Hundreds of newsletters land in my inbox each week. I use Gmail filters to route most of them into one big feed, and only a handful go into a separate folder for easier visibility. Erika Hayasaki’s The Reported Essay is one of them. In each edition, Hayasaki—a professor at the University of California, Irvine’s Literary Journalism Program—writes about the craft of nonfiction and shares conversations with fellow journalists. She offers advice on the practice of reporting and storytelling and the business of freelancing, from balancing interiority and research to building a story’s structure to pitching stories.

Hayasaki is one of those writers whose new work I always make time to read. For Men’s Health, she told the intertwined stories of two men trying to understand and treat their long COVID symptoms. For The Cut, she wrote a memorable piece of romance and disaster about a Maui couple on the day Lahaina burned. For The Verge, she reported on an obsessive stalker who harassed Asian American professors online. Her narrative nonfiction illuminates the lives of individuals and communities, and the human connections within them. Her latest, for The Guardian, follows a New Jersey nurse assaulted by ICE, a woman she first wrote about in her book The Death Class. It’s yet another piece grounded in rigorous reporting.

After spending time with Hayasaki below, don’t forget to subscribe to The Reported Essay—it’s an indispensable resource for anyone who writes or reads the kind of nonfiction we recommend and celebrate at Longreads.

—Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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Where did you grow up? 

I was born in Champaign, Illinois, a college town surrounded by corn and soybean fields two hours south of Chicago. I lived there until I was 14, when my parents divorced and lost their home in a bankruptcy. I moved to Lynnwood, Washington, for high school, returning to Champaign for journalism school as an undergrad at the University of Illinois.

What places feel like home?

My current home in Southern California. I know it is my kids’ safe place. But I also think of my first childhood home, a one-story on Hathaway Drive in Champaign that my parents bought for $10,000 in the 1980s. When I am back in my hometown, I drive by it sometimes and glimpse the window I used to sneak out of, or the backyard jacuzzi deck that my dad built, or the strawberry patch where I winced eating unripened berries.

Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?

I often wonder how the same hometown that crafted my identity, and deepened my own humanity, could turn around and strip someone else’s away. Obviously, I haven’t let go of this place that shaped me. So for the last several years, I have been reporting and writing a book, College Town, which is based in Champaign. 

What is your favorite time of day?

Early morning writing time, 4:30 to 6:30 a.m, when the house is quiet and I am not checking messages or getting interrupted.

What are you really good at?

Connecting people to other people I think they might get along with, or appreciate, or learn from. Or connecting them to useful resources. I sometimes do mini one-on-one Zoom sessions with my Substack readers, and I like giving each person I meet their own individualized mini-syllabus at the end of it. 

What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?

The ability to communicate.

Describe your favorite meal.

Merkato Ethiopian food in Los Angeles: asa tibs (fried trout), injera, honey wine.

Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)

Silence during writing time. But I love the sound of laughter with family and friends—it is everything.

Where do you do your best thinking?

Long car rides (allowing the mind to rest and wander is key for creatives).

What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?

Right out of college, I was hired at the Los Angeles Times into METPRO (the Minority Editorial Program), which is now the Los Angeles Times Fellowship. Miriam Pawel, who just released a new book, California Dreams, was the Metro editor who hired me, and I was also mentored by people like Richard Kipling, Randy Hagihara, Steve Padilla, Richard E. Meyer (who wrote the piece I will never forget, linked below), as well as many other incredible writers and editors. The program also connected me to people who would become some of my best friends. This experience, in many ways, is why I also believe so deeply in the importance of being a mentor and connector.

Where do you like to read?

Home office.

What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?

Every story I report leads to a rabbit hole, and that is part of the joy of reporting. Since the summer, I have disappeared into reporting rabbit holes about meditation scams, Accutane (the acne drug), Illinois history, abuse by ICE agents, international students, and the future of college.

Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.

Longreads, of course. Scratch, a newsletter of interviews, essays, and conversations about how writers are surviving. I also like catching up on long reads via Apple News audio during commutes and housework.

What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?

“Julia Understands Everything,” by Richard E. Meyer, in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. I often assign this story to students. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing in 1996. Reading it myself as a young journalist broke open what I realized is possible in nonfiction storytelling. Rick wrote about a woman paralyzed by a stroke that left her able to only communicate through eye and head movements. He spent nearly 450 hours interviewing her, as she raised her eyes while he pointed to letters of the alphabet on a card.

What was the last book you read?

California Dreams by Miriam Pawel, a fascinating historical portrait of the University of California told through a cast of compelling people. And The Black Shield by Wilbert L. Cooper, a feat of braided history, reported memoir, and narrative journalism that is engaging and nuanced.

What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?

