How Writers Choose Their Topics, with Dreux Richard

DREUX RICHARD IS AN American writer and investigative journalist who is also a literary translator. From 2011 to 2016. He covered Japan’s African community for the Japan Times where he also led a year long investigation into what was supposed to be the world’s safest nuclear plant. His writing has appeared in CounterPunch and in The New York Times, among other places. He is the author of the new book, Every Human Intention: Japan in the New Century just out from Penguin Random House. Listen in and read along as we discuss how writers choose their topics. 

Dreux: Hi, Marion.

Marion: It’s lovely to have you here. And my audience is writers, many of whom dream of going somewhere other than the country of their birth and living and writing about it. So let’s talk about that and take this apart a bit. How did you first get to Japan and what was the assignment?

Dreux: I first went to Japan to read and think about Japanese literature under the supervision of a writer named Hideo Levy. And as the name suggests he’s American, he’s culturally Jewish from the Washington, D.C. area, but he’s also the first Western author to write in Japanese, to write literary novels specifically in Japanese and to win major literary awards for those novels. So he’d done something really distinct and unusual and that accomplishment was what attracted me to Japan initially and attracted me to studying with him. I didn’t know much about the country and I wasn’t very deeply invested in knowing more about it when I first went. But of course, when you have an opportunity like that and you’re young, I had just left undergrad, you become invested very quickly.

Marion: Sure. So from 2011 to 2016, as I said, you covered Japan’s African community for the Japan Times. And this resulted in you publishing one of the longest print articles in the newspapers, 124 year history. It’s quite an accomplishment and one for which you should be deeply proud. But here’s what set my mind reeling thinking about this, you’re an outsider to both of those communities, the African and the Japanese. So for all the writers listening who would like to report on something outside themselves, let’s talk about the advantages and disadvantages of being from elsewhere when you write, what are they do you think?

Dreux: Without beginning and end, they certainly define almost every aspect of your experience when you’re engaged in this kind of writing and research and ideally your place in the communities you’re writing about and the nation where you live if you’re an expatriate comes to feel pretty second nature and just as complicated and strange as your relationship with your own culture comes to feel. But when we’re talking specifically about what I was doing, obviously the difference between being a very, I know this is like a freighted word these days, but a very privileged outsider. That is an outsider who can go where he wants and talk to whomever he’d like to talk to as an American in Japan is really different from the experience one has as an American writing about a community of immigrants, that’s facing a lot of economic hardship and also faces a lot of ethnic discrimination.

So those were very different experiences and the ways that Japanese people who I was interested in knowing better or getting information from, tended to push away and deflect my interests were really different from the ways that people in the Nigerian community did that, which is not to say that I spent all my time being deflected but I think almost anybody who comes to those communities without a really profound personal historical or ethnic connection to them probably spends a good chunk of their time being pushed away and probably has a lot of vivid memories of trying to figure out how to integrate into those communities, not just successfully, but respectfully.

Marion: Yeah, respectfully, absolutely. Privilege, respect, all of these things really impact us as we have a look. And I think I’ll give everybody a little reminder here. The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster was a nuclear accident at a power plant in Japan primarily caused by an earthquake and a tsunami. It was the most severe nuclear accidents since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. And it would have been well enough to look at the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and the many cultural, political, economic, and other aspects of the rebuild from that.

But in your book, Every Human Intention: Japan in the New Century, you offer a thoughtful, illuminating exploration of modern Japanese culture and politics, but you do so through the eyes of this investigative reporter, this investigative piece. And I just found that fascinating. There’s so many ways you could have just curtailed this story a bit but instead you went much bigger and you went into this investigative head. So let’s talk about those eyes, that investigative eye and how they’re different from a writer who’s just doing fairly simple reporting with basic curiosity. What about that investigative piece allows you to go so broadly into this Fukushima nuclear disaster in the rebuild?

Dreux: Well, for me, it’s part of the artistic and literary endeavor that I’m engaged in. I think that somebody who reads my work and this would include people I’ve studied writing with or alongside and this would include my own editors, see journalism when they look at it. And it’s certainly fair to label it that way. And the principles and ethics of journalism are always nearby when I do my work, but the impetus always begins in a very literary or discursive or artistic way. And I think this may speak a little bit to your previous question when you said, what are the advantages and disadvantages of being an outsider? Well, I think the advantages you’re forced to be among people whose experiences are different from yours. And therefore, if you’re a curious human being very fascinating to you and very stimulating in a way that more familiar experiences may not be.

