Dave Eggers inspires youth to express themselves through storytelling

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."

In 2002, Eggers set up 826 Valencia, a writing lab for youth between the ages of 8 and 18 in San Francisco’s Mission District, where half the population is Latin American. The non-profit organization publishes booklets and newspapers and, because the place needed something out of the ordinary to attract visitors and kids, operates a store with pirate supplies. (You can get the city’s best deals on eye patches and wooden legs right here.) "If you can learn how to write well, you can start expressing yourself," Eggers says. "You’ll be able to bring order to a chaotic world that seems beyond your control. You’ll have power when you’re able to explain clearly what you need, what your dreams are, how you can overcome the problems in your community. If you can write extremely well, many doors will be opened so you can succeed in school, in life." Eggers cites Barack Obama as a case in point: "By writing two autobiographies, Obama wrote himself into existence. He is where he is primarily because of his ability to write. He is the best evidence that you don’t need anything but a pen and paper."

Doing good with money has always been important to Eggers—so important that it was one of the subjects of his second book, You Shall Know Our Velocity. Two childhood friends mourning the death of one of their buddies make a hectic, seven-day trip around the world to give away tens of thousands of dollars, discovering in the process that it isn’t easy. How do you decide who gets money and who doesn’t? And not everyone wants a piece of the pie.

"It’s clear that I’m confused by people who need money," says Eggers, who declined a seven-figure advance for You Shall Know Our Velocity to distribute the book through McSweeney’s independent bookstore channels. "Encountering beggars is so bewildering and confusing, because it jams up your cognitive system. Our natural reaction is, ‘Here, take anything.’ That’s what seems to me the most human, honest and logical thing to do. But then we always start thinking, ‘Wait, that’s not right,’ and that totally goes against our instincts."

But is giving money away such a good thing after all? In a 2006 Ode interview, Muhammad Yunus, pioneer of microcredit, was sharply critical of charity—whether it involved giving change to a homeless person on a street corner in India or welfare benefits to jobless people in Indiana. Yunus compared the recipients of charity to animals in a zoo: They’re given meals at set times but never challenged to follow their instincts to hunt. As a result, Yunus argued, they lose their ingenuity, just as a beggar in Bangalore and a guy on benefits in Berkeley are both deprived of their humanity.

Eggers considers for a moment, expresses his admiration for Yunus ("He’s awesome"), then goes on to explain how what he’s doing is different. "Microcredit doesn’t reach a remote village in Sudan like Marial Bai, where there are no phones, no Internet, not even roads. What they need is a school. Whose responsibility is it to build a school? The government’s, but that’s one of the reasons Sudan has a modern history of civil wars—the government wasn’t building any of these schools. So we need local community members like Valentino, who got the means somewhere else, to build a school so people can empower themselves.

"Building a school is different from giving money," he continues. "In a way, it is a loan. It will be paid back by a country that is safer, because the more people are educated, the less likely they are to go back to war. If we invest a little bit in education in developing countries, that’s an investment that pays great dividends."

The Marial Bai Secondary School in southern Sudan was funded by proceeds from Eggers’ book What Is The What.

Photo: David Levenson/Getty Images

Eggers speaks softly as we sit in the pleasant offices of McSweeney’s. Newspaper pages hang on the walls. The editorial staff of McSweeney’s literary magazine, Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (published about four times a year with a circulation of 17,000), is working on an issue about how to keep newspapers alive. "Or, actually," Eggers corrects himself, "not just how to keep them alive, but how to make them thrive. It should be a business model from the ground up. It’s silly to put so much faith in advertising, so we need to put some control and some ownership in the hands of subscribers. You need to involve them, which will partly solve the cost problem."

Maybe newspapers can learn something from McSweeney’s. Thanks to what Eggers calls "a sometimes painfully realistic, not to say pessimistic, business model," the publisher has managed to survive and thrive despite the economic crisis. "We’ve never taken unnecessary risks, so we’ve always grown within our means," Eggers says. "I think more companies will start doing that, as I think that is what we need to learn from the crisis. It doesn’t mean you can’t take risks or try to grow, because you should. But it can be done smarter, more organically. When some of these giant newspapers die, we might find smaller, more nimble and more responsive media outlets. After all, whenever dinosaurs die out, new life forms that are smaller, quicker, more agile and better able to adapt flourish."

Eggers says the economy hasn’t really affected McSweeney’s "because we risk nothing. It dips a little bit. Some independent bookstores have a hard time. But some are woven very well into the community, with workshops and authors coming in. When things get rough, some people get even more involved."

And Eggers is eager to get more people involved—specifically, as part of his TED wish, in public schools. Students need "your open minds and your open ears and boundless compassion," he said in his TED acceptance speech. "Some of these kids just don’t know how good they are, how smart, how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them."

By giving kids extra attention, Eggers hopes to keep their optimism and idealism alive. There are a million ways to get involved, Eggers believes—from donating materials to helping out with homework. "Kids don’t often get that kind of attention," he says. "There’s something life-changing about it. What are these kids learning about society when random adults show interest in what they have to say?"

Eggers is convinced this type of one-on-one help is the way to bring about change—and the good news is, most people can fit it easily into their lives. "That’s the thought that keeps me sane and allows me to stave off the despair about the problems that still need fixing. You can’t despair that there are so many problems and we can’t address them all. Be glad about the work you’re able to do. When the idea of writing What Is the What arose, I didn’t think I would solve Sudan’s problems. But I thought, ‘All right, I have a little bit of the ability to address this issue by writing this one book, and that’s what I’ll do.’ And look, now there’s the school in Marial Bai."

Marco Visscher, Ode’s managing editor, buys all his eye patches and wooden legs from the pirate store at 826 Valencia.