Dave Eggers

...Meanwhile, he kept on writing...

...About a month later, he came out here to tour college campuses— Berkeley, St...

...So, you have to call Valentino, or do that research some other way, every time...

...Q: Part of what makes the story so poignant is the way you place the narrative in the Sudan within the framework of another story about a robbery and assault in Valentino's home in Atlanta years later...

...Eggers: The next book is definitely going to be something else...

...Or do they have emotions...

...I don't see why the U.S...

...We hope to do at least one book a year but the project has no funding, so it's going to be as much as we can...

...The talent and energy those attracted became the foundation for all his subsequent ventures—the publishing house, The Believer, the tutoring program, and retail stores that also function as indie literary clubhouses...

...In 1998, he co-founded the literary journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and the Web-based magazine Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency, with the stated goal of publishing fiction and nonfiction that had been ignored or rejected elsewhere...

...and he's college bound and he's going to start a new life and help rebuild the new Sudan...

...All these things are things you see when people are allowed to breathe after war...

...That's the word that occurs to me...

...In person, Eggers was surprisingly unassuming...

...Then there's the book about Sudanese women who tell their stories about being enslaved during the civil war that is due out early spring...

...I was endlessly intimidated...

...Eggers: My first book was too much too quick, and it just wasn't what I intended...

...I don't know if it was that card or what, but it crystallized for me that it couldn't just be a story of triumph...

...Q: Do you feel satisfied by the role that literature can play in addressing political problems and human rights abuses...

...The book was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award, and proceeds of the book sales go to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which is building schools and community centers and offering microfinance in Southern Sudan...

...Eggers: There's no particular end in sight...

...Q: How many times have you been to the Sudan...

...to come in and clean house and bring a new regime...

...Will you do another collaboration with someone who has suffered through political or social conflict...

...they were too afraid even to rebuild anything...

...He felt for the first time that he was being personally targeted, that there was real hatred in the eyes of his attackers...

...Why they couldn't step up with the same diligence and the same tenacity in Darfur is really beyond me...

...If that's the trade-off, it's a horrible, horrible trade-off...

...But that's another reason why I need to work on something else in the meantime...

...She wrote to me out of the blue asking if I'd be willing to write about the Lost Boys generally, and, in specific, if I'd be willing to meet Valentino, who at that time was a spokesman for the Lost Boys in Atlanta...

...Supposedly there are intelligence agents in Khartoum who are working for the Administration...

...There, he co-founded a short-lived magazine called Might, and then moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn...

...You have no frame of reference...

...It's really a much smaller conflict involving far fewer people...

...Q: What do you make of U.S...

...But Eggers, who at the time was twenty-nine, and, as he puts it, "embarrassed" by his sudden fame and wealth, didn't embrace the obvious—big publicity and big publishers—and instead made a number of interesting choices that shielded him from the mass media and enlarged the literary world around him...

...There is this tendency in America to believe that the people of "that part of the world" are so unfathomable, so inscrutable, so different from us that, well, do we even know if they have ten toes...

...Eggers: At first, his story was going to be one of unmitigated triumph, overcoming struggle...

...Do you fear the corrupting influence of the mass market...

...They don't love their children the way we do...

...Q: You've chosen in many ways to limit your own fame and even to limit the number of your books that are published...

...And then in October 2005, he was attacked in his home and robbed...

...Eggers: I think there are wonderful writers that might benefit from a more interesting story than another one about infidelity in the suburbs of Connecticut, but everyone's process is so different and the choice of what to write is so personal that I would never urge someone to write anything...

...there's so much more work to be done, but you can see the effects of peace...

...I went there thinking I might write about him in some way, but after we spent the weekend together, having a conversation with my tape recorder in his hand for about ten hours, I said yes...

...It didn't have a simple arc...

...You didn't see any sign of teachers...

...Everyone has a different comfort level with the mass market, and I guess I hit my limit...

...Why and how did you decide to structure it that way...

...And the novel is more alive than ever...

...He first e-mailed me about it...

...There was a lot of excitement, and a lot of the Southern Sudanese really wanted the same thing to happen in Khartoum...

...wouldn't act more resolutely...

...You see a person's face and you shake their hand and you find out that it wouldn't kill you to help them...

