Category: Nonfiction (Page 1 of 2)

Author Q & A with Susannah Cahalan

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 12)

New York Times bestselling author Susannah Cahalan shines a light on a turning point in the field of psychology with her second book, The Great Pretender.

The award-winning author of Brain on Fire, Cahalan presents in her new book a thoroughly researched and thoughtful assessment of Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan, whose 1973 undercover investigation into the country’s mental illness facilities would bring about major–and more compassionate–approaches to treatment.

The twist that Cahalan reveals is that Rosenhan was not forthcoming in many of the “facts” of that study–leaving readers with plenty of clues to make their own conclusions about his intentions.

As a writer who shared her shocking struggles with a rare autoimmune disease of the brain in her first book, Cahalan has become an influential voice on the approach to mental health in America.

She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

After your experience of having a rare autoimmune disease of the brain that was misdiagnosed as a mental illness (and led to your first book, Brain on Fire,) what caught your interest to write a book about Stanford psychiatrist David Rosenhan’s well-known study and subsequent article “On Being Sane in Insane Places’?

Susannah Cahalan

My interest was piqued during a conversation with two Harvard researchers who study the brain. I told them a bit about a woman who I call my “mirror image,” a young woman around my age who went misdiagnosed for two years and would never fully recover. It prompted one of the researchers to say that we both essentially were modern-day pseudo-patients–testing the nature of psychiatric diagnoses and finding it lacking, much like a famous pseudo-patient experiment in the 1970s.

I read the study that night in my hotel room and immediately was transfixed, not only by the focus on misdiagnosis but the beautiful, spot-on descriptions about how you are treated when there is a psychiatric label attached to you. I immediately knew that I wanted to learn more about the study and the man behind it.

In what ways has Rosenhan’s 1973 study been groundbreaking in changing the field of psychiatry?

You can’t really underplay the role that this one study had on psychiatry and public perception of the field. The study occurred right at the center of a lot of controversy hitting psychiatry–rampant public distrust, a movement away from Freud, issues with diagnosis, lack of clarity about its role within the rest of medicine. This study hit into the heart of all of its insecurities. It was an embarrassment to the field, and as I found out, even played a role in reshaping the field towards a more biological approach, encapsulated by the creation of the DSM-III. It also gave fodder to the antipsychiatry movement and to the growing push to close institutions, something called deinstitutionalization.

The Great Pretender is a journalistic investigation of Rosenhan’s study, as you searched diligently for the truth of what happened during his “experiment” that led to healthy people spending time in psychiatric facilities. As a result of your research, you discovered false statements and misinformation he included as “facts” in his report. What did you come to suspect was his motive was for this behavior?

I can only speculate about motives. I think that he truly believed that he was doing positive work–at the time institutions were often terrible, shameful places and I believe that he felt he was accurately pinpointing a real problem. I also think that he wanted to make a splash with this piece, and I think that he allowed himself to take many liberties with the truth to get that splash.

Why did you believe it was important to write this book and expose not only the good that became of Rosenhan’s work, but also the untruths he intended to pass off for true statements?

This study had such a tremendous effect and is still taught in many classrooms around the country. It’s still trotted out as evidence that psychiatry lacks validity and its institutions are harmful places.

Though I do think there are serious limitations within psychiatry and its institutions, it’s important to accurately pinpoint those problems so we can make progress. What this study does is allow us to look back, take a more nuanced and careful look at the mistakes and the misconceptions of the past, allowing us to clear the way for a real, open and honest discussion about the issues in mental health care for the future. At least I hope so.

Do you have suggestions for how your readers may be able to help those who experience mental health issues, in ways that could help make a difference?

On an individual level I think it’s important to understand that someone who struggles with serious mental illness is not always “ill.” We all at various points cross in and out of what we know as sanity and insanity. It’s so easy to discount people based solely on their diagnosis and I hope that this provides some more insight into the complexity of that experience. I hope it shines some light into the complexity of all of our experiences with mental/physical/emotional health.

I also hope that it calls into question why so many of us sympathize with people when they have a “physical” illness, but we are far more likely to ascribe blame or be frightened or suspicious of someone with a mental illness. Why do we do this? I think part of it is the fear of the unknown–the brain is one of the final frontiers and the idea that someone could lose themselves without a known reason is deeply unsettling.

That said, I hope you look at people actively struggling with serious mental illness with more compassion–much like you would someone with any kind of chronic physical illness–after reading my book. That’s my dream.

Lemuria has selected The Great Pretender its January 2020 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Staff Nonfiction Favorites for 2018

Before Christmas, we shared with you our favorite fiction books of the year. At the time, we also polled the staff about their favorite nonfiction books of the year. The only parameter was that it had to be published in 2018. In the holiday rush, we forgot to share! We are here to rectify that today. Maybe you can come to the store and pick up a great book in the down time after a busy holiday season, or find your favorite for 2019. Either way, we’ll be here to help.

  • John Evans, bookstore owner – Black Flags, Blue Waters by Eric Jay Dolin
  • Black Flags, Blue Waters is the swashbuckling reality of pirates in the early period of colonial formation. It’s a must-read for anybody going to the islands this winter. This book is big fun.

  • Kelly, book buyer and events manager – The Dinosaur Artist by Paige Williams
  • Austen, operations manager – 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan Peterson
  • Lisa, first editions manager – The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman
  • Hillary, front desk manager – The Meaning Revolution by Fred Kofman
  • Clara, former Oz manager – Congratulations, Who Are You Again? by Harrison Scott Key
  • Abbie, fiction supervisor – Educated by Tara Westover
  • Educated is a captivating and inspirational memoir about a girl breaking free from her eccentric family’s ideals to pursue an education. It will stay with you for a long time; it’s perfect for fans of The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls.

  • Guy, First Editions Club supervisor – Disappointment River by Brian Castner
  • Brian Castner’s Disappointment River is both a vivid history of early North American exploration and a reflective travel memoir following the author’s own retracing of a failed route through the Canadian wilderness.
  • Andrew, blog supervisor – The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington
  • Before I read The Cadaver King, I suspected it was going to be well-written, but I was surprised by how engrossing it also turned out to be. Mixing infuriating stories of injustice for Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer along with policy wonk details of Mississippi’s broken death investigation system, this book is not only good, but also important, if it can get people to pay attention to an important but neglected issue.

  • Aimee, bookseller – I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara
  • I am a true crime junkie; my favorite podcasts include My Favorite Murder, Criminal, and Last Seen. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is about a previously unsolved case concerning the Golden State Killer. McNamara expertly weaves evidence, witness statements and police files to create the full picture. (Fun fact: I wrote a blog about this book earlier in the year and we unknowingly posted it the same day the news broke that the Golden State Killer had been caught.)

  • Hunter, bookseller – The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte
  • A wonderfully accessible tale of some of the beasts that lived long before us, as well as a creative take on the story of how these creatures are discovered and studied, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs makes science fun and reawakens the fascination and curiosity about dinosaurs that exists in many.

