The Truth of What Happened
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A conversation with Ted Conover
Interview by Ted Genoways
Nearly twenty years ago at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, I saw a well-known nonfiction writer deliver an impassioned lecture on the importance of “emotional truth.” In essence, he was arguing that it was more valuable to convey a sense of how something felt over a strict allegiance to the literal truth of what happened. He suggested that this should afford the writer of creative nonfiction the leeway to invent composite characters, to adjust the timeline of events, to enjoy some flexibility when it came to the facts. Essentially, he was saying: as long as it’s all more or less true—as long as it feels true—who really cares and who will know?
In a place like Bread Loaf, a place that has its historical roots in fiction writing and poetry writing, there seemed a measure of sympathy for what this writer was arguing, there behind the podium in the Little Theater. The air seemed to shift in his favor as he spoke, from a feeling of discomfort to one of intrigued engagement with the idea of a figurative truth. Then, during the Q&A that followed, Ted Conover rose to speak. I don’t remember his exact words—but I remember them to be something along the lines of: “I think this is one of the most dangerous things I’ve ever heard anyone say in a public space.”
Conover comes from a different tradition than most practioners of what we call the New Journalism—a form of first-person and often participatory writing that melds journalism with memoir and opinion. (He himself calls this “immersion.”) Though Conover appears in his writing, he often serves as a kind of Virgil to our Dante, guiding us the through various hells of modern American life—the exploitation of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border without legal documentation, the dehumanization of the prison system at Sing Sing in New York, the blood and pus of the meatpacking industry in a Cargill beef plant in Schuyler, Nebraska.
But Conover’s approach is less about sensational muckraking than it is about careful direct observation. He studied anthropology at Amherst College, where his thesis on tramp culture turned into his first book, Rolling Nowhere. That book set the mold for what would follow: narratives of life on the margins, told with precision and a dedication to the truth as exactly rendered as Conover could muster. So it was little wonder that he felt such shock and dismay at the idea of fudging the truth to make a story better or to serve some other covert purpose. And in the two decades since, Conover’s concern about what we first came to know as “truthiness” and then “alternative facts” has proven prophetic.
In the conversation that follows, Conover explains his philosophy in typically straightforward terms. “My loyalty,” he says, “is to the effort to depict the world in a way that if you went out there and met the same people, you’d know exactly who I had written about and who I was talking about.” His most recent book, Cheap Land Colorado, is about homesteaders in the San Luis Valley in south-central Colorado. It is a place defined as off-grid, a last frontier. Conover writes about the valley with Steinbeckian sweep and deep affection for the people who chose the hardscrabble life there. He also writes about them in a way that you know exactly who he is talking about—spiritual heirs to the homesteaders of the nineteenth century, with all the complications that entails.
“The land is no longer free,” Conover writes, “but it is cheap—some of the cheapest in the United States. In many respects, a person could live here in this vast, empty space like the pioneers did on the Great Plains—except you’d have a truck instead of a mule, and some solar panels, possibly even a cell-phone signal.” He lived there during the majority of the first Trump administration, documenting a lifestyle and attitude that had eluded much of the coastal media in the run-up to the 2016 election. Now, on the verge of a second Trump term, his views of people pushed to the margins, what that says about our country and what it means for the importance of truth-telling, are more vital than ever.
Ted Genoways: This issue of Switchyard is focused on the idea of land as a physical space and landscape as a cultural terrain—and how those two things interact. It seems to me that much of Cheap Land Colorado is about mapping that same difference and trying to understand what it is that draws disparate people to a place and then how their vision for that place comes to define it. Talk a little about the the physical setting of the book.
Ted Conover: The title is the Google search term that a lot of the people I got to know out there used to find the land they bought. And that was their goal: to be in Colorado for not much money, which I think in the popular imagination is very hard to do, because we associate Colorado with mountains and streams and evergreen forests. And especially during the pandemic, places meeting that description all got really expensive. But there is a part of the state which is not like that, which is more like the Great Plains, or it’s a high valley called the San Luis Valley, which, in the 1970s had been subdivided, parts of it. This was before subdivision was regulated as it is today.
Back then, you didn’t need to do much more than plat the roads, put up road signs, and open a sales office. Basically, they created five-acre lots to be sold by mail. This was in vogue at the time, and the idea they pitched was to own a Colorado ranch, as if a five-acre plot of arid prairie land were a ranch. But apparently most of the buyers were out of state, and what was important was owning a piece of Colorado. I was fascinated, because the anticipated subdivisions didn’t appear for fifty years. Basically, nobody moved out there, and it’s because it’s really hostile country in a lot of ways. It’s super cold in the winter. It’s windy year-round. There is natural beauty, but mostly it’s around the edge of the valley where there are trees and mountains. Otherwise, it’s a gigantic empty space—a space almost as big as New Jersey.
