press reporter happened to see it, and interviewed me just as I was graduating. There was a lot of response to the story, including calls from NPR and the Today show–utterly unexpected and bizarre! I was getting ready to do a newspaper internship in Indianapolis, and instead I ended up getting an agent in New York and selling a book based on a short epilogue to my thesis which was about the field work–and the article. So, that’s how the thesis became a book –or the first part of how, anyway.

You said “I found an agent in New York” as if that were an easy thing to do. Was it for you?

Well, no, not exactly. I knew almost nobody in New York. But I had worked at a magazine in Washington D.C. one summer, and when I got called by the “Today” show, I thought well, it’s now or never if I want to write a book about the hobo journey. An editor at the magazine knew of a guy who had an agent and gave me his name, which was Sterling Lord. Sterling’s secretary said something like, “Why don’t you come by the office after the TV show and you and Mr. Lord can talk about your idea?” Sterling, as it turned out, had grown up in Burlington, Iowa, home of the Burlington Railroad, and seen hobo campfires as he walked to school. You certainly don’t expect it to happen like that; it hadn’t been part of my plan.

Had you intended to do more traditional journalism?

Yes, I had. But I’ve always enjoyed writing in the first person, and I love reading that kind of story as well. This kind of book, it struck me when I was writing Rolling Nowhere, was a great way to combine the journalism which I’d been doing since junior high school with the anthropology that I had just learned and the methods of participant observation that are so central to anthropological research. My first book, Rolling Nowhere, showed me how those two really worked together. I thought: this could be taken in so many directions! After two years of graduate school in England, I had the idea for Coyotes. It seems as though I’m still on that road.

You do such an amazing job of telling your story, but not having it be just about you. How do you do that?

I write about myself, but I don’t want the book to be a book about me. It’s a big world out there, and I think that, all things considered, there are more interesting things in it than me. That said, I know that my experiences in some of these strange worlds are what will be bring people into them. That is, it’s not easy to get the average reader to go into prison. It’s not a pleasant place. And a lot of folks are made uneasy by illegal immigration–they don’t want to think about it or don’t imagine they can know those people. So I sort of become a tour guide and I try through my voice to provide an entrée into these worlds, a way in. I want readers to care about me as a means of caring about these subjects. I strive for a balance. I think it’s important that I be there as a voice and as a presence, but I don’t want to take center stage. Occasionally, of course, I do: things happen. I get slugged and it’s about me. That’s the way it works and that’s fine. It’s all a question of proportion.

In Newjack in particular, but also in Rolling Nowhere, the people you were interacting with didn’t know you were a writer –

In Rolling Nowhere I didn’t even know I was a writer. And, I purposely did not bring it up in Sing Sing.

What challenges did that present for you? It is certainly different from sitting down and interviewing somebody.

Newjack is the first and probably the only book I’ll ever do “undercover.” Secrecy is something that I think a journalist or a nonfiction writer should only use as a last resort, because whenever possible in this life it’s good to be up front with people. But as you know, I had tried to do this story in the traditional way. The New Yorker asked me to write about guards, the State wouldn’t let me go to work with them, and I knew I had to see the workplace to understand the guard’s life. So I applied for the job, and was truthful on my application. I actually didn’t expect to get hired because I wrote down the name of my alma mater, Amherst College, which I was sure would immediately disqualify me or subject me to suspicion. But for whatever reason, I don’t think they’d heard of Amherst College. I don’t even know what they thought. I learned there are other red flags they’re looking for–credit card debt, evidence of a hot temper, a felony conviction–things that really might be a big problem in prison work.

I did not offer an explanation of my ambitions to the people I worked with. I felt if I did, some would be suspicious that I was just going to do a cheap exposé along the traditional lines of evil prison guard beating defenseless inmate. Or word would get out that I was a journalist and I’d be fired –I really think that is very likely — if not beaten up in the parking lot, the other likelihood. However, nobody asks about your background in corrections work, nobody brings it up. And they certainly never ask if you’ve been to college because if you had, why on earth would you want that job?

The other difficult part of the secrecy was that these ten and a half months were an extremely stressful and dismaying time for me because prison work is really hard, and you see ugly things and it is important to talk about them and yet it’s difficult to talk about when you’re leading a secret life. I had a handful of friends whom I could confide in but you can’t always reach them when you need them. My wife knew most of what was happening, but not everything because I didn’t want to frighten her or bring prison into our kitchen. And she was working full time and had her own problems to deal with and I didn’t want to burden her more than I already had by being gone practically every weekend, leaving her with our newborn daughter and our three year old son. She was already doing heroic things. So that was really the hardest part of the job, keeping it quiet. And I felt I understood why so many undercover narcotics agents get divorced and become drug addicts: I mean it’s unhealthy to keep secrets and it’s unhealthy to live a double life. I feel like I’m still mending these two parts of my life back together.

