Chapter 53: "Lots of verbs in play": A Conversation with Daniel Alarcón
This week I had the pleasure of interviewing Daniel Alarcón, a Peruvian-American writer and journalist who has somehow done it all. He is the co-founder and executive producer of Radio Ambulante, a Spanish-language podcast distributed by NPR, a professor at Columbia Journalism School, a novelist, a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a 2021 MacArthur 'Genius Grant’ recipient. We spoke via Zoom about how he got his start in journalism and radio, what his writing process is like, and whether he has a healthy work-life balance.
How did you get started in journalism?
My apprenticeship in nonfiction came with a Peruvian magazine called Etiqueta Negra. It was an interesting magazine because it wasn't something you'd expect to be published in Peru. It had a really broad regional lens and a very high production value. The pieces were unlike anything else on the market -- you could read them in a year or five or seven, and they were still interesting.
The magazine contacted me after I published a [fiction] story in The New Yorker. They were basically like, “Who the hell are you? We don't know you.” (In Peru, everyone knows each other.) So I started writing for them. And it was the fulfillment of a dream in some ways because I had been writing fiction, but I was really interested in doing journalism. I did that for a few years before I worked up the courage to pitch something to Harper's. In 2006, I wrote a piece for them about the political situation in Peru and that was the beginning of writing longform nonfiction in English.
What drew you to audio journalism?
I was always fascinated by radio. My father's first job was as a soccer announcer on a big radio station. He was also a host of a music show where they would host live performances from the local theater in his town. I grew up in the American south, and my father heard us speaking in southern accents once. From that day on, we listened to NPR all the time. He was like, "This is how you have to speak if you want to make it." And so I grew up with these sort of nostalgic memories of Peruvian radio in the 60s and NPR jammed down my throat.
I guess what came out of that was a kind of latent desire to tell stories in audio. In 2007, I published a book called Lost City Radio and the BBC wrote to me asking if I wanted to do a radio documentary. And because I had this background, it was like a dream come true. I went down to Lima and a producer met me from London, and we recorded this audio documentary about ending migration to the city and how it had changed Lima completely. It was a great experience and it made me want to do more. And the long-term outcome of that was Radio Ambulante.
Do you have a favorite medium to tell stories in or does it just depend on the story?
My favorite medium is the hybrid audio performance. It's such a cool thing, and I've done it several times with Radio Ambulante live shows. We do this thing where I will do a Radio Ambulante story but then subtitle the audio and translate my narration into English. I perform it in front of an audience with animations or photos behind me. That's my favorite type of journalism.
It’s not really the journalism, it's the medium of having that interaction with an audience. It reminds me of doing readings at a bookstore when I was publishing fiction. I love bringing in these voices and having these kinds of cross-cultural conversations where you're able to bring in the Spanish audio for non-Spanish speakers and tell these stories from Latin America in front of an audience that might not necessarily speak Spanish, but then the Spanish speakers who are in the audience also get a lot more out of it.
Do you think it's possible to have a healthy work-life balance, especially as a journalist who's just starting out and has a lot to prove?
I remember being told by my father that from ages 30 to 40 you'd be leaving the house before your kids were awake and coming home after they were asleep because you'd be working so hard. I don't do that. I feel like I have a good work-life balance but I don't have a good sleep life. I'm exhausted all the time. But the sacrifice that I make is sleeping. I love my kids and I love spending time with them. I try to spend as much time as I can with my wife. I try to play soccer at least once a week. Work-life balance was not a phrase that we used when I was coming up. But that doesn't mean it's not a valid concern. It's absolutely valid.
In journalism, it always feels like there's someone else willing to sacrifice more. And that puts you at a disadvantage if you want to get a drink with a friend or sleep in on a Sunday. And that shouldn't be the case. I wrote my second novel from five to seven in the morning. I would wake up and stumble over to the computer to write. And I would be maybe 300 words in before I was fully awake. Then I would come out at 7am and my wife would give me a cup of coffee and I would take the kids to school. Then I would come back and work a full day for Radio Ambulante until 3pm, go pick up the kids from school, come back and then usually, when everyone was asleep, I would work some more on the book and go to bed at 12:30 or 1am. Even now, I go to sleep at 1am every night.
What is your writing process like and does it differ between nonfiction and fiction?
I was told very early on in my career that this is how you do journalism: You go into a room and you observe everything. You write down everything, like the number of light bulbs that are out, the number of chairs in the room, if the tiles are worn down or if they're new, the way curtains are hanging. And then you want to try to observe the moments when people are learning new things or when they're doing things, when there's lots of verbs in play. And you're always trying to understand power dynamics -- who's in charge, who thinks they're in charge but actually isn't, what's actually going on. When I write fiction, I'm doing the same thing except the rooms that I'm entering are imaginary rooms and the people that I'm talking to are imaginary people.
I feel like when I write fiction, it's a very similar task of interrogating my characters in the same way I might have an interview with a source. So in those ways they're the same. Given what I told you earlier about how busy I am, I'm always disappointed with my output. I always feel like I have no time. And I always get to a point of just complete crisis. I have so many things going on that it feels like a plate spinner. I go and I spin one plate to get it going really fast until it's done. And then I turn and I look and there's four other things that are about to collapse. So I run over and find the one that's closest to collapsing and keep that one up. Sometimes I can't believe I wrote what I wrote because I have no memory of writing it because I was so busy and panicked. It really is like a state of low level panic.
Do you have any advice for journalists who are starting out today?
Learn to pitch and pitch well. In my class, we only take pitches verbally. It's really important to be able to perform your story and sell it. It's not something that necessarily comes naturally. It feels safer to write. But I think it's very important to be able to speak it, to perform it. That’s an incredibly useful skill. Also, do your research about who's publishing what and where, and what the voices of different publications are. Understand that the first place you publish will not necessarily be your dream job. But with every step, the goal is to learn something valuable that you can take with you.
You’ve reported in both English and Spanish and in many different mediums for various outlets and platforms. Do you find one to be the most rewarding?
As much as I love doing Radio Ambulante, my role there more recently is very much that of an E.P., like an editorial director. I approve all the stories, I help shape the stories, I edit all the stories, but I don't get to report the stories, in large part due to the pandemic. My story on the suicide of Alan Garcia, the former president of Peru, was the first piece The New Yorker ever translated in Spanish. And since then, I've written about social upheaval in Chile, the collapse of a telescope in Puerto Rico and most recently, about the covid outbreak in Guayaquil.
And it seems to me that the greatest responsibility I have is being that person covering Latin America for The New Yorker because it's such a wonderful outlet. The team behind you when you're putting a piece together in terms of fact checkers and editors is just amazing. There's nowhere in Latin America where you have the resources to do a piece like that -- to spend six months on a story and have that kind of backup. It's a huge responsibility. Sometimes it feels like too much responsibility. But that's what I love the most. It's absolutely the hardest thing. I always want to give up, but it's the most rewarding.