Called the “master of experience-based nonfiction,” award-winning author Ted Conover has worked as a prison guard at Sing Sing, crossed borders with migrant workers, and lived off the grid in the American West. We speak with Ted about his extraordinary life and career as a writer.

This is the Open Book Podcast, A behind the scenes look at the world of books and publishing through conversations with leaders in the field, hosted by David Steinberger, the CEO of Open Road Integrated Media, and chairman of the National Book Foundation, and now your host, David Steinberger.

Today we're talking with author Ted Conover. Ted has been called the Master of Immersive or experience-based nonfiction. You can get a sense of what that means from the title of his first book. Rolling Nowhere Riding The Rails with America's Hobo for Other Books. Ted has traveled with migrants from Mexico and spent a year as a prison guard at Sing Sing. Today, Ted gives us a behind the scenes glimpse at what it was like to really put himself in the shoes of his subjects. I hope you'll enjoy today's conversation. I want to welcome Ted Conver here, and this is very exciting because we've been meeting with book publishing people and CEOs from the book industry and agents and nonprofits, but we actually haven't spoken with a published writer before. I understand that you weren't actually even born in the United States. You're a famous American writer, but it's not true that you were born here, right? Where were you born?

I was born in Okinawa. My dad was in the US Navy and flew a plane between Okinawa and what was then fora and now Taiwan. Right. So you were born there. You came back to the continental

United States. How old were you when you got back here? I think two. So when you were two, were you thinking you'd be a great writer and a famous journalist and writer at that time? When did you start realizing that writing was something that you might have a knack for?

I don't know if anyone's ever actually asked me that question. I took a leap after college because I had researched an anthropology thesis, an undergraduate thesis by riding freight trains with railroad trips. I actually had not done that with the college's approval. They said I'd have to leave college in order to do that travel. Now that I'm a professor, I get it. But I thought, well, it just sounds worth doing. And so I did. I left college for four months and came back and wrote a third person ethnography of American Railroad Tramps in the 1980s. And because I'd worked as a journalist during summers, I wrote a first person article about one guy in Portolo, California one morning with one old guy, and I was part of this student run magazine that put it toward the back of the magazine.

But the College Alumni Association magazine made it the cover and then the Associated Press saw it, and I was asked to be on a TV show in Worcester, mass, and I didn't want to do any of this because my thesis wasn't finished, and I was under incredible stress trying to be done. But it's good did because, gosh, three days after the Worcester Mass TV show, I was called by the Today Show. I'd only been to New York twice in my life. And then the next morning someone called claiming to be from Good Morning America, and I demanded to know which of my friends was pranking. I was about to work a summer internship in Indianapolis at a newspaper. One thing led to another. When I came to New York, I didn't know any agents, but a friend of a friend had heard of Sterling Lorde. I'd called his office before I arrived. His assistant said, call after you've been on tv. I'm thinking, what is Sterling Lord going to watch me on the Today Show? I don't think he did, but he did agree to see me and said he thought he could sell my book based on a proposal, and I just needed to write him a long letter explaining what my book would be about. We do a fair amount of the sterling Lord, actually.

So that's an amazing story. So first of all, you kind of glossed over this. You spent four months riding around on trains with, what did you call them? Railroad tramps. Railroad tramps.

Most people say hobos.

Hobos. That's pretty unusual. Where did you get that idea? I grew up in Denver. I don't know where the idea came from that people who live like that are not sort of high functioning people without housing, but rather are some sort of free spirit, that they enjoy some kind of freedom from the nine to five that other people don't and they don't live in the kind of squalor that a urban person without a home would live in. They have this ability to go somewhere else by just using their initiative to get on a train that's leaving that they won't get caught getting on. So there's some kind of mystique around, and it's all tied up with railroads, I think, and the opening of the West. And I had friends who just didn't believe any of them would talk to me because from a family, my sisters and I all went to college, and most of the people living that way did not, but I just thought, I bet they'll talk to me.

And I've been kind of based my whole career on that idea that not everybody, but I bet most people would talk to you if you tried. You just kind of worked at it. It didn't seem too different from them. If you could find ways to minimize how you're different and put yourself in their world is the other part of it. So did they talk to you that you were talking to? Yeah. And that was the basis for the article or for some pieces that you wrote? For that one that I wrote For the student magazine. For the student magazine. And that led to the book contract with Sterling Board, which was on the same subject a book was. It was a first person version of my third person thesis. So had you done all the research for the book at that point? Was it just writing at that point? Yeah. Yes. I had done it all right. My professors had told me, you can't be in your thesis. So it had to be third person. But that's the story that everybody I knew wanted to learn. What was it like? Weren't you scared? How do you get on a train? Right. Did you get arrested? Did anybody steal your stuff? And I thought, I like talking about it. I think I would enjoy writing about it.