  • Trianne, bookseller – Sick by Porochista Khakpour
  • In a world where physical illness is often ignored or misunderstood, Sick does not shy away from the reality of Lyme disease. Khakpour’s refreshingly irreverent memoir chronicles the progression of her sickness and brings a fractured beauty to the harsh truth that we all are bound by physicality.

  • Jack, bookseller – Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) by Jeff Tweedy
  • Jamie, bookseller – Heavy by Kiese Laymon
  • The scope of this memoir is truly American: race, violence, poverty, food, tenacity, deceit, honesty hope, fear, fearlessness, love. The honesty with which Laymon writes is heartrending, and his prose is impeccably gorgeous.

  • Norris, bookseller – The Library Book by Susan Orlean

Author Q & A with Julia Reed

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (August 5)

Mississippi’s Julia Reed, a columnist and author of six previous books, has blessed her fans with yet another salute to the South, this time with South Toward Home: Adventures and Misadventures in My Native Land, a collection of essays culled from “The High & the Low,” her regular column in Garden & Gun magazine.

A Greenville native, Reed left her hometown at 16 to attend Madeira School in McLean, Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C., then went on to Georgetown University and American University.

Her time at Madeira became the basis for two essays in South Toward Home, subtly named “Grace Under Pressure” and “Good Country, Bad Behavior.” Those essays, she explains, are about her high school years at the school and “and about how my murderous (true story) headmistress inadvertently kick-started my journalist career.” Other essays tend more toward the familiar, and cover such Southern topics as alligator hunting, summer camp, and the Delta Hot Tamale Festival.

With a foreword by Jon Meacham, the book earns points for Reed’s role as “one of the country’s most astute and insightful chroniclers of the things that matter most.”

Julia Reed

Reed began her career in the Washington bureau of Newsweek magazine and later worked in New York as an editor and writer for Vogue. In addition to writing for Garden & Gun, she contributes to Veranda and the Wall Street Journal‘s WSJ magazine.

Do you have plans to move back Greenville from New Orleans? I’ve heard you’re building a house in Greenville.

I will still keep my treehouse of an apartment in the Garden District of New Orleans. But I am indeed building a house in Greenville that is almost finished. It’s across a country road from the pasture where I used to keep my horse. It’s a slice of Delta heaven–I’m calling it my Delta Folly–and I’ve long had the dream of building a place on that spot. I can hardly wait to be in there with my hound dog Henry. Of course, I’ve already planned a kajillion parties.

Your new book is a collection of essays you’ve written about the South, including Mississippi. What do you hope readers will take from them?

There are plenty (of essays) about Mississippi, and especially about the Delta, since that’s always been “home” to me. But as Jon Meacham says in his foreword: “Her canvas is the whole South, stretching from the dives of New Orleans up through her beloved Delta and winding up, naturally, in the northern reaches of Virginia, at the Madeira School for girls.”

What I hope people get from them is a view of the South in all its complicated, sometimes embarrassing glory. I cover everything from Scotch whiskey to the lowly possum and a lot of stuff in between: our food, our music, our fun-loving proclivities, our tendency toward committing a whole lot of mayhem in the name of the Lord. One of the things I hope people take away from the book–and one of the things we might should teach the rest of the country, especially in these increasingly fraught times–is the crucial importance of being able to laugh at oneself.

The title of your book, of course, invokes memories of Mississippi writer Willie Morris’s North Toward Home. Tell me how the title of your book fits the theme of this work.

Willie was born in Yazoo City, not far from where I grew up, so of course I knew of him, even as a kid. I was still a kid when North Toward Home came out in 1967, but not long afterward, I read my parents’ copy and I knew, even then, that it was the kind of memoir every writer should aspire to. Willie, like so many of us, went north from Mississippi to make his fame and fortune, to create a life and career.

I had a wonderful, rich life and career as a journalist in Washington and New York. But after a while, I missed my native land. When I returned home for visits, I’d rent the biggest car I could find in Memphis–even though in those days there was a plane from Memphis to Greenville–roll down the windows and blare the air, and breathe in that inimitable Delta scent of soil and pesticide. I swear it was like heaven. One of my favorite drives remains that route from Memphis, much of which is on Old Highway One, the road that hugs the river parallel to Highway 61. Eden Brent has a terrific song about that road called “Mississippi Number One.”

Anyway, I finally moved back, as did Willie before he left us, so South Toward Home seemed appropriate as a title and an homage of sorts.

The humor in your writing is unmistakable, and it gives a lighthearted nudge to encourage fellow Southerners to laugh at themselves while considering a wide and diverse range of topics in South Toward Home–including the use of grits as a weapon, the mixture of lust and politics, and the merits of taxidermy, to name a few. How did you develop your keen sense of humor, and learn to shape it into your writing in the form of personal “life lessons,” often in the face of sobering circumstances?

Well, as I said,, we’ve long had more than enough reason to laugh at ourselves, so it’s a useful skill to have. Plus, there’s just a lot of stuff down here that’s flat out funny. I mean, in one of the book’s chapters I talk about a New Orleans socialite who not only planned her own funeral, but attended it–with a glass of champagne in hand. She was seated onstage at the Saenger Theater, a cigarette in one hand and champagne in the other while people went up to pay their respects–or just plain ogle. The photo of her dead self, living it up, made the front page of the Advocate. If I wrote that as fiction everyone would say it was too over the top. You literally can’t make this stuff up.

There’s another essay about the Mississippi coroner who declared one poor man dead–except that he wasn’t. They figured out he was alive when they saw movement in his leg just as they were about to pump him with embalming fluid.

As my friend Anne McGee said at the time, “That gives some new urgency to the phrase ‘Shake a leg.'” We almost fell over we started laughing so hard. What else is there to do? Life is pretty funny, and laughter is really, really good for you. It’s an infinitely better choice than the alternative.

I also had the good fortune to be raised by very funny parents who had very funny friends. It’s like not knowing what real Chinese food tastes like until you finally go to Chinatown–or something like that. I thought everybody was funny until I left home, and then, sadly, I found out otherwise.

In what ways would you say being a Mississippian has shaped your life and career positively; and in what areas would you say we still have a way to go?

I have a baseball cap that says, “American by Birth, Southern by the Grace of God.” It was given to me as a joke, but it’s sort of on the money. I am especially grateful that I was born in the time and place that I was–the Greenville I grew up in was a cultural hotbed, full of writers and artists and lots of goings on. We had a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper, which is still there, thank goodness. During that heyday of journalism, talented reporters came from all over the country to work for Hodding Carter. I decided that seemed like a pretty good way to make a living.

Plus, my next-door neighbors Bern and Franke Keating wrote a took pictures for National Geographic. I loved the idea of having a magazine send me around the world to learn stuff and I got a lot that when I was at Vogue. I went everywhere from Los Angeles to London to Paris to Manila to Moscow and Kabul. And I saws many, many miles of America on various presidential campaign buses and trains. I was really lucky in my career–I had a blast.

As for how far we have to go, Mississippi has done a pretty good job lately at facing down some our more shameful and horrific ghosts. When I come to Jackson to sign at Lemuria and again for the Book Fest, I want to make a lot time to experience the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, which I hear is amazing. But we should not allow ourselves to get complacent on that subject, ever.

