As a collection, make it scream, make it burn and they are so smart, so nuanced and its fascinating to hear about and to read about the ethical complications of being a writer. Theres tension between making art making beauty and exporting the people you write about. Thats one of the recurring themes, all of these essays. Theres also a lot else as well so its great to have the here. Its wonderful to be here. One thing that so striking to me about this collection is this a very different kinds of answers. Some are journalism, summer what i would callst criticism and thn you very personalal essays, revealing essays. Arere you equally comfortable wh all those different kinds of writing or do you have a favorite type ofu essay . Best way to start answer the question would be to say that i am differently uncomfortable with all three forms of writing. I think its usually a bad sign if im feeling too comfortable about a a project or peace and working on but i find, and suddenly and discovered as a generative thing but the sources of discomfort are different in those three modes. The personal essay is probably the one ive been doing in some form for the longest but there are all sorts of discomfort that are still embedded in that. What needs to dig deep in your own experience, to dig underneath the varnish to well polished or she told archuleta, find the messy stuff underneath. Most of the stories worth telling but a light at the things we dont t understand and often things that produce a sense of shame or vexation and thought into all that material is difficult in lots of ways and this will probably come talk to every life is a shared custody life so youre also writing about other people when youre writing about yourself. Journalistic or reported pieces are new for me. I started to write pieces that involve more reportage maybe in 20102011 with immediately like so excited by that mode. Some of the pieces in them, the piece about ultramarathon in tennessee, a piece about people who suffer from a controversial skin disease. It felt deeply fascinating to me to immerse myself in corners of the world and try to write about what i saw i also, i was a shy kid and that shy kid still is inside of me. Showing up for interviews still makes me a little bit sweaty and a little bit nervous in secret how to coax out of people truths that feel illuminating and later all that still produces a kind of exciting but it also produces an adrenaline rush. Those are handinhand. Lets talk about some of the essays. You had this wonderfulul essay about a whale that was known as 52 blue and all these people that were justow obsessed with this one and more. What was the nature of this subsection . Fiftytwo blue who sometimes also goes by 52 as couple of different nicknames but he is a blue whale who has been tracked. It was initially tracked by these old hydrophones along the surface of the ocean floor that had initially been built to track soviet subs. After the end of the cold war were repurposed to study ocean life. At one point these naval audio engineers started picking up sounds consistent with the call of a blue whale but they were much higher frequency souther at the frequencyha of 52hertz whih was orders of magnitude higher pitched than most blue whales. Only this one whale . Only this one well at this particular that was one thing though strange about this whale. The other was whenever they tracked him he was never in the company of other whales which was unusual for a blue whale. When they publish the results sort of the mythology started about this well because he had higher pitched song so that ate wilson because he was always alone people start to become fascinated by him he was called alone was whale in the world. And as embedded in the title as you can see people rejecting all sorts of stuff onto it. They were projecting loneliness, independence, heartbreak, kind of adequate fierce autonomy. The whale became in the mode of like great white whales a set of moby dick at the repository of so many different meanings. That was the beginning of the story. Used that time with a lot of these people, both people who studied the wheel but also some people just became obsessed and there was one woman in particular who it sounds like you spent a lot of time with her. I did get to her name is leonora. I was particularly interested in her industry for connection to this well because the whale really reachedth her in the inf intense needs. She was recovering from this kind of major Abdominal Surgery that kept her in the hospital in rehab for many months. She had been in the fiveweek medically induced coma. It wasnt like she woke up and found the whale the next day but she was in the midst of this which was cosmetic and great. She was in the still very much in the midst of reclaiming speech, reclaiming movement, and she discovered this whale and he seemed to her of what he began to was a what it meant to not quite know how to be in the world, trying to figure out. I ended up spending time with leonora or a trip over a long stretch, culminating in this show, art show at her Community Center choose quite involved with up in harlem. So she was with the drawing pictures of the whale . And display the particular when painting should been working on for a long time that was a portrait of her and the whale as she imagined their communion in her mind. I found her whole story to be quite moving and i found the painting to be moving. But maybe this opens up some of your questions. A lot of things she said that also sound quite out of how to say, a little bit new age or like waves of energy and things, distractions that can sound a little bit hollow maybe. I felt torn between wanting to represent her voice as id heard it but not wanting to make her seem like a like a caricature,y who could be easily dismissed. It was important to provide deep context better story so you could understand that believing things like energy waves for her was really a way of trying to reckon not just with her surgery and herer recovery but her whole lifetime really a feeling at odds with the world or not able to find a place in. As i was reading this and you kept going back and talking with her, one more time, she clearly was morene than just a subject o write about. Did you become friends . I mean, friendship is a complicated term when youre talking about a relationship that exists primarily and certainly initially as a writer subject relationship. Sometimes to lean too