Laura Jane Willoughby in conversation with Ted Conover
I was in the midst of my own immersion reporting before I learned that what I was doing had a name; before I knew there were other writers who approached their chosen subject by becoming a part of a community or subculture to more fully and fairly explore it. While memoirs tend to focus on the author’s development and insights, immersion journalism involves the author as part of the plot line to reveal a subject more deeply than the standard third-person narrative voice can do.
It felt awkward for me, a trained journalist, to insert “I” into the narrative: yet it was the only way to be fully transparent with the reader; to divulge the way my mere presence in the room changed the plotline.
I’ve turned to several immersion journalists as mentors-on-the-page since then. Among them is Ted Conover. Even if you’re not familiar with his name, you’ve likely heard about at least one of his books.
His first book, Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with American’s Hoboes, started as his undergraduate anthropology thesis and became a cult classic soon after its 1984 publication. In 1987’s Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America’s Mexican Migrants, Conover immersed himself with migrant workers, transiting the U.S. Southern border twice to explore what was at the time a largely hidden community. NewJack: Guarding Sing Sing, which details his experiences as a prison guard inside what was at the time the nation’s most notorious prison, was the 2000 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
His other books include Whiteout: Lost in Aspen, The Routes of Man: Travels in the Paved World, and the craft book, Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep.
For his 2022 book, Cheap Land Colorado: Off Gridders at America’s Edge, Conover purchased a trailer in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, a valley situated between two ranges of the Colorado Rockies, to explore a subculture living on the margins of society. He volunteered with a local nonprofit working to prevent homelessness and through that work met the people he profiles in his book. He still owns the trailer, still visits the Colorado prairie, and keeps in touch with his “prairie neighbors.”
We talked on an October afternoon in the days before the 2024 election, Conover from his office at his home in New York City, and myself from my home office in Maryland. We explored the changing nature of the immersion genre, the ethical nuances deep immersion requires, and the growing recognition that sometimes the third-person voice can erase the context that brings depth and resonance to a subject.
What follows is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.
Laura Jane Willoughby: How do you define immersion journalism, and where does participatory journalism fit within that spectrum for you?
Ted Conover: I don’t draw hard and fast lines with those terms. To me, both suggest in-depth research that lasts weeks or months. Both also point to a writer who includes their own experiences among the important sources for a project, writing about their experiences and reflecting on them. To me this potential for reflexivity is one of the advantages of this sort of writing.
LJW: Can you say maybe a little bit more about that reflexivity piece? I think you’re touching on something that’s very important.
TC: For many years, journalism was limited to a third-person rendering of things that have a first-person aspect to them. Cutting out the first person sometimes cuts out a lot of what’s interesting about somebody talking to somebody else.
For my book Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge, I remember interviewing a woman out on the prairie. When I drove up, one of the first things she did was remark that the tires on my truck were pretty new. To my mind she was saying, “you must have money.” That informs the social dynamic between us, and so it might be worth a mention.
One reason I love the immersion approach is it lets you be forthcoming about things like that. It lets you be more transparent than certain journalistic conventions would allow. That doesn’t mean you always should be, but it opens the door to the possibility that you can, which might add depth and nuance to a conversation.
LJW: I think you’re touching on this idea that immersion journalism is more relevant now than before. That when you include who you are as the writer and your perspective, you’re actually giving the reader an idea of your personal perspective and therefore addressing the bias inherently there that many people in our nation have awakened to.
TC: We all have a point of view. These things are always subjective. And to explain a bit about your subjectivity, or to be able to, is a good thing. To step aside from this idea that it’s the voice of God speaking. Writing in the third person can suggest that it is universal knowledge or something that qualifies me to say these things. I’m always happier modifying that if I can and trying to explain where I’m coming from.
LJW: You mentioned “voice of God” which triggered for me one of the things I’ve been trying to put into words, and that is that the third-person point-of-view is usually written from the predominant culture’s viewpoint. And here in the United States, that is still the white European perspective. How do you feel about that?
TC: I think if you write for publications with a wide readership, such as The New York Times, the Washington Post, any place big, there’s a sort of voice to that publication that represents the majority culture. Or, what used to be considered the majority culture—everything seems a bit up for grabs right now. The times we’re in call for more thoughtfulness about where each of us is coming from and who we’re speaking for. For years certain publications had a voice they considered normative. I think now they’re all questioning that and trying to include more diverse points of view and trying to determine just what, as a group, the people who work there might agree on. And I think that’s good.
LJW: Your career spans some great cultural and societal shifts. What changes do you think the immersion genre has undergone during your practice of it through the years?
TC: There wasn’t a special term for it when I started—I didn’t think of what I was doing as “immersion.” I considered Rolling Nowhere to be first-person reported nonfiction or journalism-cum-memoir. The first-person voice in journalism and general nonfiction is much more common now—it has evolved over the years and gone mainstream. That has happened alongside the popularity of memoirs and the growth of the web, where everybody can publish a sentence or a paragraph on social media. Along the way, the idea of an “objective” reality has slowly taken a back seat to the acknowledgement that there’s a subjective element in all that we write. I think that’s a good thing, and I think it’s especially good if we can find ways to gracefully acknowledge it.
