On Writing 'The Other' in Narrative Nonfiction

A conversation with journalist Alice Driver

The beginning of journalist

Alice L Driver

’s new book, Life and Death of the American Worker, situates herself as the narrator of a reported story about employees of Tyson Foods, the largest meat producer in the United States. Tyson is headquartered in Driver’s home state of Arkansas, and she spent four years interviewing meatpacking workers and their family members. Driver began to investigate the industry, she writes, “because I grew up around meatpacking workers and knew their stories.”

Driver is not an immigrant. She is not a factory worker. Right away in an author’s note, she tells you where she comes from, how she got here, how she felt about the workers growing up, why she decided to write this book, and what limitations or challenges she faced.

In the social sciences, Driver’s author’s note might be defined as a statement on “positionality,” a term used to think about the varied experiences and backgrounds researchers might bring into their own work, which can inform and also bias how they approach it.

In recent years, I have heard more journalists refer to their own positionality, in considering potential biases or blindspots in reporting, or the ways in which their life experiences could enter into their work. 

One storyteller who comes to mind is Assia Boundaoui, an Algerian-American filmmaker, writer, and investigative journalist who I got to know during our time in the Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellowship at the University of Michigan (*note: the program is now recruiting applicants for its next class and I highly recommend it, a life-changing experience).

Boundaoui attended New York University for her master’s degree in journalism, and reported for NPR, the BBC, Al Jazeera and CNN, before returning to her hometown outside of Chicago to investigate whether her own community, home to many Arab Americans, had been under government surveillance. For years, Boundaoui fought to obtain 30,000 pages of records under the Freedom of Information Act.

Her documentary film, The Feeling of Being Watched, is now streaming on Amazon Prime. But what I remember being struck by during our time at The Wallace House are Boundaoui’s stories of how she had been excluded from traditional networks of investigative journalists because she was reporting on her own community, and therefore viewed as biased.

When Boundaoui spoke to our Knight-Wallace cohort and later to my students over Zoom, she used the term positionality to unpack her own role within this story. Her personal connection to this world did not hinder her ability to do the difficult investigative reporting and storytelling responsibly and ethically, but she was also transparent about it, and cognizant of how her perspective could also inform and influence aspects of the reporting.

In a recent post I discussed finding story ideas, and suggested writers not shy away from considering where we have come from as potentially rich source material. Boundaoui and Driver both pursued reporting in their own backyards. They held different levels of positionality in their stories. They were transparent about this. Both employed narrative and investigative journalism.

Some of us are familiar with the history of investigations by journalists into meatpacking plants. In her author’s note, Driver mentions one of the most famous examples: The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel about the meatpacking industry. The Covid pandemic spurred journalists to investigate “a deadly new jungle” in meat processing plants, which led to important reporting. But I have been around long enough to remember Charlie LeDuff’s story in 2000, “At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die,” which was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times series on race in America, or Ted Conover’s 2013 piece, “The Way of All Flesh,” for Harper’s. In these examples, the journalists go undercover, working within these industrial meatpacking plants to tell the stories of conditions on the inside.

Driver talked to me about how and why she did not want to go undercover, or try to work temporarily within meatpacking. Logistically, and at a time of heightened Covid danger, it was not even possible. But Driver also explained how she wanted to solely focus on the voices of immigrant workers who have been there for decades. Holding a job for a stint in a plant, she felt, would turn the lens too directly on herself, instead of truly trying to represent the long-term life or death struggles of the workers. 

The reporting and writing, which earned Driver a J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, was intensely difficult. Driver faced threats not only from Tyson, but also she worried about her sources who feared they could be fired or face retribution for speaking with a journalist.

Any storyteller taking on such a daunting, immersive nonfiction project these days will likely be questioned about their own positionality within the story. I enjoy listening to The Stacks podcast with host

Traci Thomas

, who sometimes brings narrative journalists who have written books onto the show. Thomas never shies away from asking the most celebrated journalists some variation of: How have you thought through or handled your own role as an outsider in the story? How did you think through the ethical issues? What gives you the right to tell this story? Why you? How are you benefitting from this being published? How are the subjects?

A few episodes from The Stacks that come to mind: A conversation with journalists Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham, two white male journalists who co-authored the book The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland; a conversation with journalist and author Nathan Thrall who wrote A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy. about a Palestinian family (Thrall is Jewish and based in Jerusalem); and an interview with Andrea Elliott, the daughter of a Chilean mother and an American father, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City, about a Black teenager and her family, and their journey of homelessness.

