Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers
Dave Eggersis an American writer, editor, and publisher. He wrote the best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He is also the founder of McSweeney's, a literary journal; the co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia, and a human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness, and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in several magazines...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 March 1970
CityBoston, MA
CountryUnited States of America
You might not be able to operate your own Learjet and have an unlimited expense account, but if you have a reasonable expectation for a print-based product, whether it's a newspaper or a magazine, you can certainly exist.
Most people would trade everything they know, everyone they know- they'd trade it all to know they've been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered. We all know the world is too big for us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment.
To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that's begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way.
I had the sensation that I might always be running like this, that I would always have to run, and that I would always be able to run.
It all sounds good, and it seems to me, if a system would work, this might be the spot. But frankly, I don't think we have any good numbers to tell us if it's a viable option at this point.
I worked at Salon.com way back when they started, and there's just unmeasurable value to distributing words online, too, but I still get my news from the newspaper in the morning.
All I ever wanted was to know what to do.
What can I do for you, my man?
Who's got the Paris Review? ... It's under a new editor.
But you know, there's something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day, working one-on-one, getting all this attention - they go home, they're finished. They don't stall, they don't do their homework in front of the TV.
You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time.
It's our theory that everything trickles down from there, ... That if you have high salaries, good conditions, you have good support. You have a lot of communication between teachers, you pay for teachers' supplemental training, and the students learn.
I try to get anybody coming to San Francisco to come to the Mission. Not to misuse the word 'authentic' - I think that's such a troubling word - but the Mission really does have all the best parts of San Francisco intersecting here.
I'm never a fan of the sociopathic kind of reviewing, people who are sort of self-immolating and have social problems or whatever, and let it out in literary-criticism form. I just feel like book reviewing should be respectful and calm and not filled with bile.