Five Minutes With: Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers’ first book, the incredibly funny and raw and sad memoir of his parents’ death, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, made him a literary celebrity and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. But that is really just a small part of the story. He also presides over McSweeney’s, a quirkily humorous literary journal and resolutely independent mini-publishing empire. His fiction has appeared everywhere from The New Yorker to Punk Planet and he edits an annual collection of fiction, essays and journalism called The Best American Nonrequired Reading. His graphic design for McSweeney’s got him featured in the National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. If all that didn’t keep him busy enough, he has parlayed the fame and financial dividends from his best-selling literary achievements into an assortment of incredible projects, most notably 826 Valencia, a writing lab for young people that he founded in San Francisco, where he now lives. There, Eggers and an army of volunteer tutors teach writing, run SAT prep courses, help kids launch student publications, and conduct workshops in public schools. 826 Valencia has since spawned two siblings in Los Angeles and New York. Eggers grew up close to Chicago and attended the University of Illinois. He talked to Campus Progress about the Lost Boys of Sudan, abysmal teachers’ salaries, pirates, Abraham Lincoln, and the writing life.

Your next book is about the Lost Boys of Sudan. How did you get involved with the Sudanese refugees?

It started about three years ago. A woman named Mary Williams works with the Lost Boys in Atlanta, getting them settled, helping them with educational needs and job needs. When these boys — actually young men now — come over, theygot about three months of aid. They can pay rent and afford food for three months and then they were on their own. A lot of local churches and foundations stepped in and helped them make the transition, including Mary’s foundation. A while back she asked if I wanted to help out with the biography of Dominic Arou, one of the Lost Boys. So I went down to Atlanta and met Dominic at a birthday party — because the UN gave all of them the same birthday, January 1 — the Lost Boys have there every year together.

The book covers about twenty years or so. It’s an attempt to tell the whole story about the civil war, the causes and its historical underpinnings. It’s turned into a big sprawling novel.

How did you go about educating yourself on the issue? Was it new to you?

Mary Williams read my first book and thought I might be interested. I had always been interested in Africa, but at that point I was starting from scratch in terms of educating myself about Sudan. I read everything I could find. That’s partly why I’ve been working on it for a long time. Only after about three years do I feel I have a good grip on everything I should know.

A year ago, Dominic and I went to Sudan. He had always wanted to go back to his village in Southern Sudan that he left when he was seven, and find his family, because he had word they were still alive. So we were able to sort of sneak into Southern Sudan on an aid flight, and re-unite him with his family.

On the domestic frontier, you are about to release a book about teachers salaries. What’s the story with it?

I worked on it with Ninive Calegari, the director of 826 Valencia, and Daniel Moulthrop, a teacher we know from the Bay Area schools who’s now a journalist. It comes out in about a month. It’s mostly an oral history of teachers around the country talking about their lives and it also has examples of programs that work and school districts that tried to improve salaries and what challenges they faced. It’s kind of eye-opening. There are so many teachers working 2 or 3 jobs, selling radios at Circuit City at night, having to be away from their own family. They can’t afford homes where they teach. They’re paid nowhere near what anyone else with their education level is, and that impacts their job and the community. It’s really kind of terrifying knowing how many great teachers have to quit because they can’t afford it. Fifty percent quit in the first five years. I’ve had friends who have had to quit here in San Francisco. We profiled some of those teachers who had to quit, and the book’s opinion is that the first thing that needs fixing in public schools is the salaries of teachers. If you pay teachers better, you’d have more stable school cultures, happier professionals, with the best teachers staying in the profession and solving the smaller problems that schools face.

And you have yet another project, a film adaptation of the children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, with director Spike Jonze. Can you tell us anything about it?

It’s still a little ways off. I think it’s safe to say that it will be as unexpected and dangerous as Maurice Sendak’s original book was when it came out.

I remember when I was five I thought his book In the Night Kitchen was pornographic.

It scared the hell out of me! They bake the kid in the oven! They bake him into a loaf of bread, I think. That’s Sendak, though. He doesn’t think “Oh, what will kids like, and what will parents approve of? What will the child psychologists want me to do?” He really just does what he wants to do, and that’s why the books are still so startling.

You are involved in so many simultaneous projects, it sort of flouts that stereotypical notion of cloistered writers who think the world turns on their observations. How does it work for you? Is it harder or easier to write with so many projects in the air?

Well, for the most part the projects are separate, and they take place over a long stretch of time — three years for the book about Sudan, for example, and about two years now for Wild Things. When I’m writing the Sudan book I’ll take a month off and I’ll just be completely immersed in that and nothing else. There is truth to the fact that to write well you need a lot of time in isolation. But then you can always sort of jump back in the fray for a while — you need to, I think. I did spend about a year and a half as one of those cloistered writers thinking that the world turned on my observations. My wife and I spent a lot of time out of the country just writing.

Where did you go?

We were in Costa Rica for a while, New Zealand for a while, and Iceland for a while. We did get a lot of writing done but we felt really incredibly disconnected and not in a good way. There is a balance that everybody needs to find – how much engagement with their community they can and should do and how much time they need to work out on their own. Writing all day every day away from everybody wasn’t the right balance for me. When I was writing, the idea for 826 Valencia was forming. I talked to my teacher friends over the phone about the concept, and we eventually began forming the idea of a writing—publishing-tutoring center. We just wanted to connect this vast untapped volunteer base and offer it to the city’s teachers and parents. We find now that a lot of writers who had never thought of teaching before are really rewarded by it, they learn so much about what the high schoolers are really thinking now.

