Friday, Jan 21, 2022 • 50min
Dave Eggers: Writing For A Better Future
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Fiction can serve as a window into multiple realities—to imagine different futures or understand our own past. This hour, author and TED speaker Dave Eggers talks technology, education, and the healing power of writing.
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Dave Eggers
Manoush Zomorodi
Salvador Gómez-Colón
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Verified
Break
Manoush Zomorodi
00:16
This is the
TED
Radio Hour
. Each week, groundbreaking TED
talks.Share
00:23
Our job now is to dream big.
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Manoush Zomorodi
00:24
Delivered at
TED
conferences-Share
00:26
To bring about the future we want to see.
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Manoush Zomorodi
00:28
-around the world.
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00:29
To understand who we are.
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Manoush Zomorodi
00:31
From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.
Share
00:36
You just don't know what you're going to find.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
00:38
Challenge you.
Share
00:38
You have to ask ourselves, like, why is that noteworthy?
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
00:41
And even change you.
Share
00:42
I literally feel like I'm a different person.
Share
00:44
Yes.
Share
00:45
Do you feel that way?
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
00:47
Ideas worth spreading, from
TED
and NPR
. I'm Manoush Zomorodi
. And before I introduce our special guest for the hour, I want to play a variation on a game that my kids love to play.Share
01:04
It's called Two Truths and a Lie. So I'm going to list three apps, smartphone apps, and I want you to guess which two really exist and which one is fiction. The first is an app that tells you the best moment to run out of a movie to go to the bathroom so you don't miss anything important. The second app creates a puff of air from your iPhone speaker, blowing out birthday candles for you, hygienically. The third one, it analyzes your friends' facial expressions to determine just how trustworthy they are and then rate the quality of your friendship. So which are real, and which doesn't exist?
Share
01:52
Believe it or not, the first two are real, but the third — the one that rates your friendships —isn't. Not yet anyway. That app comes from the mind of writer
Dave Eggers,
whose latest book, The Every
, satires our relationship with technology. It tells the story of a villainous fictional corporation called The Every
which is essentially Amazon
, Apple
, Facebook
, and Google
all wrapped up into one big, controlling tech company.Share
02:21
The heroine is Delaney Wells, a former park ranger, who vows to sabotage it from the inside. In an early chapter, Delaney finally gets an interview for a job at
The Every
but she's nervous she won't get it because someone has filmed her behaving poorly in public on her way to the interview using another fictional app called Sham. And here's Dave Eggers
reading a passage from The Every
.Share
Dave Eggers
02:46
Delaney, rarely nervous, was rattled. She had spent years assiduously building her profile, her digital self, with meticulous care. But there were many, so many things she couldn't know if they knew. More pressingly, on the way to the campus, Delaney had been shammed. On the subway platform, she dropped a wrapper. And before she could pick it up, an older woman with a phone had filmed the crime. Like a growing majority of tech innovations, the invention and proliferation of Samaritan, an app standard on Everyphones, was driven by a mixture of benign utopianism and pseudo-fascist behavioral compliance.
Share
03:27
A million Shams, a bastard mash of samaritan and shame, were posted each day, exposing swervy drivers, loud gym grunters, Louvre line cutters, single-use-plastic-users, and blythe allowers of infants-crying-in-public.
Share
03:43
Getting shammed was not the problem. The problem was if you got ID'd and tagged, and if the video got widely shared, commented on, and tipped your Shame Aggregate to unacceptable levels. Then it could follow you for life.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
04:01
This dystopian creepy world of
The Every
exists in the not-so-far-off and not-so-far-fetched future. The book is Dave Eggers'
follow up to his 2013 bestseller, The Circle. and Eggers
has been a mainstay of American fiction and nonfiction for both adults and kids.Share
04:21
Ever since he published his breakout memoir,
A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius
, which was a finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize
. And I am delighted that we are going to spend the hour with Dave Eggers
.Share
04:35
We'll talk about why he's obsessed with tech's effects on society. What's happened since he won the million dollar
TED
Prize in 2008, plus his latest project: publishing memoirs for kids by kids. Hey, Dave
thanks for being here.Share
Dave Eggers
04:52
Hey, thank you so much.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
04:54
OK, so
The Every
, it's funny, it's dystopian, it's a page turner, but it's also kind of frightening because it's really an extreme version, it's an extreme story about how technology changes Us
, changes our behavior.Share
Dave Eggers
05:11
I mean, I think we live largely in a world where any deviation from societal norms, like a mistake, jay-walking, or whatever
Might
be filmed. An attempt would be made to publicly shame the offender.Share
05:28
And I think it leads to a kind of constant low-level paranoia for so many people, especially living in urban settings where there are so many cameras and you think, "Any time I drool on the subway, anytime I have a piece of toilet paper hanging from my shoe, any time I drop a wrapper, this could follow me for life. "
Share
05:50
And in the book, it's taken on- it's gone further than it has right now. But the assumption is that if you do it, it will be captured and will never go away.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
05:59
And that seems exactly right
Dave,
because we checked out of our Airbnb,
my family the other day, and I noticed there was one of those ring video doorbells and I was like, "Oh wow, we're checking out 20 minutes late. They know that. "Share
06:13
It's just a weird feeling, I don't know that I'm being judged, but it's weird.
