Excerpt: "I Found All Sorts of Dirt Immediately"
My interview in Anne Helen Petersen's "Culture Study" newsletter
Hello, new followers! Welcome! I’m a journalist and scholar who writes about immigration, systemic racism, displacement, genocide, war, and other topics—I’m really fun at parties! (Come for the writing about injustice, stay for the dark humor!)
I have a podcast called “The Beautiful and Banned” with my co-host, Christine Renee Miller, about banned books, plays, and films now and throughout history. I’ve written two nonfiction books: After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America (which won the Lukas Book Prize and other awards) and We Were Illegal: Uncovering a Texas Family’s Mythmaking and Migration (the NYT called it one of “19 Books to Read This Summer,” which basically means it’s a beach read!).
Here are a few recent newsletter posts if you want to dig in: “Hope in an Election-Year Winter,” “What It Means to Be an ‘Angel of History,’” and “The Teacher Who Changed My Life.”
And hello to my regular readers as well! I’m thrilled to have an interview up today in the “Culture Study” newsletter, which is written by one of my very favorite writers, Anne Helen Petersen.
The first time I encountered Anne’s work, I was sitting in my car in the parking lot at a local university, where I was an interim writing center director, trying to psych myself up enough to go in to work. To be honest, I hated my job, though I liked many of my co-workers, and I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. After years spent getting a PhD I wasn’t sure what to do with, I felt like my options were so limited. I could apply for the full-time job I was doing on an interim basis, which wasn’t anything like what I wanted to do (I wanted to teach and write, not manage student peer consultants). I would have loved a tenure-track teaching job, but to go on the academic job market meant multiple post-docs for $40-50k a year and dragging my young family across the country—not feasible, especially when my husband had a good, stable job with health care here already. I loved the idea of becoming a writer, but of what? And how?
My friend sent me an episode of Longform Podcast featuring Anne, and I sat in the car way past the time when I supposed to be inside the building, listening to an interview she’d recorded the year before. I listened to it in October 2015, and Anne was talking about her trajectory of leaving academia—we’d both gone to the University of Texas, though I had a PhD in English and hers was in Cultural Studies—to write for Buzzfeed. It was an unlikely move, and it opened a door for me.
I declined to apply for the full-time job; less than three years later, I was writing nonfiction full time. I’m not saying it was all because of Anne—it really was a thousand factors—but Anne’s story was a catalyst for me in so many ways. Her story have me a vision for a totally different career option than any I’d been shown in grad school or university settings. I’ll always be grateful for that.
When I tell you I’ve read almost everything Anne has written in the last ten years, it is no exaggeration—she has one of the smartest minds of any nonfiction writer I know. I read her books, her articles for Buzzfeed and other places, and I followed her eagerly to Culture Study when she quit traditional journalism to join Substack. I got into Bama Rush on TikTok and learned all about Ballerina Farm through her. I’d probably follow her anywhere.
But it’s more than her writing—she’s an exquisitely hospitable person in her online spaces, always highlighting stories and writers who are brilliant and interesting. She also ensures that many of those writers are ones who might not always get mainstream media attention. She has a writing trajectory that few people can emulate; but it’s also the same kind of story many of us have in that none of us have the same story. In a publishing and journalism landscape that changes by the minute, Anne is a generous trailblazer who seeks out new spaces, creates expansive community, and ensures that everyone is welcome.
Here’s a small excerpt from our interview:
AHP: As a way of introducing readers to the book’s project, I thought we’d start as you do in the book: with the epigraph.
“About the difficulties of Texas: Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one’s affections. In truth, it often requires the opposite. We can’t be of real service to the hopes we have for places—and people, ourselves included— without a clear-eyed assessment of their (and our) strengths and weaknesses. That often demands a willingness to be critical, sometimes deeply so.”
That’s from historian Annette Gordon-Reed, and I’m hoping we can use it to talk about 1) how you began to conceive of the book as a whole, and how you rooted it in your family’s own history and 2) the position you took in doing this work — and why it matters.
JG: This book began as a Teen Vogue article published in 2017, right before I sold my first book, After the Last Border: The Story of Two Families and Refuge in America. The idea that my own family’s migration might be considered “illegal” by today’s standards (crossing an international border without the proper documentation) was something I couldn’t stop thinking about while I wrote that first book about two former refugees, one from Myanmar and one from Syria. The core ideas in We Were Illegal are rooted in my reporting on refugees, asylum-seekers, and undocumented immigrants from those years.
I didn’t know much about my family’s past other than a handful of stories and the fact that all four sets of my great-grandparents ended up in Texas. Even that lack of knowledge was a presence in my reporting: I grew up in Texas with the myth that we — my family and others like us — were here, had always been here, and deserved to be here. We were the unquestioned center, the rightful owners. This land was our land.