And, of course, we have a whole lot more work to do on a lot of fronts. In one of the essays in the book, I make reference to our abysmal record in nutrition and education by saying that at this point we should just print up bumper stickers reading “First in Fatness, Last in Literacy.” That is actually not funny. Now that I’m going to be a homeowner in Greenville, I look forward to getting more deeply involved in the community and its many needs.

What can you share with readers about your appearance with Garden & Gun editor-in-chief David DiBenedetto at the Mississippi Book Festival this year?

Dave and I have done events like this a couple of times before. We love each other and we love to laugh and yack with each other. Our conversation onstage is not unlike the conversations we’ve had in various bars around the South.

Do you have other writing projects in mind at this time?

Next spring, my eighth book, Julia Reed’s New Orleans, a cooking and entertaining book that is a companion volume to Julia Reed’s South, will be published by Rizzoli.

Julia Reed will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, August 8, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from South Toward Home: Adventures and Misadventures in My Native Land.

Reed will also appear at the Mississippi Book Festival on August 18 in conversation with Garden & Gun editor David DiBenedetto at 12:00 p.m. at the Galloway Fellowship Center.

Author Q & A with Gary Krist

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 29)

Gary Krist’s fascinating account of the history of Los Angeles during the first three decades of the 20th century puts a highly personal face on the mage-city’s early days through the almost unbelievable stories of three of its most interesting and important influencers in The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles (Crown Publishing).

The stories of engineer William Mulholland, filmmaker D.W. Griffith, and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson weave a dramatic and entertaining narrative that reveals much of how the unique culture and personality of today’s Los Angeles evolved.

Krist also authored the bestselling Empire of Sin and City of Scoundrels as well as The White Cascade, along with five novels. HIs work has appeared in the New York TimesEsquire, the Wall Street JournalWashington Post Book World, and other publications.

His work has earned honors that include the Stephen Crane Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lowell Thomas Gold Medal for Travel Journalism, and others.

Gary Krist

Born and raised in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan, Krist earned a degree in Comparative Literature from Princeton and later studied in Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship. He went on to live in New York City, then Bethesda, Maryland, for more than two decades before returning to his home state of New Jersey–where today, he and his wife Elizabeth Cheng now live in “an apartment in Jersey City right on the river looking out toward lower Manhattan.”

In your most recent books, you’ve written about New Orleans (Empire of Sin) and Chicago (City of Scoundrels). What led you to write about Los Angeles?

I see The Mirage Factory as the third of a trilogy of city narratives, the first two being, as you mention, the books about Chicago and New Orleans. It’s been fascinating to explore how each city grew and developed over time, each one coping with similar issues but in different ways, depending on the particular people and circumstances in each place.

What intrigued me about Los Angeles was the fact that this remarkable urban entity grew up in a place where no city should logically be. The area was too dry, too far from natural resources and potential markets; it was isolated by deserts and mountain ranges and without a good deep-water port. And yet it grew from a largely agricultural town of 100,000 in 1900 to a major metropolis of 1.2 million by 1930. That feat required imagination, not to mention some really unorthodox tactics–including plenty of deceptive advertising–and that’s the story I wanted to tell.

Please explain the title of the book.

The main point I wanted to convey in the title is that, granted, the city being promoted in the early 20th century was at first more image than reality, but eventually the hard work was done to make those mirages real. Since the site of Los Angeles lacked so many of the usual inducements to growth, city boosters trying to convince people and businesses to move to L.A. had to do a little creative salesmanship.

For instance, L.A. was advertised as a blossoming garden in the desert long before it had enough water to sustain that image; but eventually, through an enormous expenditure of creativity, effort, and money, it solved the problem by building the aqueduct. The city was also attracting too little industry; it solved this problem by more or less creating its own brand-new industry–motion pictures–a business literally based on selling images to the public.

So, while some people have interpreted the title too negatively, I see the term “mirage” as having both negative and positive connotations; a mirage, after all, stops being fraudulent when it actually takes physical form and becomes real.

The stories of the rise and fall of the figures you’ve chosen to highlight in this well-documented history of Los Angeles from 1900 to 1930 would probably be deemed almost unbelievable if they were fictional. In The Mirage Factory, you’ve chosen “three flawed visionaries,” as you called them, to tell the story of the city’s growth and cultural development during these years: engineer William Mulholland, filmmaker D.W. Griffith; and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. When you were conducting research for ideas, how did you settle on these three?

I always like to put a human face on the history I’m telling, so I try to focus on a few individuals whose stories allow me to discuss the important issues in a concrete way. these people are not necessarily the most influential figures in a city’s history, and they’re certainly not the individuals who “single-handedly” built the city–cities are always a group effort. But they must in some way be representative of the larger forces that DID build the city.

In the case of The Mirage Factory, I needed individuals to represent the three strands of the story I wanted to weave together–what I sometimes refer to as the water story, the celluloid story (i.e. Hollywood), and the spirituality story.

The first was a no-brainer; Mulholland was the dominant figure in L.A.’s water story for decades, and you really can’t tell the city’s history without him. For the celluloid story, I had a number of possible choices–Cecil B. DeMille, Charlie Chaplin, or on the studio heads like Adolph Zukor–but ultimately Griffith seemed to be the seminal figure, the person most responsible for taking the motion picture from a vaudeville house novelty to an industry-supporting art form. And as for McPherson, she may seem an obscure choice, since she’s not well known now; but in her day, she was at least as famous and influential as the other two, and she brought a large number of spiritually-seeking people to L.A.

Of course, the fact that all three of these people were fascinating individuals–with character flaws as big as their talents–was a definite bonus for me as a storyteller.

The city’s explosion in population from 1900 to 1930 was incredible, and you state that there were three main migrations to the city: the first being the well-off; the second primarily middle class; and third being those lower socioeconomic status who arrived hoping to become laborers. Tell me about the evolution of the city’s population as the years passed.

One thing that really surprised me when I was researching was how relatively homogeneous L.A.’s population was in the early decades of the 20th century, compared to that of other American cities. Given L.A.’ s current identity as a rich multicultural center, it was astonishing to me that the Los Angeles of the 1900s and 1910s still lacked large Latino, Asian, and African-American populations. That changed, of course, over the 1920s and 1930s, and especially during and after World War II. But until the 1920s, the city was drawing new residents largely from the well-heeled white populations of the Midwestern and Eastern states.

Taking each of the main characters individually, I’ll start with the contributions of Mulholland–an uneducated, self-taught man who would later be recognized as one of the leading engineers in the world. Why was his role so vital to the city’s existence and its future?

Mulholland was a phenomenon–a tireless autodidact with a remarkable memory and a prodigious work ethic who chose to devote his entire life to taking on the technical challenges of his adopted city. Every city should be so lucky. He was chief engineer of the Department of Water and Power, and its predecessor agencies, for decades, during which time he built the city’s water system up from essentially a small network of wooden pipes and open ditches. Really, the conception and construction of the L.A. Aqueduct was only one of his many feats.

