Sam Quinones
/How did you become a writer?
Well my father, a comparative literature professor, and my mother, an elementary school teacher, had a lot to do with it. When I was four, we moved from Cambridge, Mass. to Claremont, California and my father told me the story of Odysseus along the way, over and over, as I was hooked. We didn't have a lot of possessions around the house, but we did have a lot of books. To this day, to me, a house doesn't look like a home without books -- same as a city without trees.
I went to UC Berkeley, lived in an infamous co-op called Barrington Hall and produced punk rock and reggae shows at the hall -- very DIY. That DIY approach to life has been a guiding compass, I guess. I also studied economics and American history.
Later in life, I was looking for a job that would support me, where I wouldn't have to wear a tie, that would leave me endlessly fulfilled and constantly exploring. A lot happened, but key to it was that I was lucky enough to get a job covering crime at The Record in Stockton, CA. I had great editors, a magnificent town, and a lot to write about. I wrote 4-5 stories a day for four years and emerged with enormous confidence in my writing.
Then I went to Mexico for 1994-2004 and that allowed me the freedom to write long-form narrative, something that the country is particularly given to. Unbelievable stories just there for the picking. So I was a freelancer in Mexico for that decade and that led to my first two books: True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx in 2001, and later, in 2007, Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration. By that point, I had long been unable to imagine doing anything other that journalistic storytelling.
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).
Early on:
Calvin Trillin, Edna Buchanan, Joan Didion, Alma Guilleramoprieto, David Halberstam
Respectively, Killings, Corpse Had a Familiar Face, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Heart That Bleeds, and most everything Halberstam wrote.
I've also had great editors: Bruce Spence, Rich Hanner, Sam Enriquez, Julie Marquis, Frances Fernandez and others.
When and where do you write?
I write in the morning. Usually in my garage office, or at a cafe somewhere. Independent cafes, the writer's savior -- allow you to get out of the house, be among other people, but also get a lot done, particularly if it has no wi-fi, or if you have software to block the Internet. I usually have headphones and listen to music that has no lyrics.
What are you working on now?
--I'm preparing a book of photographs of murals of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the walls of Los Angeles - The Virgin of the American Dream is the title. It's almost finished and should be out by March, 2022.
--I'm hoping to publish the manuscript of a triple-life California prison inmate, who wrote his life story while awaiting trial for his third murder. I've edited the work and helped him write it. Quite a story.
--I'm very interested in beginning to write more about neuroscience and neuroscientists -- their stories are mind-blowing, so to speak.
--A fictionalized version of the story of how the first Chinese-Mexican beauty queen was chosen (in Mexico), by accumulating more Pepsi bottle caps than any other candidate. True story.
--Finally, I'm working on getting published a manuscript for a children's book about the true story of a village in Mexico where everyone makes popsicles ("paletas" in Spanish).
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?
Writer's block is my craft's way of telling me I have not interviewed enough people. Usually I'm stuck on what to say, what story to tell and that's almost always because I need to talk to more and more varied folks. Or I need to re-interview the people I've already spoken to. No such thing as too many interviews, from the journalist's perspective.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Write about what you don't know but what you're going to learn all about.
What’s your advice to new writers?
See Question 6. Leave your politics at the door completely. Journalism is not to understand that the world is just as you thought it was when you were 25. If you're lucky, you'll change your mind constantly, and you'll encounter triggers, unsafe spaces and a lot more every single day.
Sam Quinones is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist, a reporter for 35 years, and author of four acclaimed books of narrative nonfiction. He is a veteran reporter on immigration, gangs, drug trafficking, the border. He is formerly a reporter with the L.A. Times, where he worked for 10 years. Before that, he made a living as a freelance writer residing in Mexico for a decade. His latest book, released in November, 2021, is The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth.
In The Least of Us (published October 2021), Quinones chronicles the emergence of a drug-trafficking world producing massive supplies of dope cheaper and deadlier than ever, marketing to the population of addicts created by the nation's opioid epidemic, as the backdrop to tales of Americans’ quiet attempts to recover community through simple acts of helping the vulnerable.
The Least of Us follows his landmark Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury, 2015), which ignited awareness of the epidemic that has cost the United States hundreds of thousands of lives and become deadliest drug scourge in the nation’s history.
Dreamland won a National Book Critics Circle award for the Best Nonfiction Book of 2015. It was also selected as one of the Best Books of 2015 by Amazon.com, the Daily Beast, Buzzfeed, Seattle Times, Boston Globe, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Entertainment Weekly, Audible, and in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Business by Nobel economics laureate Prof. Angus Deaton of Princeton University. In 2019, Dreamland was selected as one the Best 10 True-Crime Books of all time based on lists, surveys, and ratings of more than 90 million Goodread.com readers. Also in 2019, Slate.com selected Dreamland as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the last 25 years. In 2021, GQ Magazine selected Dreamland as one of the “50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century.” For Dreamland, Quinones has testified before the US Senate’s Health Committee, numerous professional conferences of judges, doctors, librarians, hospital administrators and at more than two-dozen town hall meetings in small towns across the country. A Young Adult version of Dreamland – for 7th through 12th graders -- was released in July of 2019.
His first two books grew from his 10 years living and working as a freelance writer in Mexico (1994-2004). True Tales From Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx was released in 2001. It is a cult classic of a book from Mexico’s vital margins – stories of drag queens and Oaxacan Indian basketball players, popsicle makers and telenovela stars, migrants, farm workers, a narcosaint, a slain drug balladeer, a slum boss, and a doomed tough guy.
In 2007, he came out with Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration. In it, Quinones narrates the saga of the Henry Ford of Velvet Painting, and of how an opera scene emerged in Tijuana, and how a Zacatecan taco empire formed in Chicago. He tells the tale of the Tomato King, of a high-school soccer season in Kansas, and of Mexican corruption in a small L.A. County town. Threading through the book are three tales of Delfino Juarez, a modern Mexican Huck Finn. Quinones ends the collection in a chapter called "Leaving Mexico" with his harrowing tangle with the Narco-Mennonites of Chihuahua. Dagoberto Gilb, reviewing Antonio’s Gun in the San Francisco Chronicle, called him “the most original writer on Mexico and the border.”
Contact him at www.samquinones.com or samquinones7@yahoo.com.