The longest-term residents now are Hispanic and they look at people living out on the prairie—or the flats, as they call it—as a very low caste of person. They’re living on a shoestring. They’re not building picturesque cabins. They’re dragging old trailers out there and Tuff Sheds and scraps of this and that, cobbling together basic shelter. And they’re often asked, “Why live in this hard way?” And the answer is, “Well, it’s my place. I bought those five acres for four or five or six thousand dollars. I own it. I don’t have a landlord. I don’t pay much tax.” Yeah, there aren’t a lot of services—pretty much none. If you need the sheriff, it’s going to take at least an hour for them to get there. You’re really on your own. But people who have chosen this—and they do choose it—see something in it that is meaningful. They see a version of the American dream. They own their piece of the rock, right? Which is increasingly difficult to do.
Photo by Jon Cohrs
TG: And this notion of being off-grid, of being disconnected in the way that you’re describing—not plugged into the usual infrastructure of the culture—is central to how the people there build their notion of identity and community. And, to say the least, they’re not super open to outsiders. Talk a little bit about how you made your inroads.
TC: That was a pretty big challenge, because I live in New York City, and I imagine some parts of my self-presentation might reflect that I’m not from there. I’m from Denver, but I’m not a prairie person in terms of how my hands look, in terms of the dirt under my fingernails. I thought the strategy of just driving up to somebody’s place and saying, “Hey, you want to be interviewed?” was not likely to be so successful. I had heard of a group called La Puente, which is a social service organization best known for a shelter they have in the town of Alamosa, the biggest town out there. They call it a rural homeless shelter because most of the people in it are sort of country people there. They’re not like the urban unhoused. They are the rural unhoused who have often started out on the prairie trying to make a go of it. And around October, November, the nights get cold, your firewood gets used up, or if you had any propane, it’s disappeared. You realize you’re not prepared. And lots of people abandon their places and end up in the shelter. And this group thought if they could offer folks more firewood, more blankets, more food, runs to town to get their prescriptions, they could help them stay at home.
And so I asked if I could volunteer for this group, because I do like to think too that reporting need not be just an extractive activity, that it should be okay to give back without introducing problems with your fairness or impartiality. I kind of think it’s good to help people who are in a tough spot. I’m okay with that and so I joined a fellow who does this full time named Matt Little. He’s from West Virginia, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. He grew up off-grid himself, so he’s kind of hardscrabble, plainspoken—knows you don’t just drive up and walk up to somebody’s front door. He said, “Ted, here’s what you do. You’re going to stop in front, roll down the window so I can see your face. If it’s warm enough, get out of your truck so I can see you’re not a big, scary guy. And you say, ‘Hey, anybody home?’”
And he also taught me how to see if anybody was home. Not knowing what he knew, I had started out driving up to abandoned homesteads—there’s lots of them. But no, instead you look for fresh tire tracks in the dirt. You look for smoke coming out of a chimney. You look for a dog chained up in front. And then you also look to see if they’re growing marijuana, because if they are, they’re likely to be more cautious than otherwise. That’s really a lot of their main fear at the start of October. This is when you harvest your weed, and these plants people have grown for the last four or five months are as tall as your head and worth more than $1,000 each, and they’re really afraid of being ripped off. So they’re paranoid. There’s guns. Matt said, “If there’s a flag, there’s going to be a gun.” And I think the corollary is: if there’s not a flag, there’s also going to be a gun. So you just need to be cautious and respectful.
Conover in Kenya in 1992, researching a story that later became part of the book The Routes of Man / Courtesy of Ted Conover
And we had these magnetic door signs for our trucks. La Puente is a known brand out there and known for being helpful. And I’d say at least half the time, if somebody’s home, they’re going to open the door and at least shout out, “What do you want? Who are you?” And on the first meeting, I’d tell them, “Just checking on people to make sure you got what you need for the next couple months. I could bring you wood next week if you’re low.” Almost everybody, when they realize there’s no strings attached, says yes. And second visit, if we’re getting along, I’d say, and by the way, I’m also a writer, I’m actually from New York, I’m actually a professor—which is like three strikes. There’s a lot of people out there in the thrall of this idea that the world is run by the coastal elites and that all journalists lie. You’ve got to get past some obstacles.