The problem with Mulholland was that he began to believe the fastest and most efficient way to get things done was to do it all himself. As a result, he often proceeded without sufficient oversight and input from people who might have had more expertise in a specific area. In the end, that was the character flaw that led to the St. Francis Dam disaster and finished his career.

The role that D.W. Griffith played in the film industry was a major contribution to the city’s growth, providing thousands of jobs. What made his efforts to establish the industry in Los Angeles so successful?

Griffith essentially laid the groundwork for narrative motion pictures by taking many of the techniques being developed in the early years–close-ups, tracking shots, crosscutting–and combining them into a coherent and flexible grammar of visual storytelling. He didn’t invent those techniques, as he sometimes claimed, but he was uniquely successful at blending them to tell a powerful story.

As for turning movies into a major industry, though, it was the extraordinary financial success of his film The Birth of a Nation–as problematic as its racism was and is–that finally convinced Wall Street and the Eastern banks that movies were more than just a cottage industry–that they could be a big business comparable to steel, oil, and textiles.

The story of Aimee Semple McPherson is one I’ve never heard, but fascinating. Her evangelistic leadership played into and strengthened the city’s openness about spiritual matters. How is her influence still seen in the city?

McPherson’s extremely high profile in the 1920s and 30s allowed her to spread the word about Los Angeles as a center of often unconventional spirituality. Her unique combination of a positive and inclusive message with a heavy dose of arresting spectacle, including faith healing, speaking in tongues, dramatic illustrated sermons, and the like, became a powerful attraction for seekers of all kinds.

That legacy is preserved in the continuing relevance of the church she built–the Angelus Temple in the Echo Park neighborhood–and its outreach ministry, the Dream Center, which aids the city’s poor, homeless, addicted, and displaced. And the religion she founded, the Church of the Foursquare Gospel, now has over 6 million members worldwide.

During its early years, Los Angeles was in somewhat of a competition with San Francisco to become a leading and more influential American city, despite its location in the middle of a large desert. Why did L.A. win?

I wouldn’t say that San Francisco has really “lost” the competition, since it remains a hugely vital and influential city, but L.A. has outstripped it in size and, arguably, at least, in worldwide impact. It’s hard to say exactly why that happened, especially since San Francisco had such a long lead on L.A., developing as a city many decades earlier.

In a way, Los Angeles had to work harder. For instance, San Francisco had a superb natural harbor; L.A., on the other hand, had to undertake extensive improvements to make its harbor competitive. San Francisco had the enormous wealth created by the gold rush to jump-start its growth; L.A. had to figure out creative ways to bring investment and population to the city. So maybe it’s a matter of necessity being the mother of invention.

I’m a big fan of yours. do you already have a new writing project in the works?

I’m still in the early stages of research for the next project, but San Francisco attracts me as another, entirely different city whose history I’d like to explore. So maybe my trilogy of city narratives will become a quartet.

The Mirage Factory is Lemuria’s August 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction. Gary Krist will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 18 as a participant in the American History panel at 10:45 a.m. at the C-SPAN room in Old Supreme Court Room at the State Capitol.

Long Live Los Angeles: ‘The Mirage Factory’ by Gary Krist

by Andrew Hedglin

I fell in love with Gary Krist’s previous book, Empire of Sin: A Story of Jazz, Sex, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans, a couple of years ago when I was preparing for a short trip to the Big Easy. The next spring, I caught up on another of his books, City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to a Modern Chicago.

mirage factoryI have come to the conclusion that Krist is the great pop urban historian of today. In lucid, well-researched prose, he tells not of great American city’s beginnings, but the genesis of the idea of that city–what each metropolis has to offer to the culture and popular imagination of this country. He returns this year with The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles.

More so than his previous two books, Krist structures The Mirage Factory around three seminal individuals. Each of these titans contributed to the incredible growth and out-sized influence of L.A that we know today. These three figures were William Mulholland, who built the Los Angeles Aqueduct, D.W. Griffith, who helped shaped the motion picture industry and directed its first (albeit highly problematic) blockbuster, and Aimee Semple McPherson, a wildly successful Pentecostal evangelist who helped establish the city as a place for alternative spiritual seeking.

L-R: Mulholland, Griffith, McPherson

L-R: Mulholland, Griffith, McPherson

My favorite sections were about the grit and glamour of nascent Hollywood, but McPherson also lived too interesting a life not to be magnetized by it. And while Mulholland’s sections might be the least enthralling, they are never dry, technical, or impossible to get through. Indeed, there is plenty of land intrigue such as that would inspire the story of Chinatown decades later. And the cataclysmic end to his career has to be experienced in full detail to be believed.

Los Angeles may not have the immediacy of New Orleans to those of us living in and around Jackson, but its story enthralls us because Los Angeles radiates an important portion the American dream: dreaming itself. The ability to remake your fortunes if you can only get there. After all, neither Mullholland, Griffith, nor McPherson was a native Angeleno. Mullholland and McPherson weren’t even from America.

At each turn, Krist emphasizes how these figures made what should not be possible, possible. Sometimes they accomplished this through illusion, such as in movies, or at great cost to those living around them, such as the aqueduct. But Krist is deft at reminding us of our country’s greatness, and the cost of that greatness. I myself thoroughly enjoyed my third trip into a bustling, alive American city at the dawn of the twentieth century with Krist as my guide.

The Mirage Factory is Lemuria’s August 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction. Gary Krist will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 18 as a participant in the American History panel at 10:45 a.m. at the C-SPAN room in Old Supreme Court Room at the State Capitol.

Open a Book to the Open Road: ‘The Long Haul’ by Finn Murphy

by Andrew Hedglin

I can already tell one of my deep regrets during my time here at Lemuria will be that I was not here when Finn Murphy came last October to promote his trucker memoir, The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tale of Life of the Road. He brought a rig with a custom decorative wrap on the trailer. It looked awesome. Alas, I was visiting my brother in Nashville at the time.

While I was preparing to take a road trip this summer and visit my other brother in Indianapolis, I unboxed Norton’s new releases only to find The Long Haul had just come out in paperback this June. I bought a copy to read on the road.

Murphy is not interesting in further mythologizing the trucker as seen in popular culture–your Smokey and the Bandit,  your “Convoy.” He acknowledges that many other truckers are influenced by it, but he paints himself as both in and outside what brotherhood does exist.

It turns out that within trucking, Murphy explains, as with any other profession, there exists a myriad of castes and specialties to which a trucker can ascribe. While freight haulers dominate the popular imagination, Murphy establishes himself as a long-distance mover–and these days, one usually contracted to help VIP clients for big bucks.

This gives Murphy an unexpected vantage point: he certainly illuminates his world on the highway; I could see into the cabs of trucks from the Greyhound bus I was riding. Cummins, a diesel engine manufacturer whose existence I had spent decades being oblivious of, had a headquarters in Indianapolis that I noticed immediately upon arrival.