Share
Dave Eggers
06:18
Surveillance has become socially acceptable. It used to be the province of spies and
FBI
agents, and you would have to have a court order and, you know, there would be, it was a very high bar. But now it's a matter of course and it's considered absolutely fine to surveil your children, your loved ones, your Airbnb
guests, your employees.Share
06:45
It's fodder for comedy, but it's also makes me very sad. I wish we were a little bit more feisty about that and a little bit more outraged.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
06:55
I will say that, you know, now here we are in 2022, and there is a better understanding, at least if not resistance, an understanding of the power that these tech companies have. But you came to that, I mean, more than a decade ago when you wrote the predecessor to
The Every,
The Circle. So talk to me, you were early on this one. Tell me how you formed the skepticism and maybe even fear about technology.Share
Dave Eggers
07:23
Well, you know, I was an early adopter. And I saw it go from a really egalitarian and really fun, and sort of, you know,
Apple
as the scrappy tiny company with like less than 5% market share, to the rise of all of these incredibly voracious monopolies that had, you know, surveillance capitalism embedded into their DNA. And I was struck early on because we had our little magazine called Might
, and we were in South Park
.Share
07:59
We shared office space with
Wired
and Boing Boing. And so these were our friends too, and still are my friends. And so I got to see really the human side, and the really lovely side of so many people that were just regular people.Share
08:14
But they did think first, and this has been the case for the next 30 years too, that the best solution to anything is going to involve a screen, and it's going to involve the internet and you can't even begin to think of solving spread of malaria, or hunger, or anything.
Share
08:36
It's going to start on your phone and then work its way from there. And I think that that sort of digital solution was something that really wrangled me early on. And I just thought like, "Well, let's- it doesn't have to be everything. "
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
08:54
Let's go back to your protagonist in
The Every,
Delaney. She wants to implode this giant tech company from the inside.Share
09:02
And it was interesting to me you created this character well before Francis Hogan, the product-manager-turned-whistleblower at
Facebook
, became probably the best known tech critic of 2021 when she leaked all this inside documentation about how Facebook
execs knew they were potentially hurting young people's mental health, among other things. I just want to play a clip of her testifying in front of Congress
right now.Share
09:32
The choices being made inside of
Facebook
are disastrous for our children, for our public safety, for our privacy, and for our democracy. And that is why we must demand Facebook
make changes. I saw Facebook
repeatedly encounter conflicts between its own profits and our safety. Facebook
consistently resolved these conflicts in favor of its own profits. The result has been more division, more harm, more lies, more threats, and more combat.Share
10:02
The company intentionally hides vital information from the public, from the
U. S. Government,
and from governments around the world. The documents I have provided to Congress
prove that Facebook
has repeatedly misled the public about what its own research reveals about the safety of children, the efficacy of its artificial intelligence systems, and its role in spreading divisive and extreme messages.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
10:25
When you listen to that after having written about a young woman who works at a similar company, what do you think?
Share
Dave Eggers
10:34
I love her, I think she's a hero. I think that they should have a statue in
Palo Alto
or somewhere down there, to Francis Hagan. And the data dump that came out of it was crucial.Share
10:47
It was very much like, you know, I covered the tobacco industry in the'90s when things turned, and some insiders leaked documents first implicating
Brown & Williamson
and then other tobacco companies about what they knew and what they did to hide it. And then suddenly they had to make a, you know, a settlement with all the attorneys general because they had nowhere to hide.Share
11:09
There was- the cat was out of the bag. And so when you are marketing products to young people who are, more than any time in history, assaulted with information at all times, it has never been- no young people have ever had to deal with so much of an onslaught.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
11:29
We're going to talk later about all the work that you do with kids and teenagers and writing. But this makes me wonder, how do you bring up this topic with young people? Because I feel like any time you start to criticize tech or social media, they're like, "Goodbye. Bye, old man. "
Share
Dave Eggers
11:46
You know, when I went on tour for The Circle, I spoke at colleges for about a year, maybe two years, and we would always have really open discussions.