Is it a genre? I’m not sure if it is. I have a bibliography in my book [Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep] of books I see as related to mine and the writers I think of as sort of my colleagues or peers. Maybe we write in the same genre—most of us take an empathetic approach to people unlike us. But there’s so much variability within that. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc might have referred to herself as “I” once or twice in her book Random Family, which I guess makes it first person, but we don’t learn a lot about her. There are people who immerse deeply, but then keep themselves out of it more than I do. My feeling is that readers now know that the presence of this writer in the room is going to change things, and so why not acknowledge it? Why not take that as a given and be forthright about the fact that my presence might cause some disturbance in the field, if you will.
LJW: In immersion journalism, you can be side by side with a person accompanying them through their experiences. Sometimes, the minute you pull out your recorder or the phone to take a photo, that shifts and changes what’s happening. What have your experiences been with that shift, especially since these days we all have a recorder in our back pocket?
TC: In a way, I think it’s easier now to ask people if it’s okay to record the conversation than it used to be. More people are recording more of everything, and it’s not such a surprise, or it doesn’t feel so formal if I say to somebody, “May I record our conversation?” Because if they wanted, they could probably also record it. They could pull out their phone and do the same thing and more power to them.
With Cheap Land Colorado, I was living on the property of this family, the Grubers, and I saw them every day. I’ve got a trailer in one corner of their five acres, but we crossed paths all day long. In a situation like that, it’s possible for people to forget what you’re doing there, that you are a journalist, that you’re here to take notes and watch and ask and learn. And so, taking out a phone or a notebook and a pen and saying, “Do you mind if I write this down?” is a great reminder to them. It’s a really good thing to do, and you shouldn’t let too much time go by without reminding somebody what you’re doing. One thing I’ve learned over time is it’s better to keep people apprised than to surprise them later. There’s always a little bit of fear when you ask if you can record it, but I think it’s usually a good thing.
LJW: Traditionally the journalistic field mandates that when one is writing about somebody else, they are your subject or your source. We never seem to call them “friends.” Has how you view the people you immerse with and write about shifted at all for you over the years? How do you view that?
TC: I think a lot about this. I often refer to my “prairie neighbors.” I think we need to be careful with the word “friend” if it’s somebody we have gotten to know through our reporting about them.
In Immersion I refer to a long story I wrote in Harper’s about a veterinarian in Iowa. He invited me to stay in his guest room while we were working together, but I preferred to stay in a motel. I’d say we like each other a lot—we still call each other every few months. But it’s different from my other friends, right? I’m a writer in New York, he’s a veterinarian in Iowa, and we met when he agreed to be my subject. Friends just doesn’t seem quite the right word for it.
LJW: Sometimes I feel like that boundary that they’re not your friends comes from a belief that if you’re writing about your friends, you won’t write the truth or you’ll want to protect them. Is that where that feeling is coming from for you as well?
TC: With immersion reporting, it gets tricky because you want to maintain rapport at the same time as you want to be able to tell the unfettered truth. When I went out to the prairie, I had to think hard about how I was going to portray people. I was happy when some of them brought that issue up. Stacy Gruber, the mom of the family I rented from, referred to her own lack of teeth and how people on TV who don’t have teeth are portrayed as automatically unreliable and down-market. She said, people like you with their teeth—they’re the ones who people believe. And there’s a lot to that. She felt a real stigma for not having teeth. I was happy she brought it up because I had not wanted to include her teeth in my description of her. That seems like a potent detail that can be taken the wrong way. But once she brought it up, I felt I could talk about it with her and put it in my book, which she has been fine with.
I think it’s good for a writer working with vulnerable people–vulnerable due to their poverty or their health status or any number of things–to adopt the motto first do no harm. I hope the reasons for that seem obvious. What’s less obvious are the possible exceptions to that. In Cheap Land Colorado, one of my neighbors was arrested for basically running a puppy mill. Other neighbors who were his tenants shared with me a bunch of internet research they had done showing he had been charged with or convicted of animal abuse in several states.
So that’s his story. What do I do with that? Is it okay for me to share it? Is it, in fact, my responsibility to share it? I thought about that for a long time, and finally put it in the book—partly because I had been present one day when he bought a puppy from another neighbor, and I considered myself a witness. But I thought hard about it before I put it in my book. Because my goal at the time was not to be an investigative reporter looking for wrongdoing. My goal is to go and achieve a deeper level of understanding of how people live.
Every kind of journalism has ethical challenges at some point. It’s almost impossible to write about other people and not consider them. And I think a lot of these issues become acute when you’re getting to know people really well.
LJW: This whole conversation about ethics has reminded me of journalistic ethics classes, where there was never any firm answer provided to the student because, ultimately, those ethics are up to the individual. It seems like with immersion it all comes down to the material, what you’re immersed in, who you’re immersed with, and the community that you’re immersed with to really determine the best ethics for moving forward.