Right. So this is very significant because it feels like this is the beginning of this immersive

Narrative nonfiction, or what do you call it? I just called it narrative nonfiction for years. And then when I started teaching at NYU, a colleague of mine said, what you do is immersion. And I said, call it whatever you want. That's fine. And he said, no, you could call it immersion too. And I said, okay, maybe I lack a marketer's way of viewing things, but I just saw any journalist. I'm going to go out and talk to people, but unlike other journalists, I'm going to spend a lot of time

And I'm not going to be afraid to live as much like them as I can while always being clear that I am not ever going to know what it's like to be a hobo. Right. I can call my parents. So that first book is Rolling Nowhere. That's the book about the hobo experience and it's first person and it's based on months of, yeah. Okay. So then what's the next book? Is Coyotes the next book? It is. So while I was riding freight trains in California and feeling kind of lonely, I was in a freight yard and saw some guys under an overpass over the train tracks, and it was three guys that looked Mexican and I speak some Spanish, and I decided to say hi again. I didn't know if they'd talked to me, and I think they were surprised that I could speak any Spanish, but I sat with 'em for an hour and basically we were living the same way.

I'll never forget this. There was three guys. It was kind of cold. They were sharing a package of cookies as slowly as they could with each other, but they immediately offered me a cooking, which it's a good sign, it's a good sign. And I had peanut butter, jelly, and bread. We made it a picnic. So I just thought that is a more significant book about American life is undocumented people coming and traveling however they can to get where they're going to work. And that's like the original American hobos who were itinerant workers who went west and worked on ranches and railroads and cut lumber and stuff like that. So I proposed that book to Sterling Lord a few months after rolling Nowhere came out. He immediately said, oh, that sounds great. Now you had to immerse yourself there too. Yeah. And so how long did that take?

That took almost a year in southern Mexico where a lot of migrants come from. The state of Cade Petro is where I was. And then I came over three times with different groups of people, and in some cases got work in the US and in other cases just hung out with them. What would be a job in the US picking citrus outside of Phoenix, Arizona was one. Every time I see a lime or a lemon, my arm hurts oranges. You can pull off the tree, but limes and lemons you have to clip and they tape the clippers to their hands so they won't fall, and they just clip all day long and they fill these bags that get so heavy and you're on a ladder with this heavy bag, but it's your hand that hurts. And so then comes New Jack. So that's the first book people think of when they think you.

So how did that come about? What was the story? Sure. After I wrote my first two books in Denver, I moved to New York because I had fallen in love with a person who I met after. That's a long story. Her You've met her. Yes, I know her. I get it. Anyway, if that was going to continue, I needed to be out here. So I did come here, and one thing I noticed was almost every day there was another headline about mass incarceration and reaching record levels in the us. It's when it was really peaking here. We were second only to South Africa, which was still an apartheid government. I started thinking, how could I go further than most reporters do to get that story? It soon became clear I could not become a prisoner. I wanted to go home at night, but then I thought I could maybe become an officer. And it took three years to take the civil service exam and then get hired. So you had to take the civil service exam to be a corrections officer? That's right. And did you have to practice? Did you have to prepare for that? I

Don't think so.

I

Think you just take

The test. You just take the test, and

Then eventually you pass the test, and then

You get called, your number comes up and they say, you go to Albany for interviews. And I was so scared because one day the hardest interview was with a psychologist. All the other interviews are very pro forma, but this woman had paid attention to my application, and she said, it says here, when you were in college left for a while and you were a Vista volunteer, just like a domestic Peace Corps. It's like AmeriCorps in Dallas. So I said, yeah. She said, isn't that a bit unusual? Vista Volunteer becomes a corrections officer? And I said, people change.

That was a good answer. So they did not know you had this project? No, but before I ever applied to become a corrections officer, I had gotten an assignment from the New Yorker to write about a family of officers. If I could learn enough about them by going to work with them and hanging out otherwise in the state, said, no, you can visit once. And that's when I thought I'd be justified in an undercover approach, which I think writers do with a lot of caution. There's a lot of trickiness about not declaring who you are. So you get hired as a corrections officer? Yeah. Where you work? Yeah. Well, fortunately, I was hired at Sing SIng, which is a name everybody knows because lots of the names you don't know. Like the mid Orange Correctional facility, just a bit further north would not have been as good a title, worst title, because the full title of the book is, it's called New Jack.

That's one word that means rookie guarding s sing better than guarding Orange County Corrections. Right. Or something. Right. I did not sign that book contract until I had quit the job because the lawyers felt I'd be at risk of being a bad faith employee of the state of New York that I was truly doing this in order to write a book, not be an officer. So I was just praying the publisher would still be interested when I was finished. Wow. Yeah. So did you find it to be an interesting experience? Yeah, every day was interesting. It wasn't fun. It's a sort of soul sucking kind of job. It's a terrible job basically telling people all day long, no, you can't come out to go talk to that guy. You can't be there. And if you're not a big person like me, that's harder because a physical presence matters in prison, and you're with people who haven't followed rules, mainly almost all have committed a violent crime in a maximum security prison.