I recently came across a binder from high school with all of these articles and columns I wrote for my high school newspaper and for a teen newspaper run by The Seattle Times. These were earnest and idealistic pieces about discrimination, abuse, educational inequities. I look back at that kid trying to find her way in the world by asking questions and writing stories, and I’m just proud she kept going. 

I see my undergrads doing the same—choosing to major in journalism in these difficult times because they care about what is happening in the world, and even in the age of AI they still yearn to think, question, and write—and that also makes me proud.

What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?

Sleep on it. Also talking to my writing friends. It’s important to have writing friends and if you don’t have any yet, make an effort to reach out to other writers and connect with them. Build a community (even if it’s intimidating).

Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?

I have a Bookshop page with categories like “Inspiring Narrative Nonfiction on Place or Home,” or “Books Erika Teaches in Literary Journalism,” or “Books About Ordinary People in Extraordinary Circumstances.”

What words do you overuse?

“Random.”

What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?

“Bunch of Friends,” YouTubers—but only with my daughter.

What superpower would you like to have? 

Healing.

What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?

I’m a people person, which is also why you will find people at the center of all my stories. I am most interested in the human condition. My house is filled with portraits and photos of people. We don’t have pets. This question was harder for me to answer, so I asked my kids. They gave these answers:

“Alicorn. Because you can do everything.”

“A dragon, according to Chinese mythology, because you are wise.”

“Eevee from Pokemon, because you have gone through multiple evolutions.”

If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?

Lately, I am big on squeezing in a 20 to 30-minute midday nap. 

What five items would you place in a time capsule?

I really don’t get attached to stuff. Over the last few years, my 75-year-old mother got rid of all her stuff. She also gave up her home, and is now living full time out of her Toyota Sienna. Full-on van life. Yes, one day I will write an essay about this. She’s living her best life right now. I do have a lot of stuff, as you see in my office photo below. But I don’t attach much sentimental value to it. 

I’m much more about the moments that I know will not last. For my first book, The Death Class, I followed a professor of death and dying, Norma Bowe (whom I also published a follow-up story on this week for The Guardian, after she was assaulted by ICE and filed a legal claim). Her class and teachings also helped me learn to value moments and human connections.

What does your writing space look like?

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Erika Hayasaki is the author of The Death Class and Somewhere Sisters, which was named an NPR Best Book of the Year in 2022 and received a Nautilus Book Award in Journalism and Investigative Reporting. She is a professor in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine, and a former national writer for the Los Angeles Times. As an independent journalist, her feature stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York, Wired, The Atlantic, The Guardian, National Geographic, and others. She recently received the Longform Narrative Award from the National Association of Science Writers, and her work is anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2025. Erika also served as chair of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize Nominating Jury in Feature Writing, and she publishes a Substack newsletter, The Reported Essay.

A few years ago, Sebastian Barry—whose collected literary works, drawn from family history and lore, offer “a loser’s history of 20th-century Ireland”—announced that the final novel in his series would tackle the relationship between his parents. “The declaration seemed to set the table for a feast of disclosure,” writes Giles Harvey, who spoke with Barry for more than a year as the novel took shape. But the feast never arrived. The “career-spanning profile” Harvey once suggested to Barry becomes a study of abuse, memory, and revelation—one Barry’s forte, and now, perhaps, his greatest struggle.

Barry and I corresponded for the next year and a half, during which the novel appeared to be on course. Then, in July of last year, he sent me a surprising email. Something had happened in the time since his father died, Barry explained. “Where there was once a great need to proclaim aloud,” he wrote — neglecting to specify just what it was he’d felt the need to proclaim — Barry now found himself in a different state of mind. “A matter I thought so urgent and in need of saying” had come to seem better served by a “strange new beneficent silence.”

I was introduced to Kimon de Greef’s work this spring when I was producing our Longreads questionnaire with Patrick Radden Keefe. In his response to a question on the last book he read, Keefe mentioned de Greef’s “totally wild” book called The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence. I immediately googled it and requested a copy. With a title like that, how could you not?

The Ego Trip, which will be released on August 4, expands on the story de Greef explored in his 2022 New Yorker feature, “The Pied Piper of Psychedelic Toads.” It’s as fascinating as the title promises: a deeply reported book on the rise and fall of a Mexican doctor who built a psychedelic movement around smoking the secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad.

De Greef’s other stories are just as compulsively readable, dropping us into worlds that most of us have never even thought about and introducing us to memorable characters: There’s a Syrian immigrant trapper in New York who communicates with raccoons and refuses to kill them, and a Guyanese importer trying to do right in a world of songbird smuggling. There’s a Native American woman unable to harvest wild white sage on Southern California land stripped bare by poachers, and miners searching for leftover gold in South Africa’s illegal mines.

