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I've been a working journalist for nearly forty years and a Staff Writer at the New Yorker since 2001. I’m the author of two books: Noodling for Flatheads (Scribner, 2000), and Fatherland (Random House, 2023). Both are rooted in my family history. I was born and raised in Oklahoma but grew up speaking German at home—my parents had emigrated to the United States in 1962. I’ve always been fascinated by underground communities and people in hidden subcultures, whether they're moonshiners in South Carolina or Alsatians in Nazi-occupied France. In almost everything I write, I try to understand people with lives quite different from mine, and to see the world, for just a moment, through their eyes.
After graduating from high school, I came east to study English and French at Yale. I went on to work as a science and environmental editor and reporter for more than twenty years, covering stories on five continents. At the New Yorker, I've written about everything from gem dealers in Madagascar to ginseng poachers in the Appalachians, deep-cave divers in Mexico, and a cheese-making nun in Connecticut. My stories have also appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and Harper’s, among other publications, and have been anthologized ten times in the Best American series. I’ve received fellowships from Yale, MacDowell, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, and my work as an editor has helped earn two National Magazine Awards and six nominations.
My first book, Noodling for Flatheads, was a collection of stories about my adventures in the Deep South. It looked at old rural traditions like coonhunting and cockfighting and tried to see what they could tell us about our changing American values. How is it that Abraham Lincoln was once a cockfighting referee and Andrew Jackson hosted cockfights in the White House, yet the sport is now illegal in every state? The book was a finalist for the Pen/Martha Albrand Award.
Fatherland is about the other half of my heritage. It’s the story of my mother's father, Karl Gönner, a small-town schoolteacher in the Black Forest who joined the Nazi Party and then gradually turned against it. I began work on the book in 2014, when I moved to Berlin with my family for a year to do research. I’ve since made numerous trips to my grandfather's village in the Black Forest, to the battlefields of the Western Front where he lost an eye in WWI, and to Alsace, where he was stationed during the German occupation of France in WWII. Fatherland is part memoir and part detective story. It's a book about how good people can be seduced by bad ideas and how their descendants can come to terms with that guilt. It’s a work of history that speaks directly to the present, as people everywhere wrestle with their own fraught family histories.
When I'm not reporting books and stories, I live in Brooklyn with my wife, Jennifer Nelson. I sing and play guitar and have made music my whole life. When our three children were young, my wife and I led a family band that played a quirky blend of bluegrass, folk, and rock and roll. The band performed every other week at a café in Brooklyn for four years and once opened for Bon Jovi on Broadway. For the past six years, my wife and I have been in a trio called Nine Pound Hammer. My wife plays violin and accordion, our friend Mike Shapiro plays banjo and harmonica, and I play resonator guitar. We like to sing in tight, three-part harmony on country and French cabaret tunes, as well as originals (www.hammercounty.com).
Photo: © Beowulf Sheehan
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