But here’s the funny thing: Murphy not only shows us his world, but shows us our world in a mirror. He drives through countless American towns decimated by sprawl and globalization, enters our homes for moving assignments, weary from materialism and impermanence. He ruminates on the economy and race. What makes this trucking tale so fascinating ultimately is its access to so many entrances and intersections into our larger culture.

This is not to say Murphy has written a philosophy book. It is first and foremost a story. Occasionally (literally) unbelievable, often uproarious (the piano story had me cackling), and filled with distinct and intriguing personas and characters, The Long Haul is the perfect book to read this summer when you’ve decided you need to get away for a while.

Author Q & A with Andrew Lawler

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 10)

Author and journalist Andrew Lawler admits that, from the beginning, he was warned.

Because he had grown up immersed in the story of the lost colony of Roanoke, he expected immunity to the possibility he would get “sucked in,” as a friend put it, to the mystery of what happened to the 115 men, women, and children who landed on Roanoke Island off the coast of what is now North Carolina, in 1587.

Although the settlers were on a mission to establish the first English colony in the New World, they disappeared without a trace while their leader was away on a six-month resupply trip that had stretched into three years. They left only one clue–a “secret token” carved on a tree.

The question of their fate still haunts historians and archaeologists, and Lawler’s own literal journey to examine the ominous expedition resulted in his new book, The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. What he found, he concludes, offers fresh understanding as to why this mystery is relevant in today’s America.

Lawler is also the author of Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? and is a contributing writer for Science magazine and a contributing editor for Archaeology magazine. His writing has appeared in The New York TimesThe Washington PostNational Geographic, and other publications.

When did you first develop an interest in the lost colony of Roanoke?

Let’s just say that I had no choice. As a child growing up in southeastern Virginia, not far from Jamestown, there was no escaping history. Figures like John Smith and Thomas Jefferson were regularly mentioned at the dinner table.

On our annual beach trip, my family went to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This was back in the days when the only nightly entertainment was bingo and a dance hall. The third option was to see The Lost Colony, the three-plus-hour outdoor drama in the buggy woods of nearby Roanoke Island. We sat on hard wooden benches amid the mosquitoes as the organ blared, Indians danced, and sweating English soldiers marched around in breastplates.

It is one of the longest-running plays in American history, and it certainly seemed never-ending to me as a child. Written in the 1930s and performed ever since, it told teh story of the three voyages to the Outer Banks by the English in the 1580s, culminating in the arrival of the final group that today we call the “Lost Colonists.”

There was just enough action to keep a kid interested–plenty of sword fights, fireworks, and firearms going off. But what really fascinated me was the end, when all the settlers go marching off into the woods, hungry and ragged but singing bravely. Then it was our turn, as the audience filed out down the dark path to the parking lot. This was the very place where the Roanoke colonists vanished, and when I was small, that visceral quality of getting lost here struck me with terror. I was relieved to crawl into the back of the station wagon.

As a teenager, fascination replaced the terror. I devoured everything I could find about the colony, reading first-hand accounts and poring over John White’s beautiful watercolors of the Native Americans. But since there was no new evidence to solve the mystery, there seemed nothing fresh to say. Then a few years ago I ran into a British archaeologist while covering a conference at (The University of) Oxford for a magazine. When he told me that he was digging on Hatteras Island, I knew immediately what he was after. Then I found out another team was hard at work digging at another site where the colonists may have gone. Finally, there were new clues emerging. It was a chance to see a childhood mystery solved. Once again, I was hooked.

It seems, from some things mentioned in your book, that you took somewhat of a literary risk by writing The Secret Token. Did you ever doubt that you were doing the right thing?

Andrew Lawler

At first, I was plain embarrassed. I’d spent more than a decade covering the devastating cultural heritage tragedy still unfolding in the Middle East–the looting of the Iraq Museum, the Taliban efforts to wreck Afghan statues, and the ongoing destruction of ancient sites in Syria. Writing about a few dead Elizabethans seemed almost absurdly irrelevant. And when I brought up the “Lost Colony,” more than one historian smirked. It was all so wrapped up in cheesy pop culture, and most serious academics gave the entire episode a wide berth.

I thought I would just do a quick online story, but then it turned into a full-fledged magazine story. Then I realized that I was amassing so much material that it had to be a book. I’ve learned that when I have sinking feeling in my gut–the “Oh, no, anything but that” feeling, then I have hit on the story that I have to tell.

There are many theories about the fate of the English colonists who were never found. In your opinion, which one is the most outlandish? Most reasonable?

My personal favorite is that the colonists turned into zombies that are still out there in those spooky Roanoke woods. Alien abduction is another. Of course, there are can’t -be-proven theories–that they sailed away on their small ship and drowned. We know now that  a severe drought afflicted that time period, and some argued they starved to death. But when you look at later “lost” Europeans, most of them simply deserted to or were captured by Native Americans. As Benjamin Franklin noted, few wanted to return, even if they were taken by force. This was what I call colonial America’s dirty little secret.

So, it seems pretty obvious that if you are hungry and don’t know how to survive in a strange environment, you will find people who know what they are doing–and in this case, that was the local Native American population. Eastern North Carolina was filled with thousands of people who thrived in villages and towns, planting crops while also gathering plants and hunting animals. The English didn’t land in a wilderness. So, most historians who have studied the Roanoke voyages agree they did what most of us likely would do–hang out with the people who could make sure you were fed, kept warm, and protected from enemies. In return, they had skills the Indians wanted, like how to make metal implements.

You traveled to Portugal to research the life of the pilot Fernandes. What was the most important thing you learned on this trip, and did you travel to other places for research?

This was a crazy effort to track down a bizarre rumor. The private papers of the Roanoke navigator Simao Fernandes were said to have surfaced in Portugal. A couple of American historians had tried and failed to verify the story, which promised to rewrite our entire understanding of the voyages, and I couldn’t resist the challenge. After running around Portugal and Spain pursuing every lead, I came up empty-handed. But as was always the case with following what seemed a dead end in this tale, I stumbled into something unexpected and important.

In this case, I found that Fernandes was not the villain he was portrayed to be, and that, in fact, he was quite possibly the real mind behind the entire project. He knew and understood the emerging global economy better than any Englishman of his day. And since Roanoke laid the foundation for Jamestown and all other English efforts that followed, you could say this obscure Portuguese pirate played a central role in launching both the United States and the British Empire.

You wrote that “In a nation fractured by views on race, gender, and immigration, we are still struggling with what it means to be American.” Explain in what ways gender issues are tied to this story.

A woman writer named Eliza Lanesford Cushing coined the term “Lost Colony” and made Virginia Dare a folk sensation in the 1830s. This was a moment when women’s magazines first appeared, and women writers like Cushing finally had outlets for their work. But American history at that time was exclusively about men, Betsy Ross being the exception proving the rule. Women were portrayed as bit players in Jamestown and Plymouth when they appeared at all. Men got the credit for “taming the wilderness.”

All we know about Virginia Dare was her name and when she was born and baptized, but her status as the first English child born in the Americas gave women a stake in the origin story of the United States. The Virginia Dare stories, though almost wholly fabricated, became wildly popular among women in the 19th century. They finally could see themselves in the drama that led to the nation’s founding.