Share
11:56
So when I went on these colleges, I said, "Well how many of you-" I'd speak to like a room of 200 — "Raise your hand if you feel comfortable with your relationship with technology". Not one hand goes up. "Raise your hand if you trust the motives and practices of the big five tech companies". Not one hand goes up. "Raise your hand if you wish you had a more balanced daily use of technology". All the hands go up.
Share
12:23
So you have a product, and the whole digital world that young people who are just finding their way, getting their feet, trying to figure out what they want to do, their brains are still forming and will form for another 10 years or so.
Share
12:40
At that moment when they really need contemplative time and interpersonal time and time to laugh, and time to, you know, be outside and walk around and- I don't know. All of these things. We have these monopolies, these giant companies that are doing everything they can to say nothing that in your life can or should be done outside of a screen. So how do we fix that?
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
13:07
In a minute, more with
Dave Eggers
about getting kids to love to read and write offline. It's the TED
Radio Hour
from NPR.
We'll be right back.Share
Break
Manoush Zomorodi
14:37
It's the
TED
Radio Hour
from NPR
I'm Manoush Zomorodi
. Our guest this hour is author Dave Eggers
, and we were just talking about the effects of tech on our behavior and society, especially kids. It's something that Dave
thinks about a lot.Share
14:54
He's been involved with education for the last couple of decades and his nonprofit,
826 Valencia
, tutors kids in reading and writing and developing their skills as authors by connecting them to grown-up writers in their own communities.Share
15:10
Dave's
won numerous awards for his nonprofit, including the million dollar TED
prize in 2008. The organization is now called 826 National,
and they just celebrated their 20th anniversary.Share
Dave Eggers
15:24
Yeah, 826 Valencia started as a neighborhood drop-in tutoring center in the
Mission District
of San Francisco
. And and it was also the offices of Mcsweeney's
, our little publishing company. We were in the back and we thought, you know, a lot of teachers in my family, a lot of my best friends, became teachers. And we're teaching in San Francisco
.Share
15:48
And everybody said, you know, teachers need more after school help with a lot of their students. One-on-one attention, especially English language learning students. And I thought, "Well, why don't we combine our little publishing company with a drop-in tutoring center? "
Share
16:04
And then, you know, we rented this building at 826 Valencia, and it- you know, this is a story I've told too many times but-
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
16:11
No, tell it. It's really good.
Share
Dave Eggers
16:12
Yeah, I mean the the space was zoned for retail. So we had at the last minute think of something to sell in the front of the store. And so I just thought — as a gag really — I just thought it would be funny to sell pirate supplies to working buccaneers.
Share
16:30
And so we actually like, you know, we got in touch with wholesalers. There's a lot of them down in
Tampa Bay, Florida
for some reason that sell peg legs and sell eye-patches and hooks, and a lot of the stuff we made ourselves. And so we made it really like a working place, like really, it's not like stuff about pirates, but stuff that real pirates would use.Share
16:55
And, so that's the front of the store. And then then there's, you know, a dozen or so tables and desks where the kids can come and get one-on-one attention from humans. So it's still that way now, 20 years later. But we've gone into, you know, we publish books and we do readings.
Share
17:11
We had a reading yesterday afternoon in
Golden Gate Park
with student poets. And we do evening workshops, and we do college access writing. And we do, I mean, you name it. It's grown in 1000 directions, and then it spawned similar centers all over the country and all over the world.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
17:36
And each one has its own theme, right? Like, they don't all sell pirate supplies. The one near me in
Brooklyn
sells superhero supplies.Share
Dave Eggers
17:45
Yeah, it looks kind of like a
Costco
for crime fighters. And then, you know, in LA
they opened the Echo Park
Time Travel Mart, which really looks like a 7-Eleven
, but for people that might be going from the middle ages into the near future. And so you get everything you need, you know, if you want, if you're going back to caveman times and you need some willie mammoth jerky, or something like that, to go.Share
18:12
It's got all this stuff, and the detail is incredible because it gives you a way to engage. So if you're walking by, you walk in, you maybe buy some mammoth chunks and that goes to support the, you know, the center. Helps pay the rent. The kids see people coming in. You can buy student poetry, student books, written by the kids that are working right behind the storefront.
Share
18:37
So it's a way to sort of destigmatizes getting help after school. It's not like going into some clinical place that says place for- you know, tutoring help for kids that aren't doing- you know? Well, it's nothing like that. This is inherently fun, inherently weird, because weird is like, a very key thing and inherently creative.
