Also, I need deadlines, just like everybody else, especially coming from magazines, newspapers, and stuff like that. I need daily or weekly deadlines to get stuff done, or I continue to do things and not go off on a year of unproductivity.
Dave Eggers
I grew up north of Chicago, not far from where the Schwinn bicycle plant used to be, and was conscious of the fact that these beautiful, everlasting bikes were made just down the road.
It's not that our family has no taste, it's just that our family's taste is inconsistent.
I am a bike enthusiast; there's a certain amount of romance to bikes. They're both beautiful and utilitarian.
Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the tree calligraphic.
The idea of 'Voice of Witness' is to let survivors and witnesses of human-rights abuses tell their story at length. It started with a course that I co-taught at U.C. Berkeley journalism school back in 2003.
I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl's 'James and the Giant Peach'.
I went to public school all my life and all through college and I liked it.
If you want to write about people, you can make it up. But if you spend time talking to someone and examining what it is you want to write about, you discover a level of detail that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise.
I publish my own books, so there isn't a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.
And that's actually the brunt of what we do is, people going straight from their workplace, straight from home, straight into the classroom and working directly with the students. So then we're able to work with thousands and thousands more students.
I always like the idea of doing interviews with somebody but completely seriously not ever mentioning what that person is generally known for.
But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization.
I'll always be working on five things at once, usually with those documents open at the same time because if I get stuck somewhere I'll jump over to something else. That's how my head has always worked.
I'm an amateur science enthusiast. I'm not even a professional enthusiast. I don't know anything; I never even passed biology in high school. But I read the science section of the newspaper.
Because I grew up with this naive expectation of people doing right, I get shocked by every little violation.
I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.
I think there's a future where the Web and print coexist and they each do things uniquely and complement each other, and we have what could be the ultimate and best-yet array of journalistic venues.
But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma. Kids weren't going into the 'Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help' or something like that. It was 826 Valencia.
I'm interested in the human impact of the giant foot of misplaced government. After all, we encounter it every day.
It's so easy to print in the Midwest. You're saving months in shipping and customs, so we have started printing a number of books there.
But you know, there's something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day, working one-on-one, getting all this attention - they go home, they're finished. They don't stall, they don't do their homework in front of the TV.
I really believe strongly that kids should be spared the runoff of their parents' lives and problems.
When I'm doing work online or on the computer, it's one thing. When I want to read, I want to go elsewhere, and I want to be away from the screen.
Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, 'The Things They Carried', has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.
I worked at Salon.com way back when they started, and there's just unmeasurable value to distributing words online, too, but I still get my news from the newspaper in the morning.
You treat a kid with respect and as an adult you talk to them as if they're smart people. But you don't throw at them the trappings of adulthood and you know, the darker stuff.
Paper is a uniquely beautiful format, more so than the web, I think: you need to invest in the aesthetics.
McSweeney's as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object.
I don't mean to beat a made-in-America drum, but I would be lying if I said it doesn't feel somehow right to be printing books in the U.S.
And what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention. The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students.
People are strange, but more than that, they're good. They're good first, then strange.
I went to Saudi Arabia in 2010, and spent most of my time in Jeddah and the King Abdullah Economic City.
Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time.
When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes.
The key thing is, even if you only have a couple of hours a month, those two hours shoulder-to-shoulder, next to one student, concentrated attention, shining this beam of light on their work, on their thoughts and their self-expression, is going to be absolutely transformative, because so many of the students have not had that ever before.
I met a lot of great people in Saudi Arabia and I'd like to see them again. And I'd love to spend more time in the desert and in the mountains. I felt really at home there.
The only thing that everyone needs to look out for is keeping the students reading through high school and thereafter.
You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time.
When I was on the bestseller list with the first book, everyone who knows me knows that every week it continued to be on the list was a very dark week for me. Everyone knows that all I wanted was to be off that list.
The house is a factory.
They took my mother's stomach out six months ago.
Status in itself is criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.
You know, it's been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade level higher.
So this is the space during tutoring hours. It's very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention, complete devotion to the students' work and a boundless optimism and sort of a possibility of creativity and ideas.
Three-dimensional results are important to me. I did once spend some time just writing, and floating around, and I lost my mind a little bit. I wasn't so good at that.
Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.
But while mum and dad were incredibly caring, it was also a very chaotic household where everyone fought about everything. So I know what it's like to internalize all that chaos.
I think I'm far too hopeful and trusting. That's something I got from my mum.