I sometimes assign my students this article by

Alexander Chee

, “How to Unlearn Everything: When it comes to writing the ‘other,’ what questions are we not asking?” In the piece, Chee is talking about fiction. But these questions are relevant in journalism and other storytelling too. Journalists will always write about other people’s lives and experiences. That is, of course, the job. Yet in this day and age, it is not usually enough (particularly when it comes to these immersive longform stories and nonfiction books) for us to answer the question of “why you and why this issue?” simply with “because I am a journalist, and I thought it was a great story.”

These answers require critical and thoughtfully considered responses from nonfiction writers interrogating their own motivations, ethics, and journalistic approaches.

Alice Driver, Simon & Schuster.

I often return to this quote from my former journalism professor, Walt Harrington:

“Literary journalists imbue their inquiries and stories with their own constellation of experiences, values, intelligence, and commanding philosophical questions to unlock the stories within the people they are writing about.”

Driver writes most of her book in third-person omniscient voice, occasionally interjecting to explain answers to how or why, or to provide context. Here is how she begins to lay out her own positionality and constellation of experiences right away, before pulling you into the visceral experiences of the workers she got to know:

“My neighbors grew their own food and tried to make ends meet working odd jobs. Some, like my parents, raised and butchered chickens at home. After my dad and uncle (who lived across the dirt road) chopped off the chickens’ heads, the birds would run around, their nerves briefly alive, as the last flows of life pulsed through their bodies. I close my eyes and see chickens running through the yard, their bloody heads left behind. Other people drove the forty-five miles to the chicken processing plant, where they worked and killed twelve thousand chickens per day, their hands in perpetual motion, completing a ritual both delicate and forceful—for one false movement could get them maimed or killed. I would see immigrants with scarred wrists, infected hands, and missing fingers. Some of them were disabled and rode around the store in motorized carts. Their labor was invisible, but I could see the marks of it on their bodies.”

Here is my interview with Alice Driver.

You're from Arkansas. But as you were getting into reporting this project, how did you start to begin to especially think about your own role as a journalist, as an outsider? 

I didn't study journalism. Nothing in my life is traditional. Ethically, I do try to follow journalistic guidelines about telling subjects what I can and can't do, what the project is. I can share your story. This is what I can do. But I can't pay your bills, find a lawyer, do a GoFundMe, help with all the millions of needs they have at any given time. 

So I try to be really clear about that in the beginning, because they do have a lot of needs, and I understand that. And I don't want them to feel like I'm ignoring that.

I am also fluent in Spanish. I have dedicated my life to living in Mexico. I have lived and worked in all the same countries that the workers that I interviewed are from. So it's not like I just showed up and said, “Hey, what's up?” I wouldn’t have been able to do this book if I wasn't fluent in Spanish, and didn't have the cultural fluency to maintain those relationships. The difficulty of this work was just too high.

You knew about this issue partly because this was your backyard. Often we see journalists parachuting into places they have no familiarity with. For you, this was something you were aware of your whole life. Was it a story that was just burning inside of you, to one day tell?

I'd long wanted to write about meatpacking workers. Nobody wanted to pay me to do it. But when the pandemic hit, I applied for funding. I thought: “This is going to kill people.” I know how meatpacking is, they're not going to do social distancing. That impetus to apply for that funding was just like “go.” It was an instinctual thing, and I don't think anyone else was thinking about that at that time. 

This project brought together all of my strengths: reporting in Spanish, and reporting in my home state, and reporting on a company that everyone ignores, but it is a global superpower, and it is from Arkansas.

It’s almost like all the pieces came together. 

I didn't think it was going to be a book. It wasn't my super plan. Reporting it was hideous and horrible for an entire year. People were super mean to me. Everyone was like: “Why are you even doing this? Nobody cares.” And then things changed. Suddenly, everyone is like: “Wow, this is a great story.”

It just takes a few important people who support it. Then there is a domino effect. But the beginning for you was full of rejection and difficulty?

Yes, it is really about hanging on to it.

One thing I admired is how you mentioned you were well aware of the stories that have come out of the meatpacking industry, journalists who have tried to work inside of the plants. You were pretty blunt: “That's not what I'm doing here.” 

A lot of people asked me: “Are you going to work at Tyson?”

Arkansas is so small that Tyson already knows me. So I probably couldn't get hired anyway. But also, this was during the height of Covid, so I also wasn't wanting to be inside at the highest outbreak of Covid, to maybe die doing that reporting. Aside from that, I think undercover work does have its role and uses. But I also think it's not the actual story, about the people who work there.

I would love to go into a plant. There was a part of me that thought: “How can I do this?” But on the other hand, I thought, “What kind of story do I want to tell? That is not about me?”

It’s not about you. So how did you handle that in the book? The relationship that you have to this story? Did you grapple with how much you need to state: “Here's who I am and here is why I'm doing this.” 

