You are often called an immersion journalist — what does that phrase mean to you?

Immersion journalism means to me that you’re taking the time to inhabit the world that you’re writing about, to observe its rhythms and daily rituals, not just to be there. To really get beneath the surface and probe the inner workings of whatever it is you’re writing about, whether it’s a person’s daily life, an institution, a process.

When you choose a community or subculture to report on and write about, to what extent do you know what the story will be before you begin your immersion?

Part of immersion journalism, I think, is jumping in and finding your way, as opposed to deciding what the path is before you go in.

Once you’re there, and you’re on the inside, the characters and the themes and the issues begin to become apparent over time. You pick those you want to focus on, those that have the most meaning to you. Then, you find the structure to assemble the narrative. In the case of Baby E.R., I chose to enter, and to bring the reader into, a neonatal intensive care unit, through a father whose son was just delivered prematurely and who was racing into the place to find his son, to find out what was going on. All the barriers he had to overcome to do that, from scrubbing for three minutes, which must have been the longest three minutes of his life, to finding that even when he got into the room, the tubes and lines, the technology between him and his son were a much more impenetrable barrier than any door.

But there were a hundred different ways to have begun that story and to bring readers inside. I guess that’s the curse and the joy of writing: You get to choose — and you have to choose.

You have spoken about your experience researching Buried Secrets, your first work of literary nonfiction, as an eye-opener about the differences in daily newspaper reporting daily versus reporting for immersion journalism.

My experience as a newspaper reporter prepared me to ask and gather information about specific events: What happened, where it happened, who was involved. [In writing Buried Secrets] I wanted to recreate a moment when a drug trafficker and member of a cult that was the subject of the book had driven through a police checkpoint without stopping — a pivotal moment, because it ultimately led the police to discover a series of murders. So when I returned home and tried to write about this event, I realized that what I was lacking was the context and the background and the detail for this event, to really write about it in a narrative fashion. It wasn’t enough to have some information about what the people present were doing at that moment, who they were and what they looked like. I also needed to have more of their personal history, their thoughts and feelings, events in their lives, quite apart that the story that I was telling, that led up to this moment, so that I could establish them as characters and create a true narrative. I hadn’t really asked those questions; I hadn’t gathered that information. I didn’t realize I needed it, because it was the first time I had constructed a book like this, and it wasn’t until I tried to write it that I realized that I had to change the way I reported, and ask whole new sets of questions.

To “put the reader there,” as you’ve said.

Right. Exactly. You’re compensating for the fact that you didn’t witness a particular event by picking the brains, essentially, of the people who did witness it — and not only about what they witnessed, but about themselves, about their environment, about their relationships.