TC: Yes, I agree. Ethics is at the very core of journalism, and ethical questions come up every step of the way. But like you just said, the questions are often context-specific, and it’s hard to make firm and fast rules that apply to every situation. So, I think the best solution is to be mindful of them and to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and think, are you treating them fairly? And I think fairness and accuracy remain top virtues.
There’s a built-in tension around the whole idea of writing about somebody else. It doesn’t matter who it is: it can be your best friend, your neighbor, your old professor. It can be somebody you interviewed once, briefly, for a story. In each case, by writing about them, you are exerting a kind of power in what you’ve chosen to say about them and how you’ve chosen to say it. There’s just no getting around that—it’s built into the process, and it’s what makes it interesting. I don’t think it is a bad thing that writers have power. It can be a problem with a new writer who hasn’t published and suddenly sees what their words can do, or how they can affect somebody. Over the years, I’ve become more mindful of that. Now that I’ve been at it all these years, I can see that people are going to read that book or article just for the parts about them. This happens. People care first of all about what you say about them, and that is proper and fair.
LJW: In the past twenty years, the world of narrative and its reception has changed. We’re having all these social conversations about who has the right to tell somebody’s story or not, the nuances of the power differential that’s there, especially in a culture like ours where one’s skin color makes a difference. What’s your viewpoint on that conversation that’s unfolding?
TC: It’s a terribly important conversation that raises important points about authority, representation and respect. It’s an overdue conversation. And I think the attention it’s getting is going to improve things. It is already resulting in a greater diversity of voices writing about the world. To me, that is the best solution. I like to think that any of those voices should be free to write about anybody else. I know this has been a debate in the world of fiction writing, too. Are there certain kinds of people you shouldn’t write about because you are an educated white person? I think that writers of all kinds should be modest in their claims of what they are capable of knowing or responsibly depicting.
There’s going to be blind spots I have because of who I am that I need to be mindful of and open about. It’s a question of what constitutes authority, isn’t it, and when we can claim that authority and when we should not claim it. I think authority must be earned by life experience, by time spent learning things. Some kinds of authority you may never have, and you should not pretend that you do.
LJW: I feel like immersion journalism really can be a solution to conversations about whether somebody has the right to tell a story. If somebody is in a marginalized category or is in another category that’s considered othered, it’s only then that as a writer, you can show your reader where you’re coming from. It can become part of the story. You can write about it. Here’s my blind spots. And here’s what I was realizing as I was immersed in this culture or situation.
TC: Yes. There’s a book I love to teach, Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier, who’s a sociologist. He wrote his dissertation about the mostly African American men who sold magazines along Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village when Duneier was a grad student. Duneier would walk by them all the time—he’d buy books and magazines, and he got to know them well, and one in particular named Hakim Hasan. Hasan was very well read. He had worked as a paralegal in a fancy law firm. Duneier invited him to write a chapter of his book about the vendors, and it’s one of the best.
This idea of collaboration or letting a “subject” speak directly to the reader, share the platform is so beautiful. It can be hard to reproduce, but it’s a great model, for democratization and for truth and justice.
LJW: If we look at the canon of immersion and participatory journalists and writers, there is still a gender and color divide. It’s still mostly white men and white women who are in the canon. There have been some wonderful books published in the past few years, like South to America by Imani Perry, and I could name others. But I don’t feel like they’ve yet made it into the canon, and I haven’t seen their books referred to widely. From your standpoint, where do you see that issue? Is it something that needs fixed, and if so, how could it be approached?
TC: A diverse canon legitimizes the genre, if you ask me. It’s in all of our best interests. I think that diversification is happening, but it’s slow. Entering the canon takes a long time–that’s why it’s a canon. It’s hard to arrive there quickly, but I think things are moving in the right direction. They won’t get there without institutionalized vigilance to make sure that this isn’t just a fad that goes away. You’ve got to be in it for the long haul. But more and more of the people I know in publishing are thinking this way.
LJW: Thinking back over the breadth of your experience as an immersion journalist, what is one thing specific to the craft that’s most surprised you?
TC: Maybe it’s that if you’re willing to listen, many people want to talk. I remember a housemate of mine in college: when she learned about my idea to go ride the rails, she looked at me incredulously and said, “Why would they talk to you?” And I thought, “Well, they probably wouldn’t if I just walked up to them the way I’m dressed right now, hanging out with people like you.” But I think if I’m on the same freight train, or we’re in the same ‘jungle’ or freight yard, we’re going to have enough in common that they will talk to me. And I was mostly right, and I continue to marvel at how possible conversation can be if you put yourself in their world, and you approach people with curiosity and respect. Beautiful things can happen, but you have to take a chance, you have to leave your world and go to theirs.
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Ted Conover is the author of six books of narrative nonfiction, most recently Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge, and a craft book, Immersion. He is also a professor at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, where he teaches reporting and writing to graduate and undergraduate students.
Laura Jane Willoughby is a participatory journalist and nonfiction writer whose career spans twenty years at print and TV outlets. She has been immersed in the Sanctuary Movement at the Southern and Northern borders and in the interior U.S. since 2018. She has a B.A. in Media Communications from the College of Charleston and an MFA in nonfiction from Goucher College where she was the recipient of the 2020 Christine White award for literary journalism.
