Immersion: A Writer's Guide to Going Deep (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) - Softcover

Conover, Ted

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022611306X ISBN 13: 9780226113067

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Over three and a half decades, Ted Conover has ridden the rails with hoboes, crossed the border with Mexican immigrants, guarded prisoners in Sing Sing, and inspected meat for the USDA. His books and articles chronicling these experiences, including the award-winning Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, have made him one of the premier practitioners of immersion reporting.

In immersion reporting—a literary cousin to ethnography, travel writing, and memoir—the writer fully steps into a new world or culture, participating in its trials, rites, and rituals as a member of the group. The end results of these firsthand experiences are familiar to us from bestsellers such as Nickel and Dimed and Behind the Beautiful Forevers. But in a world of wary strangers, where does one begin?

Conover distills decades of knowledge into an accessible resource aimed at writers of all levels. He covers how to “get into” a community, how to conduct oneself once inside, and how to shape and structure the stories that emerge. Conover is also forthright about the ethics and consequences of immersion reporting, preparing writers for the surprises that often surface when their piece becomes public. Throughout, Conover shares anecdotes from his own experiences as well as from other well-known writers in this genre, including Alex Kotlowitz, Anne Fadiman, and Sebastian Junger. It’s a deep-in-the-trenches book that all aspiring immersion writers should have in hand as they take that first leap into another world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ted Conover is a journalist and associate professor of journalism at New York University. His book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2000 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Conover is also the author of Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes; Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America’s Mexican Migrants; Whiteout: Lost in Aspen; and The Routes of Man: Travels in the Paved World. He regularly writes for the New York Times, Harper’s, the Atlantic, and many other publications.

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Immersion

A Writer's Guide to Going Deep

By Ted Conover

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2016 Ted Conover
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-11306-7

Contents

Introduction, 
I. Why Immerse?, 
II. Choosing a Subject and Gaining Access, 
III. Once Inside, 
IV. Undercover: Moving beyond Stunt, 
V. Writing It, 
VI. Aftermath, 
Acknowledgments, 
Annotated Bibliography, 
Index, 
Endnotes, 

CHAPTER 1

Why Immerse?

If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.

HARPER LEE, To Kill a Mockingbird

How to think about strangers is one of the conundrums of human existence. The warning parents give children, don't speak to strangers, may be good advice when it comes to unknown adults. But how about other kids? What is school, for most of us, other than a first experience of immersion among contemporaries we don't know? And when does it become okay to speak to strangers — ever?

Many of us are nervous around others. We are slow to "put ourselves out there," wary of entanglements or rejection. We hang out with our own kind.

Shyness is natural, but not necessarily a good thing. If we can't get past it, our worlds can stay small. My third-grade teacher, whom I loved, tried to get us to think about shyness. She quoted Will Rogers, the American humorist and homespun philosopher: "I never met a man I didn't like."

Wow, really? I thought. Even bad people, bank robbers, murderers? I've been thinking about that idea for almost fifty years.

* * *

I live in New York City, one of America's most stratified metropolises, with vast extremes of wealth and many distinct ethnic identities. I mix with my fellow New Yorkers every day, on the street and on the subway, but the subset of those with whom I have real conversations, actual social discourse, is much, much smaller. Sometimes I think back on the place I'm from, Colorado, and wax nostalgic about how, though the place was less diverse, mixing was somehow easier: something in the air said it was okay, and even expected, to chat with strangers. To be newly arrived was normal. Ethnic enclaves were fewer and seemed to have more permeable membranes. I still remember the day when, home from college in New England, I rented a car at the Denver airport and the guy behind the counter, after we had chatted a few moments, said in apparent mock self-disparagement, "Oh, you probably just think I'm some guido from Brooklyn." I looked at him confused. "What's a guido?" I asked. I'd never heard that phrase for Italian American.