So my interest in these subjects like nuclear energy or the nuclear industry in particular in Japan which I reported from for a long time and the African community in Japan, specifically the West African or Nigerian community, they really just arise from happening to be in the vicinity of people who live in those communities and finding myself confused by their experiences and therefore really curious and fascinated. And for me, trying to be really forensically accurate and very thorough about the way that I write about them is a quality that’s probably inherited from my mother who was a poverty law attorney in Washington, D.C. when I was growing up. And in order for her to do her job effectively, she had to develop a very thorough understanding and a very deep set of sympathies for people who are living in neighborhoods that were not the neighborhoods she had lived in and experiencing things that she didn’t regularly experience.

And if you leave anything out of that understanding, when you go into open court with it, you can’t paint an effective or complete picture of reality, and I’m not advocating for people in the way that an attorney would be. However, I have the same set of concerns and fears about rendering a portrait of people other than myself which wouldn’t stand up to a really deeply forensic level of scrutiny. So the short answer would be, I can’t figure out or I have yet to figure out a way to make art or to write that isn’t really hung up on these questions of verisimilitude and factual truth and determining what really took place in situations that have since become very controversial.

Marion: It’s so fascinating what your mother did and which part of that you imported. And it makes me want to know a little bit more about the act of looking because it’s so deeply subjective and it was so generous of you to offer that taxonomy, that inheritance. After all, we bring our own light to every experiment, which always makes us run the risk of only observing the things our own way. But if I had to characterize your view, I would say it’s sympathetic but it’s not quite the right word. What more would you like to say about that light you shown on these worlds?

Dreux: I think the thing I really want to say right now because you’re talking to me at a particular moment is that it would have been impossible to do it without the editor I worked with at Pantheon Books. And he’s a very particular kind of editor or unfortunately now it’s more appropriate to say he was a very particular kind of editor because he passed away just a few days ago. And I’m not sure that there is any other editor or has been recently any other editor who would look at a book that is primarily literary in nature and say, you know what, there is room for these deeply forensic and at times very scientific in the case of the nuclear industry and the risks that I explored in my reporting about the nuclear industry in my book, would say that there’s room for this kind of discussion within a book that readers expect to encounter as narrative and as literary writing.

So I was very fortunate to be supported in what is a very strange approach to writing but definitely my approach and distinctly my approach to writing by perhaps the last editor in New York who was really interested in books like that because they frankly aren’t commercial.

Marion: Right. Yeah. Well, let’s talk about that. Let’s give a little bit of background about where you go in this. Let’s talk a little bit about your book structure. You present post Fukushima, Japan, and three illustrative parts. You follow the members of Japan’s Nigerian community who struggle with hostile immigration and in Japan’s Northernmost city you go door to door with the regions’ youngest census employee. And finally you take us into the offices of energy executives and nuclear regulators as they fight to determine whether reactors are threatened by earthquake faults and if there’ll be permitted to restart, you go all over these three different topics. And I was fascinated by that. You take on major contemporary issues of immigration, eldercare, nuclear energy. How, and when did you zero in on those topics as your topics of choice and how helpful was that editor in saying, well, how about this, this and this? Or did you pitch it as this, this and this, just talk to us about the process, because your inquiry that person’s complicity created a very beautiful book but I can’t imagine it was easy.

Dreux: Well, it’s really nice to be able to talk about these things in a way that is targeted at or directed at other writers because I think they’re probably the only demographic who would understand and appreciate the particular answer that I give to this type of question which is, every last topic I wrote about was selected by accident or as a matter of coincidence. I met the first people I came to know in Japan’s Nigerian community entirely by accident spontaneously on the street in Tokyo. I found myself in Japan’s Northernmost city where there really is no serious political narrative or any political narrative more serious, I should say, than population decline. And I also found myself investigating nuclear operations for the first time or becoming familiar with them again entirely by accident through people I met in a social setting.

And the truth is I didn’t make a concerted effort to build any journalistic platform around these things. I did happen to do quite a bit of newspaper writing or newspaper journalism about the African community. And I did one major newspaper investigation about the nuclear industry but I didn’t perform any regular reporting or daily news reporting on the nuclear industry at any point. And I certainly didn’t do any reporting on population decline. They were things that interested me because they affected the lives of people I’d met and been curious about. And then I became determined to write about them at great length in a detailed way with a literary level of consideration and artistic investment. And so the book, for better or for worse, both partially and artistically speaking is almost the only representation of my interest in these subjects and they are deeply personal interests.

