An Interview with Oral Historian Alison Owings

For today’s post I’m interviewing oral historian Alison Owings, whose latest book, Mayor of the Tenderloin, about San Francisco homeless advocate Del Seymour, came out this past Tuesday, September 10^th.

The book has garnered considerable pre-publication praise, such as:

“Mayor of the Tenderloin is a charming, sometimes heartbreaking, tender, and inspiring story, important and beautifully written.”
—Anne Lamott, author of Almost Everything

“Alison Owings is a master of oral history. She is a great storyteller, and in Mayor of the Tenderloin, she has a great story to tell.”
—Dan Rather, author of What Unites Us

And Kevin Fagan remarked in a San Francisco Chronicle review:

Del Seymour is one of the hardest-working advocates for homeless people in San Francisco … and is regularly consulted for his street wisdom.

That wisdom came the hard way. He used to be a homeless crack addict and pimp, jailed many times before he shook drugs 14 years ago and started his uplifting [Tenderloin] tour and Code Tenderloin jobs programs. But what most people don’t know is that before all of that, he was an Army medic in the Vietnam War, a Los Angeles Fire Department paramedic, owner of a construction company and an electrician.

That’s where this book fills in the gaps. And how. Author Alison Owings lays out the at-times astonishing journey that led Seymour from a hard-knocks childhood in the Chicago projects through an adulthood that had him sleeping in a cardboard box in Sacramento, doorways and dive hotels in San Francisco, making and spending money like water legitimately as a businessman in Los Angeles and illegitimately as a pimp here, and finally shaking dope cold turkey when he hit rock bottom in a fight over $10 to $20 worth of crack.

Alison began her writing career as a journalist and has traveled extensively around the world. Her travels specifically in Europe inspired her to write a satire, The Wander Woman’s Phrasebook / How to Meet or Avoid People in Three Romance Languages, and her highly praised first foray into oral history, Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich.

Frauen set the stage for her next three multi-year projects, Hey, Waitress! The USA from the Other Side of the Tray; Indian Voices: Listening to Native Americans; and now Mayor of the Tenderloin: Del Seymour’s Journey from Living on the Streets to Fighting Homelessness in San Francisco.

Their thematic commonality? An examination of stereotypes. The implied question: when you picture a German woman of the Third Reich, or an American waitress, or a Native American, or a homeless person, do you see them the same way after reading these books?

Hi, Alison, welcome to Writer Unboxed. You come from a journalism background, but you’ve focused specifically on oral histories in your last four books. What prompted your interest in that unique approach?

In a way it’s an adjunct to journalism—asking questions. It began inadvertently, too, when I realized that retired German women I met who were living in a village in southern Spain were witnesses to the Third Reich and had more or less been ignored. They became the basis of Frauen and set my preference of “interview virgins”—first timers. I’m not too interested in interviewing celebrities.

Did you have any mentors or inspirational figures who guided the way? (For the record, my only acquaintance with the genre is The Good War by Studs Terkel, which I loved.)

Studs was actually a great champion of my book Frauen, giving me a terrific blurb, and having me on his radio program in Chicago. I didn’t have mentors per se, but kind of cobbled together this approach myself. I was aided greatly by the German history professor Gordon A. Craig of Stanford, who encouraged my idea, and led me to my first Frau.

It would seem that your interview subjects become in a sense the “narrators” of their own “stories.” How much editing of their remarks do you do (if any), and what steps do you take (if any) to ensure their “voice” remains authentic? 

I edit very carefully, maybe too carefully for copy editors. I try never to combine quotes, but use ellipses, or summarize. I am very true to what the speaker says. That is, what I use from an interview is never the full quote. That would be “true” oral history as I understand it. Instead, I isolate what I need, which takes into account a zillion factors, including is this fair to the interviewee?

One linguistic challenge is what to do when people use bad grammar. I try to finesse that.

When and how did you decide to focus on homelessness with this book? 

Homelessness, at least as I saw it in San Francisco, was so distressing, I felt I had to do something.

How, when and/or why did the focus turn from homelessness in general to Del Seymour? Put differently, how did Del Seymour become the “protagonist” of the story? 

I was in an editorial pickle—thinking that a book based on a nationwide sampling of people without homes would be a depressing challenge for readers (my least diplomatic mantra for my editing clients is: pity the poor reader). Then I met Del on one of his Tenderloin Walking Tours. I had no idea he’d been homeless until he parted with the memorable line, “I could’ve gotten a PhD in sidewalks.”

I knew from that one line that his way of speech reflected both pathos and humor. It still does. At the time I started interviewing him, in December 2015, he was not terribly well-known beyond his own circle. He had just started Code Tenderloin, which mentors homeless individuals, among other disenfranchised people, on how to gain the skills necessary to apply for and keep a job, and he did it on a shoestring. It’s now a multi-million-dollar enterprise and has helped a lot of people. He’s become, well, Mayor of the Tenderloin. My original title was The Book of Del. People asked, “Who?”

What were the major obstacles Del faced? Did he overcome them? How?