Share
19:00
So it's caught on in so many other cities and countries because I think it attracts people that say, "Oh, that would be fun", and "That would have been fun if I was a kid", you know, it's a magical sort of environment. And now we're getting the kids that came up through the program are now writing books left and right. I just got two sent to me in the last few weeks from two students that came up through the pirate store.
Share
19:31
Not all of the kids become published authors in that way. A lot of them are lawyers, or real estate developers, or software engineers, but they've all had that one-on-one support, human-to-human contact, to help them to get through and stay at grade level, and to feel heard.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
19:51
So, I want to play- I mean, it's been a while- but I want to play for you a clip from your talk in 2008 in which you describe essentially how moved you were by how the center affected the students.
Share
Dave Eggers
20:09
Kids will work harder than they've ever worked in their life if they know it's going to be permanent and know it's going to be on a shelf, know that nobody can diminish what they've thought and said, that we've honored their words, honored their thoughts, with hundreds of hours — five drafts, six drafts, all this attention that we give — to their thoughts. And once they achieve that level, once they've written at that level, they can never go back. It's absolutely transformative.
Share
20:31
So the basis of it was one-on-one attention and, you know, we find ourselves full every day with kids. If you're on Valencia Street, within those few blocks, at around 2:30 you will get run over often by the kids and their big backpacks or whatever. Like, actually running to this space, which is very strange because it's school in a way. But there was something psychological happening there. It was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma.
Share
20:59
They're all working next to each other, it's all a creative endeavor. They're seeing adults, they're modeling the behavior of these adults that are working in the field. They can lean over, ask a question of one of these adults, and it all sort of, you know, feeds on each other. There's a lot of cross pollination.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
21:14
You sound incredibly excited there, I'm guessing you haven't heard that in a while.
Share
Dave Eggers
21:21
So I was just talking a mile a minute, but also I was feeding off of the- audience was so warm and really maybe my most favorite time talking in front of an audience was that day because they were just feeding off of it and, you know, they laughed at all the right places and helped me keep going.
Share
21:45
And so it was a blast. But- and, you know, I made a lot of friends and a lot of connections there that- and they helped a lot of the centers.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
21:56
And you also say in that talk that as much as these centers are about helping kids with their homework and writing, it's also about supporting their curiosity, and living what you call an enlightened life.
Share
22:09
What did you mean by that?
Share
Dave Eggers
22:11
To have these young people that can reflect on their lives and to be and to listen to others' stories, you know, their peers' stories. Every writing class I taught, I guarantee it was the first time that they were asked to tell their own story.
Share
22:30
I don't know of anybody who's had the assignment to say, write about your life, tell me who you are. It's exceedingly rare because, you know, there's so many other things that teachers have to do. But we have that opportunity at a very slow pace, 2-3 hours every day after school, or in the evening, or on weekends even — we can slow down and write on paper very often.
Share
22:56
And one person is gonna look, you know over your shoulder when you're ready and, you know, shine a light on what you do. And then we're going to polish it, polish it, work hard at it, and then publish it.
Share
23:10
So they are published authors at age 8. Published authors at 12. There are kids that are 14 that say, "Oh, I've been published. Well, let me see, it's 20, 23 times now. "And you know, like, they own it and they feel like their words are worthy of preservation, and to be put in a bound book that will last forever.
Share
23:33
And I think that there's a reason why so many of these kids are coming back now at 28, 29, 32 with novels and, you know, memoirs and nonfiction books. Because something got into the bones way back when, and they got a very supportive community that said, "What you have to say should be heard. "
Share
23:57
And that's not always something, it's not always a message that everybody gets. And especially kids that are in sometimes chaotic situations in their lives, they need to hear it.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
24:10
I want to hear about what has happened since you gave your talk. Because at the end, you, on the stage, you made a call to action. You challenged the people in the audience.
Share
Dave Eggers
24:24
We hope that the attendees of this conference will usher in a new era of participation in our public schools. We hope that you will take the lead in partnering your innovative spirit and expertise with that of innovative educators in your community.
Share
24:36
Always let the teachers lead the way, they will tell you how to be useful. I hope that you'll step in and help out. There's a million ways. You can walk up to your local school and consult with the teachers. They'll always tell you how to help. You can do- and use the skills that you have. The schools need you, the teachers need you, students and parents need you.
Share
24:54
They need your actual person, your physical personhood, and your open minds, and open ears, and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time. Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are, how smart, and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them one human interaction at a time. So we hope you'll join
Us
. Thank you so much.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
25:21
So
Dave,
what happened? Did your talk usher in a new era? Did they join you? Where are you now?Share
Dave Eggers
25:29
I think the latest count is 68 centers around the world that are based on our model. And most of those folks learned about it and saw it through
TED
because, you know, in the early days like, the writer Roddy Doyle
came over from Ireland,
sat and studied our model for a week, and then went back and opened a center in Dublin
. And Nick Hornby
did the same thing in London.
Share
25:56
But there was something about the
TED
talk and the, you know, the ease that people could watch the talk and sort of look up stuff and you know, go from there. That they could just start a center in Stockholm
based on what they saw online and what they heard.Share
26:12
But it just kept going. Like 5, 6 years later, there would be some young person, maybe 28 years old in
Milan
that would say, "You know what? I saw that TED
talk and we're gonna start a center like that here. And what do you think of this? "Share
26:27
And you know, everyone interprets the idea in a different way and they serve their communities in a different way.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
26:33
We're in a very different place when it comes to education since you gave your talk. Technology is baked into the classroom. What have you observed about how they learn or don't learn now? I mean, writing is certainly different. We have spell check, we have grammar check. Like I got flagged being like, this sentence is not constructed very well. I was like, "Well, thanks. Maybe not. "
Share
Dave Eggers
26:60
That's horrifying. I find that software horrifying. I think spell check is useful. Grammar check so far, it doesn't work very well. And I'm a grammarian, I love teaching grammar, teaching diagramming sentences. The software right now is very crude, and it's very often wrong.
Share
27:22
So what happens if you're 14 and the machine tells you you're wrong? Well then you correct it, but you're still wrong, because you're just wrong a different way. And so it really should be, again, the humanities need to be left alone. They really must be left alone. And the most horrifying place of all is the grading.
Share
27:42
So a lot of states, you know, at the end of the year, a student might take a standardized test and a lot of it — multiple choice stuff, fine. You can grade that with any machine. But when you're grading essays, a lot of those are graded by algorithms now.
Share
27:56
And the machines are very careful, and the companies that sell them are very careful to say that Our software cannot read. What we're doing is scanning for keywords. So if it's an essay about
Harriet Tubman
, they want to see if you got their dates right or whatever, but again, they're not reading in context.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
28:15
So do you say to kids like, "Don't think about the machines when you're writing here, "or, "Ignore them, you craft a sentence the way you want to"?
Share
Dave Eggers
28:23
They don't know, they don't know when they're being graded by machines.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
28:28
It sounds so crazy when you say that.
Share
Dave Eggers
28:30
But um, I do have to say it. And I do think that every year we're creeping into more and more of this. Partly for the reasons of efficiency and just sort of- and sometimes it's just state officials giving sweetheart deals to these companies instead of hiring actual humans to do it. And some of it is the well-intentioned thinking like, "Well, this will be more consistent. "
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
28:56
What are you hearing from teachers these days? I mean, my kid goes to public school, there are 35 kids in all of his classes. These teachers teach six of those. I mean, the last few years have put an incredible strain and burden on them.
Share
29:13
A lot of teachers are thinking, you know, "I can't do this anymore, "and that maybe they need to rethink their job choice. And it's not just low pay — which it has always been for teachers — but the environment in which they are working.
Share
Dave Eggers
29:27
Yeah. Teachers will always say it's the environment first, because they didn't get in it for the money. Although Nínive Calegari, my co-founder at 826 Valencia, she was a teacher and my mom was a teacher. My sister was a teacher. We did a book with Daniel Moulthrop, a public school teacher who we knew, and it was about just this. How do we start? I mean the pay scale has to be rational.
Share
29:54
It has to start much higher and have a possibility of a much higher end point so that a teacher can plan a life. And plan a dignified life. Have enough money to live on their own, not have three roommates at age 36, you know? So if when you do find districts that teach there, or schools that treat their teachers well, and they're able to stay not just 5 years, but 30 years, 35 years, then you have master teachers. And the students benefit. And the scores are high. And those students go on to great things because they have the benefit of that.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
30:35
That's so interesting. My kids' teachers are so young and wonderful, but I'm worried they're going to burn out.
Share
Dave Eggers
30:42
Well at 826 Valencia, every month we give an award: Teacher of the Month. And Nínive and I came up with this to just say, "We're going to give you $1,500. And don't spend it on your classroom. Just, spend it on anything. But like, please, you already give so much, just do something else with it. Take yourself on a vacation, whatever. "
Share
31:04
These are the most extraordinary educators. They were nominated by parents, students, peers. And month after month we got to hear from the students about them, these beautiful letters, the students would write about their favorite teacher. And then we look back about 10 years on, and all but a few of the teachers that we gave the awards, two were gone.