So what is on the mind of high school students?

Nothing much different than when you were in high school. We have 670 tutors in San Francisco and we send them into public schools all over the city. One of the tutors was recently telling me that he thought the students would be mean to him or wouldn’t want help or would think he was a dork or whatever. But when we work in these so-called “underperforming” schools, we invariably find that the students are really thankful- they’re incredibly excited to share their thoughts and their writing with the tutors. The tutoring sessions are kind of heartwarming in a way you can’t believe. At my last session, the students were working on oral histories of their relatives who had immigrated to the U.S. The stories were phenomenal. One of the best students that day- his father was Cambodian and had been made to fight for the Khmer Rouge and finally escaped and came here on a boat- and this student didn’t know any of this before he started the project. The project was initiated by this teacher at Balboa High School, and we were just there to help edit the stories, but it was an amazing thing, watching these kids get excited about their heritage.

As the Co-Editor of The Future Dictionary of America, which has both a lot of political gallows humor and a lot of hope, what would you say to our young readers who are struggling to keep their eyes on the prize after having this sort of deflating political experience?

We actually got a lot of donations to 826 right after the election. We had a surge of volunteers. A lot of people wanted to dig in and do something tangible. That’s one thing to remember – a good deal of the work that affects change is done one on one and block by block. So, my recommendation would be to get involved in something tangible.

But still, I really think the Democrats and the left in general sometimes gets a late start because everybody licks their wounds for a couple of years before getting geared up again — and then it’s already too late. I think Karl Rove and Co. were thinking eight years ago about where we are at now in terms of nurturing the electorate they’ve got now. It’s like they were off somewhere building some secret clone army. Sorry, I was just watching Star Wars and clones are on my mind.

You only marketed your second novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, through your website and independent bookstores. Were you ever worried that it would limit your readership too much?

Well, we were concerned. “What if someone lives in Alabama and there isn’t an independent bookstore nearby?” That’s why we sell it online. I remember when I was growing up, I couldn’t get the records I wanted to, and so I ordered everything through the mail— lots of stuff from England and Australia. There were basically two choices with Velocity: go through a major publisher again, and have it splashed over every chain bookstore, or try to partner up with independent bookstores and do it on sort of a more modest scale and get people into these stores that they might not otherwise go to. We had a chance to make a small point, and to help the stores that help us.If it means going two extra blocks to an ndependent store as opposed to a chain store, that’s a good thing — that was what we were trying to get people to do.

As a purveyor of a pirate store yourself, I thought you might be interested in a recent news story about a college student in North Carolina who is running for class president on the platform of being a pirate. He’ll only come to debates dressed as a pirate, he won’t have a platform, only a “plank.”

That’s awesome.

So why on earth does your 826 Valencia tutoring center have a pirate store in the front?

We didn’t have any particular interest in pirates beforehand. The landlord insisted that we sell something to get the lease. We had torn up the rubber floors and the acoustic-tile ceiling, and underneath, this place had very old wooden floors and beams. It had the look of an old ship, actually. So that was it, it was just kind of someone’s random idea when we were renovating, and we just went with it. It’s turned into a good source of funding, and a way that people can come in off the street and see what the nonprofit’s doing. We didn’t think the pirate theme would last, though; we thought we’d just change it every six months or so.

What were some other themes you considered?

Some of them were ones we’re using elsewhere. At our Chicago writing center, we’ll have a lumberjack supply store. I don’t know exactly what those supplies will be, but we’ll have to come up with them, I guess. We’ll try not to make it too dangerous – no axes or chainsaws. Maybe a lot of flannel.

The Brooklyn, the store sells superhero supplies. In Brooklyn there are a lot of crime fighters, but apparently they used to have to get all their stuff mail order. So we’ve filled that void. In the Brooklyn store, they have things like grappling hooks and anti-gravity clamps. The stuff is real — they’re not toys.You can actually use the anto-gravity clamps to climb walls. They’re amazing, and affordable.

I hope you’re not arming the forces of evil with that stuff.

Well, I don’t think they get their stuff from us. I think they go to Queens.

During election season you serialized a satirical novel about the American political circus on Salon. Where do you turn for the political news that inspired you?

I dial up for my internet connection, so I don’t do much on the web. I’m already distracted enough with a TV in the house. But I don’t have cable either- I only see Fox News and that stuff when I’m traveling. My news comes almost exclusively from newspapers and magazines. That way I know what’s going on without having to see Terri Schiavo’s feet being massaged for weeks and weeks on end. Also, my older brother was an advisor to Bush in Texas and he works at a think tank now and we talk a lot. I guess it helps me understand his side of things.

I also talked to a lot of friends in D.C. and I would sort of adapt their stories. Sometimes the actual news would beat me to the punch. I wrote a piece, which I thought was just ludicrous, about a character, a lot like Bush Sr, parachuting into New Hampshire right before a major debate — trying to grab some of the spotlight from his son.And about a week later, Bush Sr. actually did something like that. It was incredible. At a certain point, it was hard to top what was really happening. Whatever I wrote, something much stranger would happen the very next day.

If you could have your dream Presidential ticket of anyone living or dead in any field, who might you pick?

I’m loyal to Lincoln, having grown up in Illinois. And we’ve got something approaching Civil War now, don’t we — at least in terms of the intractibility of the two sides. So I’d take Lincoln as president, and Joan of Arc as VP. I don’t know what she’d do as VP, but it sounds pretty great, doesn’t it? Vice President Joan of Arc. If Lincoln and Joan of Arc can’t fix what’s going on, I don’t know who could.

Illustration: August J. Pollak