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Dave Eggers inspires youth to express themselves through storytelling

Bestselling author Dave Eggers believes helping young people learn to express themselves can make all the difference in the world.

Dave Eggers

Photo: McSweeney's

Halfway through our interview, Dave Eggers jumps up from the sofa, flips open his laptop, which is buried under a pile of magazines and newspapers, and retrieves an email from Valentino Achak Deng, the Sudanese refugee whose harrowing experiences during his country’s civil war and bizarre entry into the U.S. were chronicled by Eggers in What Is the What. The proceeds from that book, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006, go to Deng’s foundation , which is helping reconstruct Sudan. The email contains photos showing what has been done so far with the money: pictures of a recently opened school building in Marial Bai, Deng’s native village. "Isn’t it beautiful?" Eggers says.

Call it "trickle-down eggersnomics"—ever since his immensely successful 2000 debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers has used his royalties to help others. He devoted some of that money to 826 Valencia, which helps children in poor neighborhoods of San Francisco with their writing skills and homework. Meanwhile, he runs McSweeney’s, a publishing house that offers a platform for unknown writers and brings out a series of books in which those on the margins of society—such as prisoners and undocumented immigrants—get the chance to tell their stories. Eggers is using his Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Prize—a $100,000 award given by the TED arts and ideas conference that grants the recipient "one wish to change the world"—to inspire people to put time and energy into helping inner city kids in public schools. "You do what you can," Eggers says.

Eggers is preparing to promote his new book, Zeitoun, due out in July. It’s about Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant who paddled around in a canoe in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, helping friends and neighbors in New Orleans. During his rescue efforts, he was thrown in jail on suspicion of terrorism. "If you hear about the sacrifices immigrant families make only to get a small piece of the pie, it’s incumbent on us to help them get a fraction of what we enjoy just by birth," Eggers says. "I could’ve been born in some other part of the world, so I feel that I have no more right to the bounty of this land than an immigrant from Sudan, Syria, Mexico or anywhere else. Immigrants who sacrifice to get here and work here are the bravest people in the world. So I prefer to tell their stories, to help understanding and empathy."

Although in many ways his more recent work is a sharp departure from his earlier books—gone is the self-assured, funny tone and the stylistic pranks—the book fits seamlessly with what Eggers, 39, has done all along: encourage others to tell their stories, especially those others to whom we so rarely listen. "We all long for ways to engage with people and we don’t always know how to do it," he says. "I just assume that anybody sitting next to me could be a close friend, and would have been in a twist of events or circumstance. It’s human. There’s something very powerful within people that yearns to reach out to others."

In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers described in a strikingly good-humored way how, as a 21-year-old student, he lost both parents to cancer within a few weeks of each other. He then decided to move with his 8-year-old brother from Chicago to Berkeley, California. The book made it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Eggers considered it a logical choice to spend the royalties from his memoir on a good cause. "My parents didn’t save any money, and I too would rather keep the money in circulation than sit on it. I could never be one of those guys who accumulate vast wealth and then donate $100 million when they die. For me, it’s painful to think about what all that money could have done while I was still alive."

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