Share
31:25
They had all moved on to other careers because
San Francisco
is a really expensive place. And there are, you know, innumerable pressures put on teachers, and they couldn't do it. And so they went into other careers.Share
31:41
And we made a documentary about this called "American Teacher", with all of these teachers that loved the job more than anything. And they were all like, unbelievably gifted teachers. And they were all on the bubble, all struggling to stay in, and support their families, and see a life in the profession.
Share
32:00
We have got to be able to say, "Listen, you're going to start at $65[000], you're going to get up to $220[000] and so you can plan a life. You can buy a house. You can- you know, your worth at least as much as the podiatrist, you know? So why wouldn't you make the same pay scale? "
Share
32:16
You know, so many other positions in society that we put a certain value on monetarily. Teachers- you couldn't name a more valuable job, so why do we pay so poorly? Why don't we reflect that with our school budgets?
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
32:37
In a moment, more from writer
Dave Eggers
. And we'll hear about his latest project, publishing a new series of books written by kids who have experienced incredible, often devastating events, around the world. I'm Manoush Zomorodi,
and you're listening to the TED
Radio Hour
from NPR
, we'll be right back.Share
Break
Manoush Zomorodi
34:41
It's the
TED
Radio Hour
from NPR
, I'm Manoush Zomorodi
, and we are spending our time with author and Pulitzer Prize
finalist, Dave Eggers
.Share
34:51
So far, we've talked about his latest book,
The Every
, and the work that he's done to build a network of youth writing centers across the globe since he won the million dollar TED
Prize nearly 14 years ago. His latest project is publishing a new series of books written by young activists called I, Witness.Share
Dave Eggers
35:14
I, Witness. It's I-comma-Witness. Uses first person narratives to sort of illuminate recent history through the eyes of one person.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
35:23
Eggers
has published first person accounts of current events for years as part of his other nonprofit, Voice Of Witness
. But this is the first series written by kids, for kids, especially middle school readers.Share
Dave Eggers
35:36
Yeah, we have a nonprofit called
Voice Of Witness
that I started with a doctor Dr. Lola Volland, who worked with exonerated men and women who were wrongfully convicted. And we started with a book of their stories about how they were wrongfully convicted, railroaded. And then we went from there.Share
35:59
While we were finishing that book,
Hurricane Katrina
hit, and we did a book called Voices from the Storm: Oral Histories from Survivors of Katrina. And so this series is still going strong. It covered everywhere from Myanmar
to- one of the latest books was Native American voices called How We Go Home.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
36:23
And so now you have taken that concept and you've turned it into your first series for kids. And so far three books have come out. The first is called Accused and it's by a young woman named Adama Bah who moved from
Guinea
to New York City
as a child. But then after 9/11
, she was picked up by the police for allegedly being a terrorist. Tell me more about her.Share
Dave Eggers
36:48
She's muslim young woman who was accused of terrorism for wearing a hijab to school. So she and her father and friend were all picked up and spirited off in the middle of the night and detained for months on end. And she had to wear an ankle bracelet on, with no charges whatsoever with any evidence. It was just during the heat of
The Patriot Act
and the post-9/11
Islamophobia.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
37:15
Yeah, I was pretty shaken by her story, you know, and I'm thinking of my 11 year old and my 14 year old, this book is aimed at them. Do you think this would be up their alley?
Share
Dave Eggers
37:26
Yeah, perfect. So I got a 12 year old and a 16 year old. So I made my 12 year old read two of them the other day, which he did with great joy. And I'm just, you know, how a 12 year old boy- but he read them because they go down, you know, you can read them in a sitting. And that was the idea, is it doesn't have to be a month-long project.
Share
37:45
You're not going to read a 400-page book here. This is going to be- you're gonna really learn something in a short-ish amount of time. But you'll never forget Adama Bah's story.
Share
Adama Bah
38:01
I didn't know I wasn't an American until I was 16 and I was in handcuffs. I was born in
Conakry
, the capital city of Guinea
in 1988. In Africa
and in many developing countries, people hear about the riches to be had in America
. It's the land of opportunity.Share
38:19
I was 13 years old on September 11, 2001. That day, all of the teachers came in late and had the students sit in a huge circle. My teacher said, "I have to talk to you guys, I want you to brace yourselves. I have some bad news, sometimes things happen in life that we don't understand. "
Share
38:39
Then she said the Twin Towers were hit today. They went through papers, threw our stuff around. They were like a destructive storm in our apartment. I heard them yelling at my mother who didn't speak much English. They pulled her into the kitchen screaming, "We're going to deport you all. Your whole family. "
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
39:01
A tell me more about the process, because it's hard, you know? Like, if you've lived through trauma, reliving it is sometimes not what you want to do.