But New York is not all snobbery and specialization. New York, deep in its DNA, has Walt Whitman. Whitman, a poet and journalist, wrote a long and famous poem called "Song of Myself," and another that is wonderful called "Song of the Open Road." Both feature long lists of people he hopes to meet and know. In "Song of Myself" he mentions the duck-shooter, the deacons, the lunatic, the squaw, the deck-hands, the one-year wife, the paving man, the "pedler," the opium-eater, and many more. In "Song of the Open Road" he writes,

The early market-man, the hearse, the moving of furniture into the town, the return back from the town,

They pass, I also pass, any thing passes, none can be interdicted.

None but are accepted, none but shall be dear to me.

* * *

When I walk downtown on Broadway, to which Whitman addressed a poem ("What hurrying human tides, or day or night!/What passions, winnings, losses, ardors, swim thy waters!"), I try to channel him, because in some ways Whitman helps me to understand myself. I like to travel and I like to hang out and Whitman helps me understand why. Whitman, as many Americans still do, nurtured an idea of a country where nobody is better than anybody else, where everyone can meet and engage. It strikes me as a democratic ideal worth keeping alive. When I'm out there talking to people I feel as though I'm emulating, and in turn maybe modeling, a kind of democratic discourse.

Americans don't have a corner on this kind of thinking. An expression in Spanish conveys a related idea: Cada cabeza es un mundo. Every mind is a world, a universe. In other words, each of us is interesting. What could be a better calling, in this world, than getting to know other minds?

After my first two books, when I was still living out West, I came to New York and attended a party where David Remnick, who went on to become editor of the New Yorker, introduced me as "a writer who makes his living sleeping on the ground." The subjects I had chosen for those first books were groups of people, hoboes and migrant workers, whom you didn't need a lot of money to hang out with. Often in my life, when I've been sleeping on the ground, it means I've been having an adventure, so I think of it as a good thing. The prospect of adventure — of getting out of my circle, my world, my own head for a while — has been another enduring appeal to me of this work. Occasionally somebody who doesn't quite get this will look at me as some kind of a nut, consigned to a lifetime of hardship in the pursuit of my craft. How do you keep doing this? My answer is usually something to the effect of no, you've got it wrong. It's not about the suffering, it's about the opportunity, the chance to learn new things. What could be better than riding freights with hoboes/traveling with migrants/driving a cab in Aspen/working as a meat inspector for a while? And I mean it.

Granted: the difficulty is a given. People don't always want to talk, to let you in. Not everybody you get to know will turn out to be a person you are glad to know. (Sorry, Will Rogers.) Sometimes conditions are uncomfortable. Often there are long stretches of waiting and tedium. You might become lonely, you might get sick. Staying home or going to the office in nice clothes would no doubt be easier. But oh, so much less interesting!

A case in point: one evening when I was working as a guard at Sing Sing prison, I came home, collapsed on the couch, and turned on the TV. I'd had a long day dealing with stubborn and angry prisoners, not to mention fellow correction officers (COs) who had second-guessed some of my decisions in a way I would not describe as supportive. On the screen was a presidential news conference — the reporters looked well-dressed, alert, more engaged than stressed. I'd been in that briefing room years before as an intern at US News & World Report and might have followed that path. The shouting of questions in between the President's answers was a bit chaotic, but nobody in that briefing room was going to get slugged or shanked. Everyone seemed more or less collegial, and briefly I felt envious.

But after a good meal and a hot shower, that feeling went away. What I was doing was unpredictable, trying, sometimes frightening — but almost every single day, I came home having seen or heard something remarkable that my friends could scarcely imagine. One day it was the young inmate who said to me, as I escorted him down the corridor to a medical appointment and asked about his "bid," "CO, I'm gonna be here till the sun burns out." Another day it was the quick response of a fellow officer who saw an inmate run into me and wasn't sure if it had been intentional: if it had, he was ready to subdue him for me, to put his own...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022611306X
• ISBN 13: 9780226113067
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 182
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland