Adam Hochschild, a co-founder of Mother Jones Magazine, has written for The New Yorker, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine and The New York Review of Books.  His most recent book, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, builds on themes from his earlier writings about slavery and civil rights.  Hochschild lives in San Francisco and teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Your two most recent books, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves and King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa are steeped in the history of slavery.  Why have you chosen to write about slavery as it was in colonial times rather than slavery as it still exists in Sudan and elsewhere? 

AH: Of course slavery still exists in the world today, and I’m glad there are people writing about it and trying to do something about it. I hope there will be more. But I like writing about these past events because one can draw a more complete portrait of the human rights campaign involved. Those struggles in the present—not just against slavery but against all sorts of other things as well—are still unfolding. Although here and there I have written about them also.

[Writing about the present and the past] are both absolutely necessary. And I think the same skills are required for writing about either. As a writer, I have the most fun when I can wind past and present together, as I did in my books on South Africa and Russia. (Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey (1990); The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (1994))

Three of your books are set in Africa – what do you think the rest of the developed world can learn from its history?   

AH:  Africa’s colonial heritage has contributed to its problems. But it’s a huge mistake to blame colonialism for all of them. Many other former colonial territories, some of them ruthlessly exploited, from Ireland to Vietnam, have made a far better recovery from colonialism than Africa. So I think one has to look squarely at other factors in Africa’s heritage as well: the abysmal position of women, the experience of politics as loyalty to clan or ethnic group and not nation-state, and, perhaps above all, the widespread experience of indigenous slavery. Other parts of the world where these things were part of the heritage have had a tough time as well.

You were one of the founding editors of Mother Jones, which has become one of the most important outlets for progressive journalism.  What drew you to starting a magazine?  Has Mother Jones been able to live up to the dream that you had when it started?  What is your current role with the magazine? 

AH: The other co-founders and I hoped to create a magazine that would take a progressive perspective on the world to a far wider American audience than that reached by most of the existing such publications. Somewhat to our surprise, I think we succeeded. I’m very proud of what the magazine stands for and what it’s done, although in recent years I can’t take much credit for it. I’m still on the board of directors and write for it occasionally, but haven’t worked there as an editor since the mid-1980s. Most of the credit for what it has published in the last two decades or so goes to those who have been its principal editors in that period: Deirdre English, Doug Foster, Jeffery Klein and Roger Cohn. A promising new editor, Russ Rymer, has just taken over and I think will keep the standards high.

Your first book, Half the Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son is about your own history, and most of your other writing involves the history of others.  Can you talk about how your research and process of writing differed? 

AH: One advantage of writing about yourself: no research is needed! It saves a lot of time. No need to spend months in libraries and archives, or more months of reading, making yourself familiar with some distant time and place. In autobiographical writing, whatever label one puts on the sub-genres, to me the important distinction is between full-scale, throw-every-ingredient-in-the-pot autobiography, and a memoir of some specific aspect of one’s life. Very, very few people can do the first successfully. And very few of us readers want to read everything about someone else’s life—unless, perhaps, it’s a writer or artist or public figure we already love. The second, a memoir that focuses very closely on one particular aspect of one’s life, is a different and more modest form. So I think of my first book as being in that category: a memoir of one relationship. The latter is something I doubt I will ever write—and doubt still more whether anyone would want to read.

Your wife is also a writer (Arlie Russell Hochschild, sociologist and author of The Time Bind : When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work).  How does that work?  Do you ever collaborate on your writing?

AH: We are each other’s first readers and critics—and she is certainly my best critic. By the time I finish a book, she has heard me talk about the characters so much I feel she almost knows them, even before she has picked up the manuscript. We’ve once or twice written something together, but the more important collaboration is the mutual reading of each other’s work, and a lot of talking about it as we go along. Arlie is a marvelous writer, with a beautiful eye for dialogue, description, scene-setting and the evoking of emotion. And in her writing about the intersection of work and family, she goes where many others fear to tread. I’m constantly meeting people whose lives have been changed by her books.

I’m always interested in what writer’s read.  What are you currently reading?  What writers have had the most influence on your style or choices of topics?

AH: I just a few days ago finished Gabriel García Márquez’s wonderful autobiography (now he’s someone who is entitled to do the first type of work I described above), Living to Tell the Tale. For my pleasure reading, though, I read more fiction than non-fiction. I’m always trying to learn about craft when I read, and I think there’s more to be learned from novelists and short story writers than from journalists. The latter can find an audience if they impart useful information. But fiction writers need to hold our attention by how skillfully they tell the story. As to fiction writers whose work I’ve loved, I think Tolstoy and Chekhov are at the top of the list. And I like certain modern writers who have Tolstoy’s ambition to interweave the social fabric of a time and place with personal drama: Pat Barker on World War I, Paul Scott on the last days of the British in India, E. L. Doctorow on American life. And there are many more.

You teach in the journalism school at Berkeley.  What is the most important lesson that you try to instill in your students?

AH: The single most important lesson is: keep your eye on the reader. How can I attract his interest? How can I keep her from getting bored? How do I keep him on the edge of his seat? How do I make her want to turn the page? Too many writers are always thinking about what they want to express and not about how to frame and organize the narrative to draw in the reader.

Two final questions:  What do you see as the role of storytelling in the alternative media?  How has your role as an editor affected your own writing?

AH: Storytelling is increasingly crucial in any written medium. People are so bombarded with news and information everywhere: they get the headlines on the radio in the car, on their cell phone screens, on their Blackberrys, on the Internet, on TV. When they pick up a newspaper or magazine, they already know the gist of the story, so you have to keep their attention by the skill of your storytelling.

Being an editor helped my writing a lot. I’ve written about that process a little in my book Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels. When you’re an editor, you’re constantly thinking: is this story worth 1,000 words? 3,000? 5,000? The writer, of course, always wants 5,000, but you have to make a judgment. Maybe the judgement is that the story could be better told in pictures. Or shouldn’t be told at all. Your eye is always on the reader. You learn, after a magazine comes out, which stories people liked, and which they didn’t. Which moved them to write letters to the editor and which didn’t. You try to figure out why. All of this helps you keep your eye on the reader, and that’s where a writer’s eye needs to be.