Share
Dave Eggers
39:14
You know, we always choose narrators based on their visibility already. So we find people who have already spoken up, and usually working with a partner agency. You know, like if it were survivors of slavery in
South Sudan
, which one of her books covered. I met, you know, a number of women in South Sudan
who had been enslaved and recently freed, and you would work with the agency who is repatriating those young women to say, you know, "Is there anybody here who's- you've identified as feeling comfortable, you know, speaking? "Share
40:01
And so almost always, it's people who have already found their voice and feel comfortable, you know, being somewhat public about it. But very often we're changing names. In the
Voice Of Witness
series, at their request. But we find that the act of telling one story — and this goes back 826 Valencia
— make so many people feel whole and feel heard.Share
40:29
And a fragmented narrative, or fragmented personal narrative, is suddenly made coherent and linear. Somebody that has been taught by society to stay in the shadows, like undocumented Americans here in the, you know, in the
US
, suddenly they can feel like, "Oh, I'm valued. I have a story to tell, I have education to provide. "Share
40:53
So we've had so many people start out as unnamed or pseudonym narrators who come out and the next edition of the book, it's their name. And they're the ones that want to be on stage, and talking, and educating. And the transformation is unbelievable. It shows you that it's not just edifying for the reader, but it is empowering for the narrator.
Share
41:14
And so, it's a whole process. It's not just sort of like, "We're going to publish your story, see you later". It's an ongoing relationship to say, you know, "You're a voice for so many others like you. We are going to stay in touch and we have an ongoing, you know, we're partners in this. "
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
41:40
So how do you go about working with these young people to help them tell their stories, because, you know, it's heavy stuff.
Share
Dave Eggers
41:49
Sometimes we will help like Adama help, you know, start with an interview, or start with a conversation. What do you want this to be about? And then it goes back and forth. And then in some- so there's an oral history element to some of them.
Share
42:03
And then in the case of some of the books, like Francie's one that's coming out soon, he just wrote it. Because he is a writer first. And so they have different methodologies to how they come about, but the voice is always theirs, and it's first person, and it's bell-clear and visceral.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
42:23
You know, it really is. They take global events and make them relatable. I especially think these stories will be relatable if a teen actually remembers when an event happened. I'm thinking of the second book in the series, which is called Hurricane: My Story of Resilience by a young man named
Salvador Gómez-Colón
. He writes about Hurricane Maria,
which hit his home in 2017 in Puerto Rico,
and it's just gripping to get his perspective.Share
Salvador Gómez-Colón
42:54
18 days before
Hurricane Maria
, I turned 15 years old. The morning of my birthday, I woke up to blue balloons all over the apartment, and a happy birthday sign on the dining table. Every year my mom decorated the apartment, and I look forward to it more than any other present.Share
43:13
The first thing to know about hurricanes is that they are all destructive, and that all the categories are powerful. Hurricanes have already passed two thresholds, tropical depression, and tropical storm. Categories 1-3 hurricanes are manageable, though they always cause flooding, damage to buildings, and injuries.
Share
43:32
A category 4 hurricane is a beast within itself, but there is no cap to a category five hurricane. The category 5 takes everything and devours it. It is a storm without mercy.
Share
43:48
The living room, my room, and my mom's room were flooded. The air conditioning unit was on the floor. It had just popped out because of the change in air pressure when the hurricane hit. We threw clothes onto the living room vents as water poured inside.
Share
44:03
As you tried to stop more water from coming into the bedrooms, the building started to sway.
Share
44:09
"We need to get out of here", my mom said. We felt the entire building shake. We knew if we got stuck up there, it would be terrible.
Share
44:18
"It's time to go downstairs, "she said.
Share
Dave Eggers
44:25
Salvador Gómez-Colón was a teenager that we knew from a program that we did called, The International Congress of Youth Voices.
Share
44:32
And he, you know, lived through
Hurricane Maria
in Puerto Rico
and then helped his community, you know, started a nonprofit and raised money to buy and distribute lights for his community and people all over the island.Share
44:50
And the next book takes place in
Afghanistan
. And then there's a new book coming out from the Bronx
. And so these are all books that are sort of, you know, if you're sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade, they're very readable and they give real voice and agency to the authors.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
45:13
I'm rereading the book that made you famous,
A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius
, which was published 22 years ago. And what you're describing, about kids without agency feeling like the world is out of control and using writing to reclaim that agency, rereading your book, makes me think that that's what writing a memoir in your 20s did for you at a time when you're life was a bit out of control. Is it?Share
Dave Eggers
45:47
Yeah, I mean when I talk to kids about writing their story, I have a place- I have some expertise in this. My parents died when I was 21. And within six weeks of each other, and I spent, gosh, 8, 9 years after that, trying to make sense of it.