Is there any hard evidence that the English settlers “chose” to adopt the Native American lifestyle, as some have suggested?

If they wanted to live, the settlers had to become Native Americans. When Europeans first arrived on the North American coast, they didn’t have the skills to survive, even when their ships regularly brought supplies. They depended on trading their goods with the locals for food. Without the indigenous peoples, all the early European settlements almost certainly would have failed.

Finding hard evidence for Lost Colony assimilation, however, is tricky. If they became Native American, would Jamestown settlers 20 years later have recognized them? Probably not. There certainly are hints that when John White came back in 1590, three years after leaving for England to get supplies, he was watched by people–perhaps including assimilated Lost Colonists who dreaded boarding a cramped and stinking ship for a long passage back to gloomy and plague-ridden London. But I pieced together circumstantial bits of evidence to make a what I think is a compelling case that the Elizabethans became Algonquian speakers–and that their most likely descendants ended up in a most surprising place.

Why is the story of the Lost Colony relevant today?

There are moments in the life of our nation when what it means to be American becomes hotly contested. This was true in the 1830s, when an influx of German and Irish shook up the majority Anglo-Americans. Certainly, during and after the Civil War we differed on whether African Americans could or should be full citizens.

A century ago, we decided women should be able to vote, though at the same time we didn’t generally considers of Italians or Jews to be “white.” In each of these periods, the story of the Lost Colony served as a fable reflecting these tensions. So it is today, with groups like Vdare Foundation warning whites about the dangers of being outnumbered by non-European immigrants. So, I can’t think of a more relevant story in today’s climate.

Do you have ideas in the works for an upcoming book?

I’m drawn to the ancient tales that seem to define how we see the world today. Right now, I’m spending time in the Middle East exploring the source of religious tension there. Few places on Earth are so driven by old stories, particularly those that many see as God-given.

Andrew Lawler will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, June 13, to sign and read from The Secret TokenThe Secret Token is Lemuria’s July 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Author Q & A with Brian Castner

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 15)

For a man who never intended to be a writer and admits that he “stumbled into it,” Brian Castner’s work has landed on solid footing thus far.

disappointment riverHis newest book, Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage, follows his own bold journey to retrace a 1789 expedition whose leader had hoped would finally unlock a North American passage to Asia–and change world trade forever.

Castner’s original goal of becoming an engineer got sidetracked years ago, and after a successful Air Force career that found him detonating bombs on a regular basis, the Iraq War veteran returned home to find that writing would become his tool to work through lingering stress from his military years.

His previous books include the memoir The Long Walk in 2012 (a New York Times Editor’s Pick that was adapted into an opera); and the nonfiction All the Ways We Kill and Die in 2016. His journalism and essays have appeared in Esquire, Wired, VICE, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and others.

How did your engineering background lead you, in a roundabout way, into your writing career?

Brian Castner

Brian Castner

I grew up in Buffalo, New York, went to Marquette University in Milwaukee, and majored in electrical engineering. I was never a good engineer, though. I got good grades, but I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t think like other engineers. But the engineering degree was a means to an end, because I had an ROTC scholarship, and wanted to get into the Air Force to be an astronaut. I’ve always wanted to explore–the further out, the better! Obviously, that didn’t work out, but writing has let me travel the world.

I’ve always liked to read, and as a kid I wrote a lot, in middle school and high school. Even in college, I tried to escape engineering a bit, and studied a semester in Oxford, reading philosophy, history, and English. I even took a playwriting class. But I never considered a career in writing. I didn’t think it was a job that contemporary adults really did. I didn’t know any authors until I became one. I stumbled into it.

You served three tours of duty in the Middle East, working as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer (a bomb squad tech) in the Air Force and winning a Bronze Star. When you returned home, you spent a good while readjusting to civilian life, and fed your adventurous side by working as a river guide. When you decided to retrace Alexander Mackenzie’s 1,100-mile exploration in 1789 of a river he hoped would finally uncover the “Northwest Passage” in northern Canada, how did your family (your wife and four sons) react, and why was it so important to you to make this dangerous journey?

I did struggle returning home, a story I tell in The Long Walk. River guiding really helped me find peace in the tumult–when you are in the middle of the rapid, you have to be totally present, to think about nothing but your line–that is, your safest path through the water–and the water itself. I have a calm feeling in the whitewater and it gave me a safe way to chill out and readjust to home life.

For this trip, I don’t have a good answer to what drove me. I find it to be an urge, a base instinct. I had always wanted to take a long journey like this, walking or canoeing, months in the wilderness. When I came upon Mackenzie’s story, I was entranced by the narrative, but also by the possibility of taking the journey myself, to write a better book. It fulfilled a long-held desire, and that it was Mackenzie’s journey I was retracing is a matter of scholarly research and serendipity.

A few of my four sons wanted to come with me; my wife put the kibosh on that. I also invited her along, for at least a section, but she smartly demurred. They know me, know why this trip excited me. And the good news is that as I get older, the fernweh [wanderlust] seems to be fading. At least a bit.

Disappointment River alternates between the detailed stories of your journey and that of Alexander Mackenzie, a fur trader who knew that his success in finding a Northwest Passage–a trade route through North America that would provide a direct channel to the East–would not only secure his place in history, but would ensure his fortune as well. Why did you decide to tell both stories?

Because these are the kinds of stories I most like to read, a blending of forgotten history and travelogue. But also, one story didn’t make sense without the other. On the one hand, I’ve had enough internal voyages of discovery. I didn’t need to take a long canoe trip to find myself. I needed an external goal and finish line, and retracing Mackenzie’s path provided that. At the same time, if I just told Mackenzie’s story, I think most readers would have an obvious question: I wonder what this land is like now? That Mackenzie encountered fierce pack ice at the end of his journey, and I suspected I would find open ocean, lent another bit of symmetry to the trip.

On your own journey, you worked out a plan that allowed four of your friends to jump in and accompany you, one at a time, via small airports along the way. Their travel schedules dictated that you were allowed little time to rest along the way. Tell me how having these friends join you–and the schedule you were forced to keep–influenced your trip.

As I write in the book, I had no interest in doing a psychological experiment on myself, to see if I could do the trip by myself; it was always about finding the right people to go with me. At first, I hoped to get one friend to do the whole trip, but no one had the time. Doing four friends, and rotating the flights, was a matter of necessity. I think it had benefits in the book, though–a variety of characters for the reader to get to know.

The tight schedule did produce some anxiety, but…pretty early on in the trip, you realize how small and powerless you are against the might of the river. So, I worried before the trip, but during it, you simply make the best time you can and realize how much is out of your control. The cold, wet, heat, thunderstorms, bugs, and hunger drove us as much as a schedule. I wanted to finish the trip, succeed, and get home to my kids.

In the book, you speak often of the difficulties you faced–several serious run-ins with storms and high winds, high waves, and, at times, even hunger. You often mentioned the stress, exertion, filth, heat, and mosquitoes–and how it took a toll on your mind and body. Did you expect it to be this difficult? Of what were you most fearful? What did you miss the most?