In terms of the editor’s role, I brought this to my editor as a complete project in terms of how I’d conceived it or it’s fair to say that I tried to sell it as a complete project and this editor was interested. And I think what’s important to say to other writers about that is I was following a writer who’d gone before me and written another book about Japan that had done reasonably well commercially, and that had won some important awards. And that I think a number of people if they read it today might think I wonder if this book is commercial but because it had done well when it was published and because this editor had worked on that book and because I was very self-consciously interested in doing a good job of the things that that book did, that editor was interested and was able to be supportive of the approach I was taking even though it did range all over the place and even though it was challenging.

And so there’s a lot of value in A, knowing who you are, what kind of writer you are, and then B, figuring out what other books it makes your books really close to. And then I suppose the final piece but this feels like a lot to ask of writers is then to know which editors or other potential patrons of your work in the world are interested in those books that you consider yourself close to and not just books that are very well known or well loved but maybe books that had a really good shot and a really good run but not everybody remembers or only a smaller group of people remember.

Marion: Yeah. I frequently tell people to go to the bookstore, take a long time, go find some books that interest you that are near to your interests or near to your topic and see who they think in the book. It literally that simple act of finding out who else has got that vibration for this, who else in the publishing industry might have a vibration for this because as you said, this is a deeply personal take. Along with the topics I mentioned you’re taking on migration, the feel for a lost homeland, xenophobia of those who move around the world and all of those you took while being very far away from home. So I have to ask what role did your own feelings about where you were and how far you were from where you are rooted? How did your own feelings inform the writing of this book? You must’ve had some homesickness, some logging. It can’t hold them in all adventure all the time.

Dreux: To the contrary, actually I feel homesick for Tokyo right now as we’re speaking to each other. I didn’t have a particularly rooted upbringing to miss once I started to travel, I had a pretty strange and in some respects fairly difficult upbringing and I left my parents’ house when I was 16 years old and moved into a neighborhood in Washington, D.C. that was pretty mixed income would be the nice way to say it and commuted like two hours through Beltway traffic each way to get to the public school in the suburban town where I’d grown up. And then I toured in Punk bands after that for a little while before going to college. So by the time I came to Tokyo, I had really not spent much time in one place during my adult life. And I think even to date, even though it’s been a few years since I’ve been based full-time in Japan, I don’t think I’ve spent more time in any city as an adult than I have in Tokyo.

So the process of learning those communities in Japan for me was actually the process of finding or adopting a home. And it’s also true that numerically speaking my largest group of friends by far, and this includes my closest friends are Nigerian people who I met in Japan, specifically IGBO people from the former Biafra region of Nigeria who I met in Japan. And that has a lot to do with me. Obviously, I’m ambivalent about my upbringing and I don’t maintain a lot of relationships with people who I know from the place where I grew up.

And so there was a hole or an emptiness there that my getting to know these communities in my writing about them filled and now that I’m back in the United States for the time being, there’s a familiar emptiness there again. And what I miss is actually being among those people in those places, and nothing feels more like home to me specifically than waking up at 8:00 PM, going to Japan’s red light districts or Tokyo’s red light districts specifically and spending the entire night there. And I have to say I’m a teetotaller, I’ve never had a drop of alcohol in my life. And a whole chunk of my family tree has Mennonite and I behave according to that cultural heritage. So I’m not a natural fit for that environment but that is where I felt most connected to people and most at home.

Marion: Wow. So this just answers a lot or let’s just say it makes my imagination spin into what I’m producing as answers to a lot of my questions about the skills you bring to the writing. So we’ve got a Mennonite background, a bit of a disjointed upbringing. We’ve got the Punk band, let us not forget that. So we’ve got this investigative eye and in your writer’s toolbelt there is so clearly poetry and the deployment of language that I would say is very novelistic. So in all it’s beautifully written and it’s not just an adventure tale, it’s a beautifully written piece. So let’s help the audience a bit and let’s just focus on the writing itself. You just gave us an awful lot of wonderfully diverse backgrounds that could create in a writer, a voice. So I don’t want to ask you, what’s the best training for someone who wants to write well, I want to ask you about how you annotate all the things we are to write well, that’s a pretty wonderful background but how do you bring them forward as you choose language?

Dreux: In terms of training I had pretty typical training. I studied creative writing. I’m one of those people who did it and now having understood what it means to do it wouldn’t recommend doing it formally. And by formally, I mean in some very institutional setting, I think you’d have to be a masochist to think that people shouldn’t study how to write well as a writer. But I mean in terms of making sure that you earn a degree in it, in particular, a graduate degree, I’m not sure that I can offer any advice about being so unsettled in an interior way that you’re constantly driven to find things that are very different from yourself to invest in. But I can certainly say that if you go to settings where people who are thinking in literary terms rarely go and try to think about them in literary terms, you often find that they suggest language to you and suggest types of language that can really constitute a breakthrough for you as a person who thinks carefully about written or verbal expression and wants to get better at it.