...Khaled Hossei-ni's Kite Runner is a book that has put five million people in touch with what it means to have grown up in Afghanistan, and it humanizes the situation there...

...She lives in Amsterdam...

...I've been reading Presidential biographies lately and I haven't been able to find any worse Administration, nothing comparably bad on so many levels...

...We found out that wasn't the way to do it...

...The novel, which is essentially a dramatized version of Deng's life, is a collaboration, but it is Eggers's brilliant act of empathic ventriloquism that makes the story more than just a transcript of suffering...

...Most recently, he joined forces with a human rights physician named Lola Vollen to create a series of McSweeney's books called "Voice of Witness," which will put into print the stories of people who have faced social or political injustices...

...The process was four years, almost exactly, which was not what I went into it thinking...

...I met him in August at the headquarters of 826 Valencia, housed in a former weightlifting gym in San Francisco's Mission District...

...With Might, we did it the dumb way...

...Raised in the affluent Illinois suburb of Lake Forest, Eggers was orphaned while in his final year of college when both of his parents died of cancer within weeks of each other...

...So it ended up having a lot of shading...

...But then over the course of his years in the U.S., his life wasn't changing much...

...The Believer has a circulation of 17,000 to 20,000 and I don't know if it will ever surpass that...

...It's perpetuated by our incurious—and at the same time a highly aggressive—Administration...

...There are things I've been taking notes on for years and years and I want to get to those...

...It would be another project I wouldn't take money for—the money would go to the cause...

...Eggers: Endlessly...

...Q. How did you get interested in writing a • book about Valentino Achak Deng...

...What did they eat...

...It's bizarre but it can work if you depend on the wisdom of your readers...

...If the readers think it's good, it will keep growing...

...It just gets embarrassing, or gaudy, in a way...

...I also prefer to work on a small scale...

...Well, you don't know...

...Eggers: I was in Sudan when Saddam Hussein was captured...

...Say you're in the middle of writing about this 800-mile trek and you want to describe the boys stopping to eat...

...It was a shell-shocked community that didn't know what the next day would bring...

...The first time we were in Marial Bai, there were no schools there, no kids anywhere...

...Nina Siegal is the author of the novel "A Little Trouble with the Facts, "forthcoming from HarperCollins Publishers in February...

...policy in Iraq...

...It was the saddest e-mail I ever got...

...We just don't know...

...It's part of the propaganda war...

...And he created a free writing program for poor children in San Francisco, called 826 Valencia (named for its address), which has mushroomed into a national literacy project, with centers in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Ann Arbor, Chicago, and Seattle...

...Ultimately, though, I feel there hasn't been an Administration as disastrous as Bush's in American history...

...Mary's, USF—and at Stanford we were sitting on a park bench, and he showed me the complaint card he'd gotten from the Atlanta police when he'd made his report...

...His Administration was instrumental in bringing all the parties to the table...

...We say, "We don't know who they are but we need to blow them up...

...And what kinds of change have you witnessed...

...He spurned corporate publishing offers and put out his next book, a novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), through his own publishing house, McSweeney's...

...And now, the same schoolyard is full of a thousand kids running, screaming, laughing, and all these teachers wearing loafers and cardigans...

...There's a book about voter disenfranchisement that's in the works, about a year away...

...I have a hard time saying no once something is right there in front of me...

...When suddenly you bleed into this much bigger, often cruder world, it get sometimes . . . I guess what I want to say is "embarrassing...

...Q: How many books do you hope to publish as part of the "Voice of Witness" series...

...And I thought, "What else am I doing that's more important than this...

...But there's another book in the works I'm doing interviews for right now, another person who was a victim of some pretty insane human rights abuses here in the U.S...

...I had never talked to him about anything that had made him so down...

...There was so much for me to learn...

...There are thousands of people who have returned from the north and from exile in other countries, the town is burgeoning, and there's new construction everywhere...

...Eggers: Twice—in 2003 and just recently...

...He'd been working this full-time job just for a minimum wage, and he couldn't find the time to take extra classes so he could get into all these colleges...

...His story coincides, just as Valentino's did, with so many different aspects of the current political and social climate...

...He wasn't able to register for college...

...I had already written the end of the book with Valentino getting to the airstrip and boarding the plane for the U.S...

...The place was decorated with tree trunks, a tent, and a barber's chair for the kids to play on...