I expected it to be physically taxing, and I knew how to patiently endure the weather and hunger. But I wasn’t good at predicting how mentally challenging the monotony was. I didn’t know I would be so bored, for such long stretches–the view never changing, the sun never changing, the food never changing, nothing more to talk about, just paddling through a constant now. That tedium was the biggest challenge.

My biggest fear was not bears or weather or waves, honestly. It was getting injured or sick. I had a big med kit with a lot of drugs, like cipro, but fortunately, I never needed it.

I missed a lot of things on the river, especially my kids. But all the modern conveniences, the thing I missed most was darkness. The ability to draw the blinds and make a dark bedroom. It felt so good to sleep in darkness.

As you traveled north, you were able to get a sense of the cultures and lives of the people in these tiny villages. What did you discover about their hopes and fears?

I had read a lot on the struggles in northern indigenous Canada: poverty, alcoholism, suicide. But I was unprepared for the reality of it, the casual public intoxication at all hours, the pervasive want. Of course, I met wonderful generous people, who took me into their homes and told me stories of living on the land in the traditional way. But they talked about the alcohol and poverty, too, all the time. I didn’t have to bring it up–there is no way to avoid it. There is just a pervasive hopelessness–the traditional ways are hard. Please rid yourself of any romance now–living off the land is hard and dangerous work, a hard life. No wonder the young people are not clamoring to take it up, not when they know all about modern life on satellite TV. But what replaces it, in these tiny villages in the North? The pipeline? Tourism? There is not much answer now.

For reasons I’ll let readers discover, Mackenzie believed for the rest of his life that his voyage to find the Northwest Passage was a “spectacular failure”–but he could never know the truth. His book about it became a worldwide bestseller, and he received much affirmation. What do you think his greatest achievement was?

I think his greatest…achievement is that he never lost a man or woman on his expeditions. This was hardly an assured thing. Voyagers died in the rapids all the time. Attack by the indigenous tribes was a real threat–the next expedition to follow Mackenzie down his river, in 1799, was ambushed and wiped out. John Franklin followed Mackenzie’s route in 1819, and his party resorted to cannibalism. Despite the hazards of the whitewater, violence, and starvation, not a single person died on his great journeys in 1789 and 1793. In retrospect, that is remarkable.

What did this experience help you learn about yourself? Would you do it again?

After this trip, I feel like I have nothing left to prove. Even to myself. Maybe especially to myself. That might sound funny, since I have survived other crucibles that are supposed to impart that feeling–in EOD school, 30 of us started and only three finished. But I had never taken a long wilderness journey like this before. And I feel like I’m good now–if I never hike the Appalachian Trail, I’m fine.

I wouldn’t do a trip like this again, not without my wife and some of my children. There is nothing hiding behind the next spruce tree that is more important than them.

Do you have another book or idea in thew works at this time?

I have started my next book, and it will be published again by Doubleday. But I hesitate to say too much, lest the ideas and inspiration slip away into the ether. I can say this, though: it is nonfiction, history, a story of the North, and I do have to take a backpacking trip into the mountains. Yes, my sons go, too!

Disappointment River is a 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Author Q & A with Francisco Cantú

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print and online editions (April 8)

When Francisco Cantú decided to join the U.S. Border Patrol as a new college graduate in 2008, he expected the work to be tough, but after four years, the realities of the job forced him to examine the morality of his duties–and a gut check told him clearly: “It’s not the work for me.”

line becomes a riverIn a memoir about his duties with the patrol, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border (Riverhead Books), Cantú recounts the physical and emotional toll the experience took on him, and his growing angst about what really happens in the desert to those who attempt to cross.

Written in three parts, the book describes his training and introduction to the brutal field work; his transfer to a desk job in the intelligence division; and his personal involvement in the case of an undocumented friend who got caught up in the legalities of crossing the border.

A former Fulbright fellow, Cantú was a recipient of a Whiting Award for emerging writers in 2017. His work has been featured on the This American Life radio/podcast and in Best American EssaysHarper’sGuernicaOrion, and n + 1.

He received his MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Arizona. When he’s not writing, Cantú coordinates a research fellowship that connects MFA students with advocacy groups active in environment and social justice issues in the borderlands; teaches at the University Poetry Center; and tends bar.

When you decided to pursue a career as a U.S. Border Patrol, you knew it would be a tough job–that you would be “fetching dead bodies from the desert” in 115-degree heat, and you were cautioned by one of your early trainers: “You will be tested.” What inspired you to seek employment as a border patrol agent?

Francisco Cantú

Francisco Cantú

When I first began to consider signing up for the Border Patrol, I was 22, about to graduate from college. I had become completely obsessed with the border during my studies in international relations, but began to feel that much of the book learning and policy work I had been doing was disconnected from the realities of the landscape and culture that I had known growing up. At the time, the border patrol began to seem like one of the only ways to really be out on the border day in and day out, to see the hard realities of the place.

I joined hoping to be a “force for good” within the agency, imagining I might spend several years in the patrol and then become a policy maker or immigration lawyer equipped with insights that had eluded everyone else. I knew I’d see awful things, but I imagined that I’d be able to just be an observer, not a participant, that my sense of morals and ethics would withstand the numbing forces of the institution. It was incredibly naïve.

Understandably, when your Mexican-American mother heard of your plans to work as a border patrol agent, she feared for you life and your psyche, worried that it would change you in hard ways. Throughout the book, there are episodes of her offering advice and reflections about your work. Looking back, do you see some wisdom in her words now that you didn’t see then?

From the very beginning, my mother sensed the risk I was running of becoming lost. She had spent her career working for the federal government and warned me how it is impossible to step into an institution without it repurposing your energy towards its own ends. I wish I’d listened to her more–like many young adults I thought of myself as infallible.

My mother was the only person in my life that was still holding me accountable, reminding me of the reasons I had given for joining. She was one of the only tethers connecting me to who I was outside of the job. I don’t know if I would have come out of it in the same way without her.

Your book is filled with references to frequent disturbing dreams that haunted your nights. You also suffered from teeth grinding and lack of sleep during your stint as an agent. What did you make of these episodes?

At the time, I pushed them away. But looking back on it, these dreams were the only thing in my life, other than my mother, reaching out to tell me that something was wrong, that I was not alright. It’s alarming to think of how plainly violence and dehumanization was manifest in my dreams and how it correlated with becoming numb to it through my work. I would dream, for example, of dead bodies, of people I had arrested returning to me. I once dreamed that I was in the desert surrounded by people without faces. The longer I ignored the dreams, the more jarring they became. I realize now my nightmares were alarm bells, calling me back to my sense of humanity, calling my attention to something that had been violated.

Your days as an agent were filled with encounters with immigrants headed north, determined to enter the U.S. at almost any cost. Some were drug dealers or worse, but most were just looking for honest work. You admit there were times you would work with desperate people at points along the way, often in miserable circumstances, and you would soon forget their names. Did you feel like you became desensitized to the violence and despair of many of these people?