So I think I’ve learned a lot more listening to the way that people use not only English but English in particular, also their native languages in interesting places outside of my native culture, I learned more about how thought gets expressed verbally or in writing in that way than I’ve ever learned, really scanning or attempting to diagram my own sentences or expressions or phrases. So maybe my contribution to that discussion would be try to hear language that will be foreign to you in one way or another, as often as possible. And try to think very carefully about how it can be so foreign to you, and yet circumscribed within the same relatively small realm of expression, because there are only so many things we say as opposed to what we think or so many things we write circumscribed within that relatively small realm of writing and verbal expression that every writer, particularly literary writers is interested in.

Marion: That’s great advice to listen and to find the language in a place that’s foreign to you. I’ve had that experience as a reporter. I stood in front of a wide open body at an autopsy for the first time, years ago and found language that wasn’t a bit biological. It was far more spiritual. It was very curious to me that I had a near occasion to face while I was looking into the body of a man who had been recently murdered. And I went with that and it worked for me. So I completely understood what you were saying as you were talking but I would never have been able to put it that way. So thank you for that. That’s fascinating. And I wonder too about your role models is in any profession, how we begin to fashion the life we want many of my moments of fashioning this life came in the inspiration of reading others. So what were yours? Who were your literary role models and how closely did you study them as you began to create your writing life?

Dreux: Well, I got to know some of them, in particular, the person whose previous book I mentioned was in some ways, the template for my book is somebody I was lucky enough to meet and get to know and who I’ve remained in dialogue with after it became clear to me that my book would be published by the same editor who published her book, her name is Norma Field. She’s written about to a pretty extensive degree in the introduction to my book. The writers who really inspire me are obscure. There are exceptions at one point in my life, I think I must have read All the King’s Men like 800 times by Robert Penn Warren, which you could see as a real problem and something to get over depending on what you think of that book but writers who-

Marion: I love that book. I’ve read many times.

Dreux: Yeah. Writers whose books have had a really profound effect on me include a writer named Christopher or Chris Norwood who is currently the head of a health nonprofit in the Bronx called Health People. And you did a relatively short narrative nonfiction book, About Paterson, about Paterson, New Jersey, many years ago. I don’t think stayed in print very long but for me is the most lyrical and most accurate account of life in a declining American city ever written. And yeah, I’m not sure that many people read it any more but it’s deeply important to me. And then as somebody who is trained, chiefly as a fiction writer, my formal training and writing was in fiction, novels and short stories are very important to me. In particular, I often find myself looking to a book called The Miracle Shed by Phillip MacCann. And he’s a Northern Irish writer who only ever published one collection of short stories.

As far as I can tell by the copies of it that I’ve cycled through it was straight to paperback and I don’t think many people bought that book. And I know it went out of print very quickly and I don’t think he’s ever found any motivation to publish anything since but again, it’s a book that captures life in a very difficult era and a very difficult part of Belfast at that time in a way that I suppose it goes back to what I was saying before, he found and dealt with and developed the language indigenous to that place in a way that is completely distinct and I think impossible to repeat. So although it’s not much of a book from a commercial perspective and even its critical acclaim, I think wore away pretty quickly, I clutch it very tightly when I’m thinking about where I’m headed whether foolishly or intelligently, time will tell.

Marion: I love that, “I clutch it very tightly.” And the Christopher Norwood book, as soon as you said the name, I said, are we talking about the author of About Paterson? I had that book thrust into my hand probably, oh, my goodness, I’m going to say it’s before 1980, when I was at The New York Times, somebody gave it to me and I recognized it on my husband’s bookshelf before we were married. And we looked at each other like, “Oh, we both liked this book. There could be a future in this relationship.” It is a really, just as you described it, an informative book on how to write about a place where a future appears to have been vanquished but it plays astonishing history in the industrial history of America. Yeah. That’s a great one. That’s a great, great, great suggestion. I love that, so yeah.

Dreux: I would love to jump in and say Marion, that she was so young when she wrote that book.

Marion: Right.