Did it present challenges during the writing because you couldn’t go back and ask somebody “what were you thinking during that?”

A little bit, such as in the few cases where I couldn’t remember things like “How many cells were on that floor, 62 or 58?” I saved a handful of those questions for the very end when I started telling my colleagues, the guys I worked with, what I had done, and told them I’d written a book which was coming out. And most of them sounded kind of excited about that, were curious if they were going to be in it and what they were going to be doing in the book, and I told them. So I saved that kind of question until the end because I didn’t know, frankly, how they would react. And if someone was going to get upset I didn’t want them to get upset until later because I didn’t want to have to worry about it while I was still writing.

That brings up another issue that I think all immersion writers have to deal with, the issue of betrayal. You’ve put yourself in this place, you’ve gotten to know these people, you like them, and now you’re going to write about them “warts and all.”

Well, you greatly lessen the chance of misunderstanding if you’re up front about what you’re doing. In most cases it is not an issue. People might take exception to some of what you write, but if they knew your project, it generally remains a disagreement on a small point.

But Newjack was of a different order of magnitude because nobody knew, and I was very apprehensive about that. You’ll know from the book’s afterward that there was a very exciting evening in the Ossining Public Library when I gave my first reading in the neighborhood. The room was packed, and the first two rows were filled with gray uniforms. The librarian, as she pinned the mike on, whispered to me that she hoped I hadn’t been worried about the policemen who had been posted at the front door. “What policemen?” I asked her. “Well, the Sing Sing librarian called and scared our reference librarian by warning her there was going to be trouble tonight,” she said, smiling. I was about as scared then as I’ve ever been.

But as I began the reading, I started seeing officers nodding as I said things that struck them as true. And at the end, most of them came up and told me how much they liked it. The book is very candid—I tell about the many good officers, but also about the bad. But what the book gives corrections officers, which they don’t usually get, is treatment as human beings. I think the fact that I put myself in their shoes and acknowledged the way the work made me feel, how it brought out a side of me that is not my best self, means a lot to CO’s.

The greatest resistance to my book has come from the top echelons of the Department of Correctional Services which, I think, feels foolish because I snuck under their radar — by telling the truth, no less — and because I criticized the system, which is in urgent need of reform. That’s why the book was banned and is now censored, and why they wouldn’t cooperate with any fact-checking. They are very fearful and they’re worried about their grip, and I believe they are a little worried about their legitimacy. They are not fond of me.

What is the worst part of the writing life for you?

Hmm. I have to say it has many challenges. It’s not always easy to write, and it doesn’t always pay as well as you wish it would. You can’t always write about your first choice.

Here’s a difficult part of writing. I never sit down to write without having thought about what I’m going to write that day beforehand. This is something that took me awhile to learn. Rolling Nowhere was very hard to write — I still remember the days I sat in front of that blank computer screen with no thoughts coming to my head. The cure for that for me has been to make sure I think about it before hand, usually starting the night before when I go to sleep. Often when I wake up in the morning, I think “okay, where am I in this story, and where might I take it today?” I’ll try to have some rough ideas in my mind. I will get energized about it, I’ll get excited about it — and then my daughter will have strep throat. And it kind of lets all the air out of the balloon. And you don’t know when to fill it back up — is it the next day? will she be able to go back to school? or won’t it be the end of the week? That’s a challenge I didn’t use to have — but I’m learning how to handle it.

How do you balance writing — especially since you do so much traveling for your writing — and teaching and all that entails, with your family life?

I try not to be away from home for too long at any one time. One of the advantages of the roads book is that I’ll be able to research it pieces. So I hope never to be away from home for more than a month or two — even that is a lot, but in the larger scheme of things, it then allows me to be at home for at least a year and not go away at all, which is a rare privilege these days I think, and to have a lot of flexibility in terms of my schedule. You pay a price up front, but then I think there’s compensation.

Who do you read? Who are your favorite authors?

One of my favorite authors is George Orwell. John Steinbeck, Bruce Chatwin, Robert Stone, Tracy Kidder. I read a lot of fiction because often that is where you find the best storytelling. There’s a great new book by Adrian Nicole Leblanc, Random Family, her work is an inspiration for me — her persistence and the intimacy she achieves just through incredible commitment to her subjects. She’s amazing.

I love Susan Orlean as a stylist — not all nonfiction writing has to be about profound and serious subjects. She is a perfect example of how life is not all gravity — nor is it silly. I like her a lot.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading Robert Caro’s book The Power Broker, about Robert Moses, the New York City highway builder, and I have a novel on my shelf–I can’t wait — Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. I like a varied diet. I bet that at least half the books I read are fiction.

And Harry Potter?

Yes, I am reading the current Harry Potter — what a big project! My son is now 8 and he loves it!

RITA RADOSTITZ, a former attorney for death-row inmates, is a second-year student in the literary nonfiction program at the University of Oregon.