Absolutely. The normalization of violence is a central theme of this book. That moment you mention, when I realized I had forgotten the names of a pregnant woman and her husband that I’d arrested only hours before, is one of those moments I think of all the time, because I think that’s the first step in dehumanizing someone–forgetting their name, the thing that makes them an individual. It’s a small form of violence, and, looking at that–all the big and small ways we become desensitized to violence and despair–that was one of the principal things that led me to write after I left the job.

It felt like one of the only ways to truly grapple with what I’d been part of. I became interested not only in interrogating the ways I had normalized violence in my own life, but in examining how this also happens on a much broader level, how entire societies and populations normalize violence, especially in the borderlands.

The book includes a great deal of the history of the border situation, along with reflective pieces by other writers whose point of view you deemed relevant. How did you choose these pieces, and why did you add them?

Early drafts of the manuscript included some history of the border, but I was actually given permission by my editor to include even more outside research, to really look at how this border came to be what it is. That was exciting to me–it opened the door for me to include different kinds of work that had influenced my thinking about this place: writing from Mexican poet Sara Uribe, novelist and essayist Cristina Rivera Garza, as well as citations from primary documents like the U.S. Boundary Commission Reports from the 1800s.

The purpose of including such a wide spectrum of research was to encourage an interrogation of borders: most people who don’t live near one would probably tend to think of the border as a political or physical line separating two countries. But part of living in the borderlands is being constantly presented with different manifestations of the border and seeing all the different ways it is thrust into people’s lives.

Why did you ultimately quit your job as a border patrol agent?

I accepted a Fulbright Fellowship to study abroad. There were several reasons I applied for it, and one of them, I’m sure, was to subconsciously provide myself with a way out of the job that didn’t represent a defeat, that represented a path ahead. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see that I had finally started to break down.

Once I left the Border Patrol, I realized that I didn’t get any of the answers I had joined looking for–I only came away with more questions, and the border only seemed more overwhelming and incomprehensible. My turn toward writing was a way of accepting that, of surrendering to the act of asking questions that might not have an answer.

The final third of the book is devoted to the story of José, a friend you met after your border patrol years who became trapped in Mexico after returning to his native home to visit his dying mother. José comments at length about the difficulties of trying to cross the border to return to his family, and he places much blame on the Mexican government for its corruption and lack of aid and support for its own people; while chastising America for its seeming inhumanity in attempting to turn them away. Do you have a sense of what could or should be done to resolve, or at least ease, the crisis?

I remember José explaining to me that as a father there is literally nothing that he wouldn’t endure to reunite with his children. It’s hard to really grasp the significance of somebody saying, “It doesn’t matter how hellacious an obstacle is, I will overcome it to be with my family.”

José explained to me that he respects the laws of the U.S., but his family values supersede those laws. Our rhetoric encourages us to think of people like José as criminals, but under those terms, it’s impossible for me to look at his actions as criminal. I think most of us would do the same in his situation.

I think we have to end the de facto policy of “enforcement through deterrence,” which is something you don’t hear our policy makers talk about in any of their discussions about immigration reform. By heavily enforcing the easy-to-cross portions of the border near towns and cities, we’ve been pushing migrants to cross int he most remote and deadly parts of the desert, weaponizing the landscape.

Hundreds of deaths occur there each year, and those are just the ones that get reported. Around 6,000 and 7,000 migrants have lost their lives since the year 2000. Even last year, the administration bragged that crossings were down to their lowest level in more than 14 years, but what you didn’t hear is that migrant deaths actually went up from the year before, not down. So even though less people are crossing the border, the crossing is becoming more deadly.

I see this as a complete humanitarian crisis taking place on American soil, and I don’t see our country acknowledging these deaths in the way we should. We don’t read their names, we don’t memorialize them, we don’t mourn their deaths. That’s unacceptable. We have to understand these numbers, first and foremost, as representing individual people, individual lives.

Francisco Cantú will be at Lemuria  tonight, Monday, April 9, at 5:00 to sign and read from The Line Becomes a River. This book is a 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Canoeist creates part history, part travel memoir in ‘Disappointment River’

By Boyce Upholt. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 25)

disappointment riverThe modern explorer has to live with a simple truth: there is nowhere left that has not already been observed. Though that disappointment can also be a gift.
In 2016, the writer Brian Castner canoed the length of the Mackenzie River, the longest in Canada. He was—quite intentionally—following in the footsteps of the river’s namesake, Alexander Mackenzie.

In 1789, the Scottish explorer traveled its length in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. I’ve read about Mackenzie before, but somehow no image of the man and his history has ever stuck. In Canada, meanwhile, Mackenzie is a minor national figure, the namesake for not just the river, but schools and towns.

A few years after his river quest, Mackenzie successfully crossed North America east to west, beating Lewis and Clark by more than a decade. (The American explorers carried a copy of Mackenzie’s book as a guide.)

The result of Castner’s trip is Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage, a rollicking read that, in alternating chapters, sets the writer’s adventures against Mackenzie’s expedition.

The remarkable geography of that river—which, like Castner, I will henceforth call the Deh Cho, in deference to the indigenous people who knew it long before Mackenzie’s “discovery”—are reason enough to read this book.

The Deh Cho, the thirteenth-longest river in the world, is the northern answer to the Mississippi, and drains a basin almost nearly as large. Wide and turbid, it winds past mountains, through tundra, across vast Arctic swamps. Inuit and Dene villages hug its shores.

For most of us, I have to think, this river is terra incognita. It’s rarely mentioned in the news, and impossible to observe on Google Street View. As Castner puts it, it’s “a place you have to see in person if you want to see at all.”

But Castner’s words are the next best thing, and they will be a delight to any armchair explorer. Frankly, I found the river more compelling than Mackenzie himself. Castner spends nearly half of the book getting us up to speed on the explorer—his youth, his rise in the fur trade, etc.—and it’s all well-told and useful.

But it’s something of a relief when Mackenzie finally embarks on the Deh Cho; now Castner can, too. His taut descriptions of his travel are by far the book’s highlight.
But both stories are necessary, as the book’s strongest message is delivered in its comparisons. Mackenzie, at the mouth of Deh Cho, found a wall of impenetrable ice. Thanks to a changing climate, Castner finds none at all. The river’s wildness persists, but today it’s pockmarked with gritty towns devoted to extracting oil and metals from the earth.

Mackenzie wouldn’t blink these such developments. He was, in Castner’s words, “the product of an age”: explorers in his era weren’t seeking wilderness adventure; discovery, for them, was a way to drag commerce and capitalism forward in the world.

Castner, meanwhile, knows he’s discovering nothing, except maybe himself. But that humility is freeing. Every acre of land on this continent has been known to someone, and for thousands of years. The only story left for explorers is the one most worth telling: why and how a place so vibrant can be overlooked by so much of the world.

Boyce Upholt is a freelance writer based in the Mississippi Delta. He is at work on a nonfiction book about the Mississippi River, and a novel about the aftermath of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Brian Castner will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, March 28, at 5:00 to sign and read from Disappointment River. This book is a 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

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