What ties this reporting together is de Greef’s eye for complex stories in offbeat industries and underworlds, and his interest in the tensions between desire and regulation, love and exploitation. A journalist from South Africa, de Greef also co-authored the book Poacher, a firsthand account on the illicit abalone trade.

Next week, we’ll have an excerpt from The Ego Trip for you. In the meantime, dive into de Greef’s questionnaire and get to know the author behind the book.

—Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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Where did you grow up?

I was born in London and grew up in Cape Town, South Africa.

What places feel like home?

My parents returned to South Africa when I was 1. We lived in a neighborhood called Observatory. I moved back here to live in a student house in my early 20s, and a few years ago I returned for a third time with my wife, who I met here too. At this point I might be in Obs forever.

Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?

I studied ecology at university and gained an appreciation for the wonder of evolutionary biology—the idea, essentially, that all life is connected, both in the present and backward through deep time to a common ancestor. It blows my mind whenever I think of it. I later researched abalone poaching for a master’s thesis and it changed how I thought about history, politics, and the law. Since then I’ve often gravitated to stories where inequality and crime intersect with the natural environment.

What is your favorite time of day?

Currently it’s when my baby daughter wakes up early in the morning and I get to hang out with her.

What are you really good at?

Catching flies with my bare hands.

What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?

A wet suit from my family when I was 10. They buried it on the beach and my uncle Cleon pretended to discover it. I started bodyboarding afterward and it changed my life in many ways.

Describe your favorite meal.

My late grandmother Vonni’s chicken guvetsi, a Greek dish made with orzo noodles. It’s been my favorite since before I can remember.

Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)

I wish I could write in silence but my office is on a busy street and I’m unusually sensitive to noise, so I use noise-canceling headphones. These days I’ve been alternating between ambient music and progressive psytrance—it felt appropriate for the book.

Where do you do your best thinking?

Often while free-writing longhand (I should do that more often) or after a swim.

What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?

I developed chronic foot pain in my late 20s. While I was recovering, I got an assignment from Audubon magazine to report on a conservation initiative deep in the rainforests of Madagascar. We would be hiking most of the way there. I was close to broke and badly needed the work. To get out, I walked something like 20 miles in a day. It was grueling but I made it through, and for whatever reason my freelance career seemed to gather momentum afterward.

Where do you like to read?

In bed early at night before falling asleep.

What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?

I started reporting a story about toad poaching in 2020 and imagined it would be 2,500 words or so. That one pulled me in pretty deep.

Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.

The New Yorker. Harper’s for its distinctive sensibility and offbeat stories that nobody else would publish. I’ve also been enjoying the new magazine Now Voyager.

What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?

“The Hunt For El Chapo” by Patrick Radden Keefe is a certain platonic ideal for me. Panoramic reporting and a sense of effortless intimacy with material that’s notoriously difficult to source. Plus the writing is incredibly smooth.

What was the last book you read?

I just finished Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. I had read the title story but not the final one, about a young man’s summer job in a logging camp. It’s so singular in tone and so richly observed and reminded me how beautiful and timeless writing can be. 

What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?

A story I did for The New Yorker about illicit gold mining in South Africa, something I’d wanted to write about for many years and am hoping to dig into further.

What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?

Jumping in the sea. Sitting in a sauna. Talking about it with my wife.

Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?

John Steinbeck, particularly Cannery Row. I enjoy his humor and character sketches, but most of all I love how he writes about animals and biology. 

What words do you overuse?

“Marginal,” “entrenched,” “booming,” “illicit.” Since writing about psychedelics, “radically” and “profoundly.”

What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?

At risk of sounding like an old man, watching archival cricket footage on Facebook.

What superpower would you like to have? 

The gift of easy sleep.

What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?

I appreciate the stoicism of donkeys and the playfulness of seals.

If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?

Go for a walk in the neighborhood or exchange growls with my daughter.

What five items would you place in a time capsule?

A cricket bat, a ball, the rules, and two wickets (should be more but we’re out of space) so that the game can be reconstituted after the apocalypse.

What does your writing space look like?

After working from home for more than a decade, I now share an office with a documentary filmmaker just up the road from where I live. It has big windows and boxes of notes on the floor for my next book project and is upstairs from a good coffee shop, which is unfortunate because right now I’m not drinking caffeine.

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Kimon de Greef is a journalist from South Africa and the author of The Ego Trip, an investigative nonfiction book about psychedelic toads, published by Doubleday. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York, The New York Times, The Guardian, Guernica, National Geographic, and other publications. He has coauthored a book about abalone poaching and holds a conservation biology master’s from the University of Cape Town.