His major obstacle in terms of his homelessness was addiction—I say, as I eat a scone I don’t need. He has said often, and recently again to me, that for some people, addiction can be beaten in a week, for others, years, off and on and off and on again, and for some people never.

I imagine he also faced serious obstacles getting the walking tours started and getting Code Tenderloin up and running.

He’s kind of funny about how he got the walking tours started, telling me about doing a tour orientation somewhere in San Francisco, maybe six people showing up, and of them maybe three taking the tour. He had virtually no money for such items as flyers and free Tenderloin Walking Tours t-shirts he and a girlfriend made and gave out, but he managed to get a contribution of $200 or so from the veterans organization Swords to Plowshares. It was very bare bones. And he didn’t charge a fee, just hoped for contributions.

Starting Code Tenderloin came later, after some drug dealers confronted him, telling him they did not want to be dealing, but could not get straight jobs.

What was the most disturbing thing you discovered as you pursued this story? What was the most encouraging?

I cannot say it was a discovery, but the increasing awareness I gained simply by being in the Tenderloin so often, seeing incoherent wraiths in various situations, simply seeing a lumpy sleeping bag on the sidewalk and not knowing if it contained a live person or not, was soul-wrenching. To invoke the cliche, this should not be.

The most encouraging was knowing that help helps. Not immediately, not always, but sometimes and with remarkable outcomes. Exhibit A: Del Seymour.

The supporting cast of interview subjects also provide such interesting perspective on the various issues and Del—especially the women who work in the shelters. Could you elaborate a little on why you chose to interview them and include their voices in the book?

I’m not sure when and why I decided to augment Del’s story with that of other people. Partly, as usual, it was curiosity—this was not my world. Partly I wanted to step back and offer a slightly broader context, such as a visit to a homeless shelter.

I actually visited only one shelter, which was large and well-run, but Del’s descriptions of others make me feel I was there, too. The prison aspect that Del refers to obviously does not apply across the board; after all, the “prisoners” can leave. But there is, from what he says, a sense of hierarchy, the new people being at the mercy of the old timers. Plus, of course, the very situation can be dehumanizing. How did I end up here?

Finally, talking to other people was a low-key version of basic journalistic fact-checking: was whatever astonishing story Del just related really true?

That really resonates—in writing fiction, we’re always using secondary characters to confirm or challenge various aspects of the major characters—to flesh them out from a perspective other than their own. We’re always advised to “tell the story?” How does that apply to your work? Specifically, what decisions do you make along the way to structure the writing so it has a narrative flow? 

We’re very much alike in that regard. Without a story, however subtle, there’s little left. In my other books, comprised of individual set pieces in a sense, my challenge was partly how to arrange everyone—this Nazi next to this anti-Nazi? This German farm woman next to this countess? And within a set piece of a single interview, I faced the exhilarating dilemma of how do I begin this chapter? With a description of the person or the setting? With a quote? With a bit of historical background?  I did not want to begin chapters the same way but vary them. I just leafed through a copy of Frauen to check myself. The first five chapters at least all start differently.

For Indian Voices, rather than debate whether to place a Navajo medicine man next to a Passamaquoddy blueberry harvester, I arranged the entire cast east to west to reflect colonization. I explain this in the preface, but if readers skip it, they might notice anyway. I end with a Hawai’ian chanter.

For Mayor of the Tenderloin, I initially arranged the chapters more or less chronologically, which my agent felt was a bad idea—having readers go through 200 pages of travail before Del’s life turns for the better. So she restructured it, starting with an upbeat chapter. Then my editor at Beacon Press restructured the restructure, arguing for example that the reader has not “earned” what led to the upbeat chapter. The result, which I think works wonderfully, is a carefully constructed hopscotch—down, up, sideways, back in time, bring in another person, current situation, and so on.

I agree, I think the final structure works beautifully, and keeps the reader guessing without confusing them. 

You have had to address the “elephant in the room” (Del’s term) concerning this book—the fact that a white woman is writing a book centered on a Black man. How has that issue come up and how have you dealt with it?  

It did not come up, that I know of, until Del used the phrase in a zoom meeting with Beacon. My sense all along, over decades, was this is what I do: interview people whose life experiences are completely different from mine. Had a formerly homeless white woman used the same phrase Del did, I may well have written a book about her. To me, how people express themselves is as critical as who they are and what they’ve done.

I recognize of course there is a new conversation because of BLM and the “real voices” movement, and I recognize that in comparison to Del, among others, I come from privilege, just being able to write books. A friend has warned me there will be trolls, so I am semi-prepared. And in this book, as in all I’ve written, my stance as an interviewer is to be thankful and, as far as I can be (there have been exceptions) respectful. One other point I may or may not need to trot out: Del is a heck of an alpha male; he could have said no. And as others have pointed out, David, including you, I wasn’t shoving aside any competition. In the over nine years I’ve been working on this story, no one else seemed interested in telling it, at least that I’m aware of.

Have you ever used interviews with real people as part of your research? How did it help inform your fiction, develop your characters, create story ideas? How did it turn out? How did it resemble or not resemble the process Alison describes above?

And please feel free to comment or ask questions of Alison.