Share
46:09
And I was trained as a painter and as a journalist and I didn't know what form telling that story would be, but I knew that I really couldn't do much else until I got through it, got past it. So I was a temp most of my twenties, you know, we ran this little magazine, but I did- I had a million different jobs. And I didn't know I would ever live as a writer primarily, but I knew that I had to make something of that, I had to make sense of it before I could do whatever I was going to do next.
Share
46:42
And, once you do that, and I do recommend it to everyone — I don't think everybody's story needs to be published. Sometimes it's just for you, or sometimes it's just for your family, or your best friend, or your spouse.
Share
46:60
But the act of writing it is an act of drawing a fence around, you know, something wild and untamable. Suddenly it's linear and coherent. You can put everything in order, you can set things right, you can learn a lot about yourself.
Share
47:23
You can give something, or honor the people that you love or lost. And I find that the people that write their stories or tell their stories are some of the calmest people you'll ever meet. Because there it is. And I always tell the students like, "It might be chaos in your mind, but it's going to be orderly on the page. "
Share
47:46
"And suddenly all that sort of, all those things banging around in your skull, are going to make sense. When you can put it in order, it's going to have a beginning, middle, and end. And it'll be right. "And that creates a real sense of calm.
Share
48:06
And when I see our former students now who are in their twenties or thirties, they're all so cool and so like, composed and eloquent. And they've, you know, so many of them become tutors themselves, so they help others write their stories. And it keeps going and going. And this sense of like, listening and honoring people's stories, it creates like a really wonderful breed of human. I think there's something to be said for it.
Share
48:37
I think there's something to be said for it. I don't think you ever come out of the back end of that feeling worse. I think you're always going to feel "Ah, everything that was in me, all that, all those storms, all that, you know, chaos, I've tamed it. and now I can do whatever is next. "
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
49:03
What do you think about ending our conversation with giving our listeners a writing prompt?
Share
Dave Eggers
49:13
You know what, this is the first thing I always- when my writing class — I used to teach a class — they'd come in 826 Valencia, and they're from all over the city and some suburbs too, and I would immediately send them out in pairs. And I would say, "Interview the most interesting person you see. Go into the bookstore, cafe, shoe store, wherever you go. Find somebody and interview them. Somebody that you might even have a preconception about by the way that they look or dress. And I guarantee you everything about them that you think you know or perceive, will be upended. "
Share
49:51
And they would come back an hour later, breathless with like, "Oh yeah, we interviewed that like punk-rock busker, he's always in that vestibule, you know, down the street, that empty storefront? Well, it turns out that he's a republican, and he lives with his mom, and he trains guide dogs for the blind, "
Share
50:12
And you know, like all these complexities to somebody that they had pegged. Or they'd say they have new respect for, you know, the place that their fellow humans play in history.
Share
50:25
Like, you know, they would go down- I remember they went down the street and came back and they had interviewed woman that said she was the first test tube baby. And yeah, she's just shopping at the bookstore. And because why not, right? She's gotta be somewhere, that person.
Share
50:42
So the opportunity to actually ask questions and meet somebody and let them tell their story. That's another thing. Nobody ever wants to stop. Once you start listening, everybody says, you know, an hour will go by, to say, "Oh really? You have to go? "
Share
50:60
You know, like the kids would have to pry themselves away because we are so seldom heard, I think. And so I always think that's a great prompt. Like, if you want to be a good writer, start listening to people. Interview somebody that's not yourself.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
51:16
I love that.
Dave Eggers
, thank you so much.Share
Dave Eggers
51:20
It's been a blast Manoush. Thank you so much. You didn't hear a cat, did you? There's been a cat trying to get into this closet.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
51:30
That's writer
Dave Eggers
, recording our conversation from his teenage daughter's closet in San Francisco
with his cat just outside the door.Share
51:38
Thank you so much for listening to the show this week. If you want to watch
Dave Eggers'
full talk, go to TED. NPR. org. As always, to see hundreds of TED
talks, check out TED. com or the TED
app.Share
51:54
This episode was produced by James Delahoussaye, and Fiona Gearan. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour. Our
TED
Radio production staff also includes Jeff Rogers, Rachel Faulkner, Katie Monteleone, Deba Motishem, Matthew Cloutier, and Harrison VJ Choi. Our audio engineer is Brian Jarboe, and our intern is Margaret Sereno.Share
52:14
Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at
TED
are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Phelan, Michelle Quint, and Danielle Apollorizzo. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you've been listening to the TED
Radio Hour
from NPR
.Share
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Manoush Zomorodi
Dave Eggers
Adama Bah
Salvador Gómez-Colón