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expand on brief notes, transcribe quotes, etc.
Does your note-taking ever bother your subjects?
Sure, note-taking can be intimidating, particularly to those who are not used to writing. Hoboes and
Mexican migrants associate note-taking with law enforcement, social workers, or employers, with
powerful people who tell them what to do. My problem in those situations is that doing my job—
reporting, taking notes— alienates the very people I need to get close to. So I work up to it slowly
and try to make my note-taking less threatening.
With Rolling Nowhere I was very new to this. I treated my notebook as my diary. That made it easy
to say, “That was a great joke! Tell it to me again so I can write it down.”
The hardest thing to take notes on is dialogue, and those details are indispensable when I’m recreating
a scene later on. If it’s inconvenient to have my notebook out, I’m pretty good at holding five
or six lines of conversation in my head until I get a chance to go write them down.
It sounds as if you rely mostly on notes. Do you ever tape interviews?
I tape if I’m interviewing a sophisticated person who is good at stringing together complicated
thoughts.
Do you transcribe your own tapes?
I do everything myself. I’ve never had a research assistant. I used a typist to redo drafts of Rolling
Nowhere, but she introduced mistakes into the manuscript, so I stopped doing that. I’m a control freak
about my writing. I like to think the work benefits from it.
How do you get people who have good reasons to be reticent—hoboes, illegal aliens—to talk so
openly with you?
I spend a lot of time with them, tell them about myself, and listen carefully when they talk to me. In
combination, those things will usually get people to open up. You have to bring your genuine concerns
to people. You’ve got to tell them where you stand, not just on questions of policy, but also on
personal issues. Self-disclosure is essential. I’ll tell them, “I miss my kids. Do you miss your kids?”
At Sing Sing I might say, truthfully, “I really hate that sergeant, don’t you?”
In the beginning I might be the chatty one who initiates the conversation. But by the end they’re
usually doing most of the talking. The desire to speak about oneself seems a human universal.
How antagonistic will you become during an interview? How much will you challenge your
subjects when they have incorrect beliefs?
It depends. For instance, I once contradicted a very explosive-tempered hobo named BB who’d
done a lot of prison time. Like most white hoboes, he was at pains to distinguish himself from the