When I started this, it wasn't a book, it was one article. So I was approaching people for over a year. And then people started dying. I was maintaining those relationships, and giving people space. Some people dropped out, some people I never heard from again. Some people talked to me for a few months and then didn't want to talk anymore. Some people got depressed and I didn't hear from them for a long time. You can't think, “Oh, these people don't like me.” They're going through a lot of things, and hopefully they'll want to continue telling their story. 

Then it became a book. But none of the people can read it. None of them speak English, or read in English. I hope it will be published in Spanish. The initial story was originally funded by National Geographic. But the woman I was interviewing didn't care what National Geographic was. She understood it was a magazine, but it meant nothing to her. So that is something you have to navigate. I've done my best. 

In my classes, we’ve talked about trauma-informed reporting. Certainly you had to think about trauma as well. Were there any ways that you approached this with sensitivity, especially when you're discussing death, loss, and grief?

I never asked people anything specific. I don't dig into: “What did the dead body look like?” Or any of that kind of stuff. I let people share what they want to share.

The other thing is I really listened to what the people that I was interviewing were talking about. In this case, they had a lot of conversations with ghosts. The dead came back and talked to them and visited them in their sleep, or gave them advice. I thought that was amazing. It was so beautiful. And I wanted that to be a part of the book. 

This ongoing relationship, which really exists in Latin America, that people have with the dead and also their relationship to sleep and dreams. To me, that's the best part of the book. The best thing that I did, which happened accidentally, because I would just talk to people about what they did last night, and they might mention they had this weird dream. It is making space for them to talk about what they are thinking about.

You were connecting on a human level. This became a theme in your book. I've always been taught that theme, in nonfiction writing, is not something you impose upon the reporting. It instead rises up from the reporting. So it sounds like it is something you were tuned into, and you realized had meaning,

Yes, not imposing theme is huge. Because everything in this story that could go wrong went wrong. It could have driven me insane. They didn't win the case. I had no happy ending. All the things that you would want to tie up a book. No. So part of that reality is asking: “What do we learn from reporting on all these really difficult things that were completely out of my control?”

As a journalist, you've gone through this journey with these people who have been traumatized, who have had these incredible, hard experiences that you've internalized, probably too. And there is no resolution or happy ending. Maybe nothing changes, systemically. Do you ever step back and think: “What was it all for?” 

I've covered social movements for my entire career. Change is slow. But we hate slow things. We love social media, we love announcing things immediately. Change does not work like that, not during the Civil Rights Movement, not now. I really wanted to show the stories of these workers who organized, who are continuing to do the difficult work of creating change. This is the pace of it. These are the battles.

When you come out with a book that is about other people, but you're doing the interviews, you're getting the awards and attention, which is all well deserved, how do you think through that weird moment of publication attention?

I think I did the best goddamn job I could do. I laid my life down for this. And if I can continue to write, I think that's an amazing thing, financially, because this is not a career for the faint of heart.

The organizations that I wrote about will receive support, donations, all of those things because of this book. In interviews, I talk about what we should be doing in terms of creating change, listening to workers who are leading these organizations.

The whole point is that we should be listening to these workers, and the reason we haven't been is because in many states, it's basically against the law for them to speak, or they're afraid of being sued, or having to pay $5,000 a day, or being fired.

You said you didn't go to journalism school? Was journalism a calling for you, a way to spread awareness?

I wanted to be a writer forever. But I'm from the Ozarks. My parents said: “Do whatever you want.” I didn't know how to make money. So I got a PhD in Latin American literature, and then I did a postdoc at the National University in Mexico City. So I have a very rooted background in Latin American literature and literary traditions, and I've been really influenced by that.

After I finished my postdoc, I didn't want to write academically. I hate academic writing. So I just started freelancing. I didn't know anybody. I didn't know what I was doing. I just stayed in Mexico and wrote about a lot of border issues, and I started working as a translator. Then the pandemic hit, and I came back to Arkansas, which I didn't even want to do. I fled Arkansas because it's conservative and not the greatest, open environment for a woman.

How do you take care of yourself when you're internalizing the stories of others who have been through trauma, while you are also managing everything else. It can be really hard on your mental health. 

In the process of writing this book, I got a remote teaching position via Arizona State University. So for the first time in my life, I have health insurance, and I now have a therapist. That has been really, really important. A game changer. My life is so much more stable right now. I can see how crazy it was. So that's part of it, working on making good boundaries. 

I've become a lot more focused on my routine. I'm still working for myself. Every day I get up and I run, or do pilates, or I meditate. I used to just throw everything out the window whenever I felt stressed, but I'm not 20 anymore, so I need to maintain my own balance.

I also recognize that I am doing really complicated work, the things that I've taken on legally as well. So I had to also recognize that I need lawyers. I need advice from a lot of different people. I'm not doing this alone.