hard into the gestures of friendship or the appearance of friendship can actually be more problematic than what feels most important to me which is just a lot of transparency around i am writing this piece, i would love for your store to be part of it, heres this tape recorder between us. We know the terms of whats happening here. But you had empathy . Yes. I came to care about her very much. I wanted to write a version of this piece she would feel good about and i need you cant always please, like every god at once, always please the gods of your editor and your sense of artistic integrity of the peace and happiness of your subject. When i was writing about her, wasnt writing a profile of like the highprofile public figure what felt like a public had a right to knowbl like all the truth. Like she was an ordinary profile person. It did feel important to me to write that was respectful of her. The were a number of things she ended up sharing with me that because she felt this intimacy between us, but then she didnt end up feeling comfortable with being the piece. Those questions are complicated ones, but in the case of a relationship and our relationship i really respected those requests when the came from her. Clearly you are drawn to write about outsiders. Talk about another one of your essays which is about people who claim to have been reincarnated. Theres a very wellknown psychiatrist jimim tucker is ben studying these cases for years. A lot of them are really compelling. They are hardll to explain. You ended up spending a lot of time with one particular family. Can you tell us about them . So a family in louisiana who son james when he was three years old started trapeze very vivid dreams in which he was in an airplane that wast on fire ad crashing. So he would wake up from these nightmares in the state of panic saying, like playing on fire, little man cant get out. His parents at first were whics really trying to make sense of, like how they could make these nightmares go away, where therey were coming from. Over the years the nightmares sort of began to unfold into a set of increasingly elaborate stories about what james remembered prompt, he said i was this pilot whose name was also james. He was using proper nouns that were confusing to them because they couldnt recall him ever having been exposed to them until he said the word he said my plane took off from natoma when themy digital reseah they saw that natoma bay with the name of a u. S. Naval Aircraft Carrier that was based outside of japan. The question would be how could he possibly know all this stuff . All the specific details. And he wasas saying names of other people been on the boat and those lined w up with the rosters. His father especially, bruce, was a real skeptic at first. He said i dont believe in reincarnation, i dont believe in private life but after these details like that he really started to turn. After watchingeu his son live wh this very visceral self experience, it seemed to come from nowhere, they could save having been this other person and having lived this prior life. They with the families, one of the families that jim tucker, the psychologist thought was one of his most persuasive cases. I wanted to spend time with them for that reason w and it also jt became very interested. What you persuaded. Was i persuaded . My whole thing what comes to reincarnation and a lotti of things in the universe is that i try to remain very humble about the limits of my knowledge. Was i persuaded by jim tuckers specific physical base accounts of our incarnation works bikes no, i was not. Thats less because i was pulling up my pieces of extracurricular thing i dont think this makes m sense but moe that i i was anything about ofs didnt feel like it made sense. But that said, i followed luther things that happen in the universe that i cant fully understand. And so i wouldnt discount it. I also think for me the most important kind off questions in the peace piece but most compeg questions were not necessarily is reincarnation real or not but why did the film it become so connected to and so invested in this belief that the sun was reincarnated . How did they make years and years of meaning and location, the father really committed himself for more than a decade to researching this Aircraft Carrier, like the fact, what they understood to be the fact of their sons entire life became one of the shining threads in them and that sense of how that story read its way into the psyches was with the compelling to me. That hadad a reality independent of whether the reincarnations itself was real. For writing a storyar like tt it would be, its tricky because it would be really easy to make fun of these people, just sort of treat this as are these people so gullible or Something Like that. I love to have you read the passage we talk about that. You refer to dealt with some of these things in a different way. Yes a writer who had such a profound influence on me sometimes the most powerful is the argument but comingofage as a writer i always love joan didions essay which famously begins we tell ourselves stories in order to live and less famously and pretty much exactly the same place where she reiterates her suspicions about all the stories and the false coherent as if its not a point she already made several times. Eventually started to have my doubts about her doubts that she positioned herself in the skeptic of self delusions i started to believe there was an ethical failure the same snobbery outlays and polls to resist cliches and recovery meetings for peoples overly neat narrative of their own lives. So in my own work myself increasingly addicted to write about lives or beliefs that others might have scoffed at. People who claim to suffer from a skin disease most doctors did not believe in or self identified outsiders who felt a spiritual kinship to a whale. If i was honest with myself to carry this selfrighteousnes selfrighteousness, maybe i like telling myself i was defending the underdogs or maybe it was cowardice. Maybe i was too scared to push back in order for others to keep surviving in their own lives. In that case it wasnt that i was convinced by the physics based account of how reincarnation worked a theory grounded in a series of experiments drawn from history and physics that was called cherry picked is electively misinterpreted tucker was a psychiatrist after all not a physicist it was more that i felt emotionally spiritually and