A couple months in, I met a family: mom, dad, five girls—all home-schooled, about twenty dogs, in need of cash, and willing to rent a corner of their five acres to me to put a camper trailer on. And so I did that for two years. They then moved. I followed them to their new place a few miles away, rented from them there. And then, I’m getting to be more and more a part of this place. And finally, I buy my own. And then I’m not just a visitor, but I’m kind of a neighbor. And is it weird to have me as a neighbor? I’m sure it is, but everybody out there is weird in their way, and at least I’m not a threatening weird. I’m not a person with a mood disorder or a clear addiction or a tendency toward violence. Add all that up, and I’m just another eccentric.
TG: You write at the beginning of the book of having some childhood memory of this region, but how do you go from being someone who needs to be told how to even approach the house to becoming somebody who’s part of the community? And how does your perspective change over time, as you go from being an outsider to at least something of an insider?
TC: A bunch of things changed. The editor of my book about working at Sing Sing prison was Dan Menaker, who’d done a lot of psychoanalysis, and one day he was buying me a drink, and he said, “I think the thing about you is you’re counterphobic.” And I’d never heard of that, but it’s pretty clear what it means: somebody who’s interested in approaching their fears. He said, “I think that turns you on.” And I said, “Well, yes and no.” I tried skydiving once, which is a scary thing, but when I landed, I thought, I am never going to do that again. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. I don’t just want a thrill. I want to see if I can survive in unusual settings, or if I can get to know people who might not, on the face of it, be like me. I’ve had the advantage of going to college. I’ve had the advantage of not being hungry when I grew up, and I like to think that means I should take some chances in terms of being able to reach out to people who haven’t had all those advantages. And I think you can get better at this; it’s like a muscle you exercise— meeting strangers and presenting yourself and figuring out what works and what doesn’t.
“There’s a need to be further out there and report on people who are not feeling represented in the national conversation. That state of affairs has really powered our current political picture.”
All that said, I was really nervous. I don’t want to get shot. I don’t want anything bad to happen. But I also think a lot of journalists are too timid. They are too comfortable at the desk, and that one of the problems we find ourselves in as a country right now is journalists got too comfortable living close to good restaurants and nice bars, schools for their kids, whatever. There’s a need to be further out there and report on people who are not feeling represented in the national conversation. That state of affairs has really powered our current political picture. And so I guess I fancy myself part of some kind of correction to that.
I’ve gotten away from your question, which is, how did I change over time? I’ve grown more comfortable out there. I just like it now. It’s the opposite of life in New York in terms of density, expense, numbers of wealthy people around, pace, ambition. It’s like a journey to another country. The land is beautiful. And to me, the landscape is something I don’t think about at home in New York. It’s something I think about every day there. And my neighbors post pictures of sunsets to social media, often of the same sunset, because everybody’s looking at it, because you can’t not—the whole gigantic sky has changed, and you notice, and it’s a factor in your life. And I really appreciate that. I like being outdoors.
You know the scene in King Lear, where he’s yelling at the wind? It is, I think, my favorite in all of Shakespeare. I picture myself out in my trailer that came with the five acres I bought. The wind shakes the roof up and down. My neighbor said, “Well, you know, a lot of people put old tires on the roof to stop that,” and so I did. And in the springtime now, half of them have been bounced off because it’s so violently windy. But to me, that’s great. I really get into it, and I like who I am out there. I’m less stressed. I’m more outgoing. It changes me. And I think this is a thing that happens in my books: all of these situations change me, and I try to give an account of that.
TG: You wrote a kind of unofficial follow up to this book for Outside magazine that directly addresses what to me seems like the often-unspoken theme of the book—this question of what it is that draws people there, but also this question of who thrives there and who doesn’t? It struck me that the piece was a kind of classic Outside question—it gets back to Chris McCandless. There’s a certain kind of person who seems to want to be able to test themselves against an inhospitable landscape. And some people discover that they thrive there, and some don’t. I wonder, as you reflect on that, and now that you have land out there, what are the things that you see that people have in common, in terms of what draws them, but also what do the people who make it have in common?
Conover among a group of undocumented migrants who had crossed from Mexico to Arizona in 1985. That journey became part of the book Coyotes.