Not everybody, but most. And they know you might be capable of being intimidated. So people try to intimidate you all day long, and it's stressful. It's very stressful. And figuring out how to manage them and manage your own fear is a big project. And all while being secretive, so you can't tell your friends you're having this stressful thing for practically a year. I couldn't tell my friends why I couldn't hang out with them because often I had to work. Also, we had, our youngest was four months old when I started the job, and our next oldest was two years old. My wife had a full-time job. It was a stressful time. So you were there for how long? 10 months. You were there for 10 months.

So this was all part of your research?

It was.

And then you came out and you tried to see if your publisher was still interested.

Yes. Yeah, they were. Right. So how long did it take you to write the book? Like 15 more months, maybe a little longer. Right. And then were you surprised at the tremendous response and Yeah, because I guess as a writer, even if you've gotten good reviews, you just have a feeling it could all end tomorrow. You just think this could be a one-off, maybe two. And I was gratified for the first time. I thought, I don't have to think, how can I publicize this book? It started just taking care of itself.

Right. Let's talk about your most recent

Book. Sure.

So the premise of this book is really interesting, and the title of book is Cheap Land, Colorado Off Gritters at America's Edge. It's got a great James McBride quote above the title here, profound. I hope every American

Reads this book. Right. So how did this book come about? A sister of mine who still lives in Denver, visited this area in southern Colorado that had been subdivided in the 1970s into five acre lots that were sold by mail and on tv, like $30 a month buys you your Colorado Ranch.

You hear that $30 down and $30 a month for how long? 12 years. For 12 years. And you get ranch land in Colorado, right. How much land you get? Five acres, you get five acres. It sounds kind of appealing. People still buy, can't just, oh yeah, there's plenty

Left. Still available. There's a whole lot left because they made too many of them. And how much does it cost now? Three to $6,000. If you have cash, three to 6,000 in cash, you can get five acres of, yep. You could be my neighbor. You bought one of these places? I did, but that was after two years, shall I say how I, yeah. So my sister worked for a foundation, a group down there had asked them for money. They gave her a tour and she sent me pictures that showed people living in lean tos and a decrepit RVs in the middle of nowhere, like really barren looking land with mountains way in the distance, but nowhere close and no trees. It just looked kind of grim. So of course you want to go out. Of course, I to go. That seems to be what I want to do.

I've now lived in New York 25 years by love being a New Yorker, but I do on days when the subway is very full or it's very hot or any of other unpleasant New York moments, I do long for open space and low cost of living. The same group that my sister had visited, I approached them and said, I hear you have an outreach program to help these prairie dwellers keep from becoming homeless, and I wonder if you could use a volunteer to augment your activity. And they said yes. So then I pitched it to Harper's Magazine where I had written a couple of articles prior and wrote that article. Gosh, after that article came out, then I'd been there so long. I wanted to own my own land. There's just so much of it, and it's so cheap. There's many downsides. If you leave anything on your land of values, it will probably get stolen when you go away because people there have very little money and there's a lot of need.

I met a guy who'd lived there maybe 15 years, and from his place you could see this other property. And I thought, well, if he's there watching it, then maybe my stuff won't disappear. So far it hasn't. And he's in my book. His name is Troy, who's got one leg from a farm accident. He was a truck driver. His father was a cowboy who had cattle on the land we were on. It's just a real different American story. And so this is the approach I think I can bring value with is putting myself in a world like that and not just visiting for a few days, but I've now spent five years out there. You have another book that you're working on except for my book Coyotes, where I immediately had the idea for the next book. I've not had the idea for the next book.

Right away. It kind of feels like my mind has to empty out of all the things that have filled it with the book, and then into that vacuum hopefully comes a new idea. So it feels like you've had a real influence on writing in this country because the journalist as writer and the first person narrative, and I mean, I didn't invent this. Hunter Thompson had lived with the motorcycle gang numbers before. I hadn't even read that book when I rode the Rails. I wasn't that well read. I came to it later, or Tom Wolf with Ken Keesey and the Mary Pranksters taking that bus across the country. I hadn't read that, but they were doing it. But I seem to be one of the few who wants to keep doing a new version of the project. I kind of just think it's like wealth. I feel so lucky to know so many different kinds of people.

Just a quick thought on today's conversation with Ted Conover. Through his unique approach to writing, Ted has given us a special opportunity to get closer to the lived experience of people we might not otherwise spend much time with. Prison inmates, migrant workers, what he calls railroad tramps. At one point in today's conversation, Ted recounts that at the start of his immersive writing, people doubted he could get his subjects to open up. But Ted said, I bet they'll talk to me. Ted made that bet and he won it as readers and I would even say as human beings, we're lucky he did. Okay. Thanks for listening to today's episode and keep reading.

Thanks for listening to Open book with David Steinberger. This episode was produced by Rick Joyce, directed by Hannah Mosley and engineered by Bren Russell. Our theme music is written and performed by Eric Friedlander. And I'm Emma Chapnick. For more episodes and links to the books mentioned, visit our website at open road integrated media.com/podcast.