intellectually allergic to a certain disdainful tone that it understood what was possible and what wasnt. It seemed arrogant to assume i understood much about consciousness of what it was, where it came from, or where what one went when we were done with it. So other essayist said she was a big influence on you may be in the sense you had to part from here on are some who were other authors quick. Yes. To huge influences that also show up susan sontag and james agee 1936 book and largely an account of the lives and labor during the Great Depression but what made that revolutionary that as they are at documenting his lives they are constantly preoccupied by the convoluted dynamics by the Power Dynamics to be harvard educated and what does that mean to be in the same room . As their backgrounds and select every moment and very fundamental level railing against the fact the matter how much he writes about them it will never be enough. There will always be more of them. He is also worried about exploiting them and romanticizing them. He wants his cake and eat it too or his poetry and eat it too. And then to romanticize poverty so that was a lyric poem. So doesnt know quite where to land to toppling between these and thats what i appreciate about sontag as well and to be strident so to have those earlier positions with intellect as well so as a writer or reporter journalist is there is a famous line i have to claim that the journalist to prey on peoples vanity or loneliness with that trust without remorse. So she does come to the image of the lonely widow waking up one day to find out the young man had left with all of her money. The one who understands you or loves you like nobody else does that you wake up one day and find out that your money is gon gone. But then you can never distill the psyche. So to see differently outside of a person they could see more in certain ways are also see les to put those pieces together. And that how they understand themselves so as people from my own life as a journalist and the nature of that so one thing that is constant to show that complexity to be multiple things on the page so those on the characters so this about poverty a relationship or loneliness so then i turned them and so to surprise me so let james be a lot of things at once. He was pretty aggressive, he was a gun nut and determined to convince me he was probably smarter than i was. All that stuff is on the page but he was also a dad who really loved his son and clearly was unsettled by things it was important to let that side of him live alongside the aggressive gun not because he was both of those things. So to go back year after year and then to take photos of this one woman and her family. And you can just imagine the complications of that relationship. Tell me about her. So yes now this project is almost 30 years and has been taking photos of this extended family that is centered on this woman maria and her children. But members now live on both sides of the usmexico border so shes doing photography on both sides and marias youngest daughter, lita some of the earliest photos from 1984 show her as a little baby some of the most recent show her with her son. You can really see the scope and span what happens to a life over 30 years. She just keeps going back . Does she move in with them . [laughter] is like a conversation in my household that we tried to move three times. [laughter] yes. I dont think she ever lived with them for months and months but from the time she was at their house when i interviewed guillermo who was one member of the family because i was curious what it was like from their perspective to have this woman that keeps coming down to document your life. And because i am very interested that writer subject relationship i was talking about the dark side. Sometimes its too much. But he has a lot of affection for annie. You can say a lot of things with my context of conversation with him. He barely knew me with a full range of his feelings may not be present but i could hear a lot of affection in his voice and he said sometimes i feel and he knows my life better than i do if i cannot remember i will ask her because chances are she does. When she comes to stay when we are eating she is photographing when we are sleeping she is photographing. Taking the kids to school when im at work. There is so much that fascinates me about that that really connected with the struggle of the inevitable she can photograph them for 30 years but she hurls 25000 frames against that that inevitability of incompleteness when he get as much of this as possible and maybe never being done to say i will go back one more time you never have to fully reckon that you are done and it still incomplete. You have a great phrase intimate entanglement. Why does she keep going back . I think it is a sense of affection she describes her relationship with them as one of love and shes not afraid to use that word. She is a real outsider artist should have institutional funding. Shes not affiliated with an institution. There are spaces to use the word love but shes is that freely. She loves them and is loved by them. Then are there ethical complications . Shes not rich but she has more money than they do so when she comes down to mexico one more time to see these problem problems, clearly there is a fair amount of poverty, does she just observe . Does she help them out . She has. She has give them more like material objects like clothes how you address poverty but thats a big part of the practice she brings them photographs of themselves so she has them. So that sense that this is not art made about you that is not also intended for you as an audience. But yes. She talks about her visits and wrestles with she keeps tallies of all the things she did give them and how much money she spent i think partially for her own purposes because she doesnt have that much but will also say they needed more. I cannot give them everything they needed. Not only does she have that complicated relationship but you do with annie. And you write about this. Yes. So this is only the tip of the iceberg in these complexities. When i finally wrote about annies work in a brief essay to accompany a magazine portfoli portfolio, the peace upset her. I wondered about writing about her than to her felt like a boundary between us. She said the writing made her feel betrayed and exposed and she articulated that reaction as the abandonment as if i left her by removing too mu