An Interview with DAVE EGGERS and MIMI LOK

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An Interview with DAVE EGGERS and MIMI LOK DAVE EGGERS MIMI LOK photo courtesy of McSweeney’s photo courtesy of McSweeney’s an interview with DAVE EGGERS AND MIMI LOK Conducted by Sean Bex and Stef Craps n March 18, 2015, we had the rare opportunity to inter- view the celebrated American author Dave Eggers and O Mimi Lok, co-founder with Eggers of Voice of Witness, a socially engaged oral history nonprofit, in front of a student audience at the Vooruit cultural center in Ghent, Belgium. The occasion for their visit was Eggers’s being awarded the 2015 Amnesty International Chair at Ghent University in recognition of his human rights work. The interview aimed to give the audience an overall sense of the various creative and charitable projects in which Eggers and Lok are involved and which have earned them widespread acclaim. The published version of it that appears below is an edited and condensed transcript. Eggers burst upon the literary scene in 2000 with his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which recounts the tragic loss of his parents to cancer and his subsequent struggle to find his way in life with his younger brother Christopher. He followed up this success with You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), a novel in which two young Americans seek to overcome personal tragedy by trav- eling around the world and, along the way, distributing money to those in need. The novel poignantly balances descriptions of abject poverty with ludicrous schemes devised by the protagonists to donate money to the poor. In What Is the What (2006) and Zeitoun (2009), Eggers collaborated with victims of human rights abuses in Sudan and the U.S., respec- tively, in order to give a voice to their suffering. The former tells the story of one of the so-called Lost Boys of Sudan, Valentino Achak Contemporary Literature 56, 4 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/15/0004-0545 ᭧ 2015 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 546 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE Deng, as he struggles to survive the second Sudanese civil war and suffers from culture shock, indifference, and racism after being resettled in the U.S. Zeitoun focuses on domestic issues in the U.S. as it chronicles the experiences of a Syrian-born New Orleans resi- dent and Hurricane Katrina hero who is arrested and detained with- out charge on suspicion of terrorism. Eggers’s other works include How We Are Hungry (2004), a col- lection of short stories, and A Hologram for the King (2012), an alle- gorical novel about the decline of America. The novel features a down-on-his-luck American businessman who tries in vain to sell a holographic communications system to the king of Saudi Arabia in a last-ditch effort at turning his own life around. Eggers’s most famous fictional work is arguably The Circle (2013), a cautionary tale about the erosion of privacy in the digital age. It portrays a powerful tech company whose ultimate goal is to make everything known and transparent, at any cost. These are just a few of Eggers’s literary works; there are many more, including several novels as well as children’s books and screenplays. Apart from being a writer, Eggers is also an editor, publisher, graphic designer, activist, and philanthropist. In 1998 he founded the independent publishing house McSweeney’s. Based in San Fran- cisco, McSweeney’s publishes books, an influential literary journal (Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern), a bimonthly magazine (The Believer), and the Voice of Witness book series, which depicts human rights crises around the world through the stories of the men and women who experience them. Voice of Witness has produced volumes on Sudan, Burma, Zimbabwe, Colombia, and the United States, as well as, most recently, a volume on Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Eggers is also a passionate literacy advo- cate. In 2002 he co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for children and teenagers which has since opened chapters in six other cities across the U.S. He tells the story about 826’s inspiration, early beginnings, and ensuing momentum in a deservedly popular TED talk. Another, more recent charitable proj- ect is ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization that connects donors with prospective college students who need help paying their high tuition fees. Two further charities that should be mentioned are the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation and the Zeitoun Foundation, EGGERS AND LOK ⋅ 547 which Eggers founded with the protagonists of What Is the What and Zeitoun and to which he has donated all royalties from these best- selling books. The Valentino Achak Deng Foundation built and operates a school in Deng’s home village in South Sudan, while the Zeitoun Foundation funded reconstruction projects in New Orleans and promoted interfaith understanding. The interview below consists of two parts. The first part deals with Eggers’s literary work, homing in on The Circle in particular, while the second part focuses on Voice of Witness. For this part of the conversation we were joined by Lok, who has served as the book series’ executive director and executive editor since 2008. Before that, she worked as a freelance reporter for the Asia bureaus of The Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, and USA Today and taught creative writing at San Francisco State University and in schools in Hong Kong and China. What Eggers and Lok clearly share is a passion for human rights storytelling. We kicked off the interview, though, with a few questions about Eggers’s identity as a writer, his writing process, and the evolution of his literary work. Q. Do you consider yourself a writer first and foremost? Is that the core of your professional identity, from which everything else flows, or do you see writing as on a par with your work as an editor, publisher, and activist? A. When we started up McSweeney’s in San Francisco and 826 Valencia, I can honestly say that that year I probably did not write a whole lot. Overall, though, it changes month to month. Sometimes I have a project that I want to dedicate time to, and I have to set aside writing for a while, but as I’ve gotten older, all of these foun- dations that we have started have matured. They are all in good hands, and so they do not need my help on a day-to-day manage- ment basis. As a result, I’ve been able to return to more full-time writing. When I enter a country and they ask me what my occu- pation is, I write “writer.” However, this feels strange, because I think it’s a ridiculous luxury to be able to write for a living. I feel it’s always very pretentious to say that; I’ve never quite gotten used to it. It’s something that I feel very grateful for every day. I don’t take it for granted: I feel like I’m still earning it every day, largely because my parents really worked for a living. My mother was a 548 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE teacher, and my father worked hard as a lawyer. They had regular nine-to-five jobs that were hard, and I have the ability to choose my hours and wake up late if I want to. But because I feel so grateful or lucky, I tend to keep the same regular office hours these days. I don’t always have a chance to write those eight hours, but at least I’m in the writing position. I feel so lucky that I have to put in the time, at least. Otherwise I have this crushing sense of shame that comes from my Catholic upbringing, which says, “Hey, what are you doing? You’ve been given this chance; other people really have to work for a living, so get back to work!” So I do feel an obligation to work as hard as the people, like my parents, who were not always doing something day to day that they loved. My mother loved teaching, but my father did not always get to take on cases that he loved. I think any of us who have the ability to do something we love tend to work twice as hard, to compensate for the luck that we have had. Q. How do you usually begin a book? Do you start with a char- acter, a plot, a setting, or an issue that you want to explore? Could you perhaps walk us through your writing process? A. I usually write one scene and one chapter first where I lock in the tone, the style, and the characters. It has to be something that you are interested in, that comes naturally, and that you feel pas- sionate about. You can build the rest of the work around it once you’ve solved that case on the micro-level. For The Circle, I’d been thinking about this issue for around ten years because I’ve been in Northern California for twenty-two years and I saw the rise of the Internet. I remember the first collapse of the dot-com bubble as well as its subsequent boom. Many of my friends are now in positions of power in some of these companies, while others have start-ups or develop apps, websites, and so on. I’ve been immersed in it for so long. I had been trying to synthesize ideas about it, about what exactly I find concerning about it. A lot of times I will take notes for years and years on something that might not come to fruition.
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