...You start thinking that way some times, just out of anger for what they'd done to the people of Southern Sudan...

...His book is an oral history of undocumented workers who have suffered human rights abuses here...

...There are new roads being built...

...He spoke about his newest book and the art of staying small when you're a big name in American letters...

...I grew up as a fairly shy kind of a sidelines guy...

...But I'm more baffled than anything else...

...I made no commitment...

...Then, Eggers poured his cash and energies into ventures that weren't exactly designed to make him richer: Under the McSweeney's rubric, and along with his wife, Vendela Vida, and writers Heidi Julav-its and Ed Park, he co-founded a visually striking monthly magazine called The Believer, where "length is no object," and "there are book reviews that are not necessarily timely," according to its website...

...I also take it really personally what he did to the perception of this country abroad, because I'm a patriot...

...In 2004, he published How We Are Hungry, a collection of short stories, and last year he produced his most impressive work yet: What Is the What, a novel that tells the life story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the "Lost Boys" of Sudan, who survived a massacre in his childhood home of Marial Bai, escaped civil war by walking 800 miles, and lived for a dozen years in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya...

...Q: What's your opinion about Bush's policy toward Southern Sudan and Darfur...

...Dave Eggers: It started with a letter in the mail from Mary Williams, who was at the time the head of the Lost Boys Foundation...

...Actually the next two books...

...Here's a guy who is resettled in the U.S...

...So far, the project has published SurvivingJustice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated and Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath...

...The subject heading was "Bad News...

...I know now it's a three- or four-year process...

...There were myriad struggles that were still ongoing after he got here that had to be part of the book...

...That is, I wondered if the murderous regime in Khartoum should be pushed out somehow...

...But in terms of writing the whole book, I just didn't know what I was getting into...

...I don't know how to explain it...

...It was one thing to write an article, because as a journalist I thought I could get by...

...Eggers: One thing a lot of us really gave Bush credit for was brokering the peace between the north and the south of Sudan...

...We're in an era when novels can have some pretty massive effects...

...I had no idea how long it would take...

...Wearing jeans, a plain cotton shirt, and leather boots, his pale blue eyes in a kind of perpetual squint, Eggers had something of the Sam Shepard about him...

...I was watching the TV with a group of young men about Valentino's age, and we were all standing out by the airstrip, around the one TV for about a hundred miles...

...Novels really have the power to engender sympathy and empathy, and give us a sense of humanity...

...Q: Did you feel intimidated by the idea of writing his story...

...He and his sister were left to raise their eight-year-old brother, Christopher, and moved to San Francisco, the story that's told in A Heartbreaking Work...

...With McSweeney's and The Believer we decided to do the math better, to depend on the readers, not on advertisers or anyone else...

...Two and a half million people died in the other war, and it involved a vast army of the SPLA [Sudan People's Liberation Army], whereas the armies and the rebel groups in Darfur are far fewer and nowhere near as organized...

...And get this: Because of reader support, McSweeney's, the literary quarterly, is able to subsidize some of the more eccentric projects we take on...

...We thought we had to do 100,000 circulation and we had to have all this advertising, and it was never going to happen and no one got paid, we were all perpetually disappointed, and it folded...

...There's a book being finished now by Peter Orner, a novelist and lawyer for asylum seekers...

...They wanted the U.S...

...It's so inspiring...

...Q: Have you thought about enlisting other authors in the process of writing novels that are based on the struggles of people in countries outside the U.S...

...So, diplomatically, it shouldn't be any harder...

...But there are reasons why they are dragging their feet, one of them being the war on terror...

...That book, coincidentally about a young American who has won what might be called an "embarrassing" cash windfall and travels the globe trying to give it away, was sold only through independent bookstores and on the Internet...

...Q: What next...

...That way, there's no compromise...

...Eggers: Yes, absolutely...

...They didn't know what they were asking for, but at that time, knowing everything they had gone through, I remember weighing things...

...THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW by Nina Siegal Dave Eggers After the amazing success of his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), a bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist that landed him a reported $2 million movie deal, author Dave Eggers could have easily made a comfortable life for himself resting on his literary laurels...

...I got used to being an artsy kid—maybe on the JV soccer team but that was it, you know what I mean...

...I didn't know what would become of the meeting...