TC: So there’s push and pull factors. The two sisters I wrote about for Outside really believed, I think, that the world was about to end, that evil forces were going to turn us into machines and robots, and the only hope for staying alive was to get off the grid and out of touch with other people. They didn’t prepare very well. Chris McCandless is, of course, the example you always think about in terms of somebody deciding to live off-grid remotely. And though he was a very thoughtful person, he did not appear to think enough about how he was going to feed himself out there. And so part of the ethic of my neighbors is: Are you prepared? It’s a country place, which means, if your neighbor is in a sudden crisis, maybe you’re going to help, and they want to help. But they’re very wary of new arrivals who aren’t prepared. And one thing you hear out there is somebody has to make it through a winter before I want to meet them, because otherwise they’re going to come knocking on my door for something, and I’m going to have to help. So I’d rather not meet them until I can see they can survive.
And so there’s a pride in having the knowledge and the gumption and the ability to take care of yourself. That’s part of that ethic out there. I think of myself as having been pulled to the area by curiosity and the beauty of it. But a lot of my neighbors, I’d say, have been pushed through some sequence of difficult experiences they’ve had, and there’s a wide range of them. They’re the things that knock people down in America. And military service in a conflict is one. There’s all these old guys with PTSD. There’s just a ton, and a lot of them don’t want to talk to anybody. Some are okay with it, but there’s some who are just hermits. There’s various kinds of addictions that send people to the margins. Drinking is the most common one, but there’s a lot of meth in the San Luis Valley. Takes more money, I think, to feed a meth addiction. There was heroin when I got there, morphing into fentanyl, and it’s less common among my neighbors, just because you need a steady supply and you need gas money to go get it, and it’s hard to come up with all those things. My nearest neighbor got two DUIs, which ended his career as a truck driver, unless he went through a whole process, including having a breathalyzer attached to a steering wheel, which he found invasive and offensive. So he drives without a license on backroads to get to his liquor store, and asks other neighbors, including me, to pick up beer for him in town. He’s a great guy. He’s a lovely man. He’s a nice drunk. He’s not going to get another job. There’s a lot of people in that situation, and there’s a lot of discouraged workers— people who have been laid off. The dad of the family I rented from, his name is Frank. He worked in various jobs in Wyoming and Colorado, a lot of them early on around petroleum, fixing tanks and things like that. And he switched to painting petroleum facilities, and then he switched to house painting, and he’s only, I’d say, early 40s, but he has so many aches and pains that the guy is used up, and that’s not an exaggeration. I mean, you can see it physically. He has all these issues that a person who has not worked those jobs doesn’t have, and he and his wife also are missing many of their teeth, and that becomes a stigma that I think makes it harder to get your next job and harder to be accepted in town, and you feel more comfortable out on the flats with other people who maybe look like you do, and have a car that breaks down as often as yours. And so I feel like people have been pushed there.
“I think when your goal is to get into somebody else’s head or understand their life, you are entering subjectivity, and that’s what makes it interesting. I’m not there to describe the median prairie dweller, if you even could.”
TG: One of the things that I’m fascinated by is how these physical spaces define a lot of the work that you’re doing. Tramps are only able to move around by hopping freight trains, migrants are pushed across the border by poverty or violence, inmates at Sing Sing, through whatever life choices, have wound up in this most confined and inescapable landscape. So much of the writing that you’re doing is in that context of those marginalized spaces. Is that part of how you’re picking these projects?
TC: I love hearing you talk about this, because I think it is. I think I need a space in order to imagine a project or a place. The place could be the Rio Grande River, and how are you going to cross? Or it could be the border of Arizona and Sonora. What’s it going to look like? How are you going to get over those fences? It’s almost like I need a stage on which I can describe people moving. And one of the great helps of the topics I’ve chosen is that these spaces are pretty interesting. So I love thinking of space.
I mean, say what you want, prison is a fascinating space. Start with the architecture of how cells are set up and the tiers—who gets to be in what space and who controls the movement. And then the quality of the light, the smell in the air, the sound of the metal doors slamming, the sound of the men talking. They’re not allowed to play radios, but they turn up their headphones really loud, and you can hear that music. There’s just so many atmospheric details that get me writing. I just have to notice it and make sure I take good notes. That part of the job is done for me. I don’t have to invent it.
I did a whole book about different roads around the world, one chapter of which you edited at VQR, and that chapter is about this walk on a frozen river that all these teenagers take in a valley in Kashmir. It’s a singular environment. So you’re right. I am, maybe more than others, really attentive to place, and I think I need that kind of space. And it could be the wide-open prairie with several weather systems in the sky—raining there, cloudy there, sunny there—or it could be a boxcar which has cardboard and plastic and pieces of wood nailed to the bottom. And in a way, that’s part of how I’m going to write about the people.
Conover outside Sing Sing prison where he worked as a guard for nearly a year, researching the book Newjack.