Dreux: At oldest, she was in her mid 20s. And I think I’m not sure if I’m right about this, but I think the experience she gained there with which to write that book was as a junior reporter at a local TV affiliate or something of that order. And so it’s an example of someone who really wouldn’t have had many people outside of their very close social circle, believing they could do something like that, taking it upon themselves to do it out of personal fascination. And the line in that book, I almost can’t read non-fiction books about American cities since reading this line was in reference to the behavior of elected officials and other people who are trying to improve the city in various morally fraught ways, “their mistake, simple but fatal was believing what they had been taught rather than what they had learned” in order to encapsulate what people do that makes them so ineffective in these environments. They ignore the world around them in favor of a very strange and very inflexible notion of their own principles.

Yeah. I don’t think anything I’ve read quite surmounts or exceeds that in describing the American urban experience in one sentence.

Marion: Yeah. It’s a beautiful book and she did a fantastic job with it. And I remember the journalists of my generation passing it around and saying, this is the book to read. Wonderful. So as we start to wrap this up, I’m fascinated by many of the things that I’m hoping that you’re going to keep writing of course, and I want to hear about that, but I can’t let you go without asking you about choosing your publisher. You mentioned how you did the research but you have a great academic background and you got an affiliation with the university in New Zealand and the University of Nigeria. And it would have been not easy but maybe more usual to go to an academic press. And so for those friends of mine, those writers out there, those peers who are academics, how did you get the gumption let’s say to go for mass market publishing as opposed to an academic press. I think the temptation for academics is to stay with the academic press.

Dreux: Well, maybe the simplest way to explain this is to say that I had an offer from an academic press who in the genteel rules of publishing, I’m not allowed to name because I didn’t publish with them, but suffice to say that it they’re one of the two or three that sometimes compete with trade or independent publishers for audience. So one of the bigger ones, and I had to make a decision about whether to publish academically or publish with the trade press. It was an easy for me because I really looked at my material. And since I’d been trained as a literary writer and my chief interests were in literary writing, the notes I had taken in the field work I’d done were aimed toward making a literary book. And it was aside from the financial considerations and there is a big difference between trade publishing and academic publishing in that way, it was clear that I wasn’t going to be able to give an academic publisher what they wanted.

I think it’s very, very, very difficult not only when you go to publish but also when you sit at your desk and you write as someone who has some academic background or let’s just say someone who’s interested in being rigorous enough to be read by experts without causing them to roll their eyes. But who also wants to tell a story and build metaphors to straddle that boundary. I was very fortunate to have one offer from an independent press, one from an academic and one from a trade press, which was a moment when I got to feel like I had successfully straddled that boundary. But there have been lots of other moments when I felt like it’s almost impossible to engage in a scholarly level of rigor, even if it’s presented in a narrative way for a general audience through a publisher that expects relatively commercial work which is to say any literary publisher and that it’s equally difficult to get any academic publisher even a very mainstream journal that’s very heterodox interested in work that is at all literary or narrative.

And I think the only thing I can say to the audience, the particular audience within your audience I’m describing is, I hope you don’t give up because it feels very lonely for me. And if only you would keep trying then maybe someday it won’t feel quite so lonely. And maybe someday it will be more possible for writers like me or writers like them to speak to a general audience in a way that isn’t filled with jargon but is certainly not a dumbing down or an over-simplification of the principles that I’m familiar with and the worlds or communities that I’ve been involved in.

Marion: That’s lovely. That’s very helpful and very generous and welcoming. So just briefly, if you would, what’s next?

Dreux: Well, I’m working on a book about my native city, Washington, D.C. And Washington, D.C. is a place that’s very economically and ethnically segregated. And of course in our country, those two forms of segregation are like a Venn diagram where maybe 2% of the diagram isn’t the overlapping circles. The interesting thing about Washington D.C’s forms of segregation from my perspective is there’s so much media there and so much regional media and they’ve played such a distinct and tortured role in solidifying and the myths or the mythology that makes it especially difficult for white people, black people, and people in other ethnic communities to see each other clearly across the boundaries of neighborhoods. I’m interested in how it’s possible that the city I’m from is probably having more conversations about race now and more candid conversations about race now, and yet feels more ethnically alienated than it ever has in my lifetime. I’ll spend some time thinking about that and I’ll spend some time with people whose lives are affected by that.

Marion: Well, thank you for doing that and thank you for coming along today, Dreux. I so appreciate this and so enjoyed talking to you.

Dreux: Thank you for having me Marion. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Marion: The author is Dreux Richard. The book is Every Human Intention: Japan in the New Century, just out from Penguin Random House. See more on him at dreux richard dot com. I’m Marion, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com and take a class with me on how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a star review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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