In this edition: in a pickle; gut feeling; king of pain; life (or something like it); for those about to rock.

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.

In this edition: loving a killer; GRASE under fire; the marvelous mundane; Texas on two wheels; and the man who would be T. rex king.

Pamela Colloff is an award-winning reporter at ProPublica and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. 

She spoke with Brendan O’Meara, host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, about how she developed as a reporter and writer, using these skills to uncover the failures of the American criminal justice system. Colloff and O’Meara talk about preparing for interviews, how thoughtful reportage can effect real change, and learning from the perspectives of incarcerated and exonerated people.

Colloff’s first book, Catch the Devil, a deep dive into serial con man Paul Skalnik, is now available. 

This conversation has been edited for pacing and flow. 

—Krista Stevens

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Brendan: What do you make of the fact that regardless of how skilled, experienced, and accomplished you become as a writer, it’s still really, really hard? And yet writers put together amazing work that creates change, and if not change, at least true art that makes meaning.

Pamela: Every assignment, at the beginning? I’m sure this is the one that reveals I’m a failure, that I don’t know what I’m doing. This is the one that’s going to break me. There are different stages. There’s the elation after finding a great idea, and then despair because no one’s going to talk to you, and then elation when people talk to you. Then there’s despair because you have this amazing material, but you have no idea how to write it. It’s this endless roller coaster. It’s funny to have been doing this for so long and still have so much self-doubt. 

I remember asking Gary Cartwright [Ed: Cartwright wrote for Texas Monthly from 1975–2010.] about this after a particularly tough close on a story. This was in the late ’90s, early ’00s, and I was really struggling because it felt like every story took so much out of me. It still feels that way, quite honestly. And I sought him out and said something like, “Gosh, this is so hard. Does it get easier?” And he just laughed and he said, “When it gets easier, it’s time to hang it up.” I think what he was saying is that when the work gets boring, when you feel like you really know what you’re doing, then maybe you should move on to something else. I loved that, and it also gave me an appreciation. I think about this a lot now; I feel so lucky at this point in my career to be doing work that is endlessly challenging, like every story is a new Rubik’s Cube to figure out.

Brendan: When it comes to writing, there’s something called the Skip Hollandsworth Method. What is that method, and do you still employ it? 

Pamela: He read a draft of mine. I couldn’t tell you which story. His rewriting instruction was to take all the quotes out, and once I had taken the quotes out, to revise it. And once I had revised it, then decide which quotes to put back in. He said, “You’ve got to do a draft where the only voice that’s there is yours.” It was such good advice because in that particular story (and I think this happens in stories where I’m having more difficulty), I was leaning really hard on quotes. He was telling me to figure out what the story was saying. You have to tell the story, and then thoughtfully choose where you need someone else’s voice and judiciously put that back in. It might also have been referring to Skip’s theory of interviewing. My inclination is to over-research everything before I arrive at the interview, to show the person that I’m knowledgeable. I have to earn their respect. Skip would show up to an interview and say, “Wow, so what’s podcasting? How do you do it?” Just the most broad questions imaginable. He got great material just coming to people totally fresh. He’d done his homework, and if he needed to follow up with something specific, he could. But I think there’s something to that. I’m really working on coming in and trying to leave a lot of space for the person I’m interviewing instead of showing them how much work I’ve done.

Brendan: You need to get them talking and get into their headspace, and it helps to have that baseball card knowledge. But the whole idea is to get them talking.

Pamela: I will make my list of questions, which is usually absurdly detailed and many pages long, and I’ll spend a lot of time working on that. I put it away when I get to the interview. Of course the work that went into it is informing the conversation, but I just try to have a normal conversation for as long as I possibly can. And it’s not until we’re going to shift gears and I’m trying to remember the things I haven’t asked that I pull out my notes. I used to be embarrassed about looking at my notes. I don’t know why I used to be so self-conscious about that.

Brendan: I loved that you brought up Skip’s tip on removing the quotes, and then having the confidence with your authority over the material, and then cherry-picking the right ones. You need to take agency and shape the piece in your own voice. 

Pamela: Before I have the confidence to write in the way that I want to write, where I really own the material, I have to spend so much time with people. At the outset, once I outline what it’s going to involve after they say yes to talking to me, I’ll say, “I’m going to be around a lot and you’re going to get sick of me at some point.” To be clear, it’s not always in person. I just finished a story where much was done by phone and Zoom and text, but I was in constant communication with my sources for about six weeks, throughout the day, every day, in various ways. For me it’s spending enough time with people that I feel like I have the right to describe what I’m describing in a story, and to tell their story in a somewhat omniscient way, that their voice comes in when they say something unique in the way that they phrased it, or makes you suck in your breath. 

Brendan: There’s your book, and the long stories you’ve written. There are false starts, stories that don’t get off the ground. Coming up with ideas is paramount. Ideas are your currency. How do you generate the story ideas that you know that you’ll run with, be it for ProPublica, The New York Times, or even a book?

Pamela: When I started at Texas Monthly at 25, again having no idea what I was doing, we had a monthly staff meeting with everyone who worked at the magazine. Before the meeting, each writer had to submit five fully developed story ideas. Not just “Hey, it would be cool if we wrote about this.” You had made some calls, or had done some real research, and you had them fleshed out. It was coming up with five viable ideas, so you had to come up with 20 ideas to get down to five, and then you had to flesh them out, and you had to write them up, and they were put in a packet that was distributed to everyone. You would get called on. If the editor in chief liked an idea on your page, you would get called on to talk about it. To pull that off every month, you’re looking for story ideas every second of every day. There’s nothing that is not fodder. There is no conversation that is not something that might lead to a story idea. I felt like it made me. I was already a curious person, but it made me talk to anyone and everyone and ask them more about their lives. So that was really good training. And it’s an exercise, a muscle you build over time. 

So much of what I write about is dark and intense. The people I get to spend time with to tell these stories? I feel like my life is a lot richer with them in it.

Brendan: In your work for The New York Times, but also in Catch the Devil,  there are men on death row, and they hear guards stomping and keys jingling, and they’re wondering if they’ll be taken to death watch. It’s chilling to hear that and you put us in their headspace. It’s incredibly moving and pulses with a kind of terror that you feel for them, no matter what they may have done.

Pamela: So much of what I write about is dark and intense. The people I get to spend time with to tell these stories? I feel like my life is a lot richer with them in it. I always think about the perspective that I have as someone who spends a lot of time talking to people who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, the things they long for, or the things that they savor when they have the chance to get them. I’m thinking in particular of one exoneree who I’ve spent a lot of time with. The way that they described just the most ordinary things. Anthony Graves had been on Texas’s death row and was freed. He talked about what it was like to go into a grocery store after you’ve been in solitary for years, and all the colors and textures and smells and the way light falls on different things. The way he talked about going to the grocery store was like how one of us might talk about going to see the greatest work of art we’ve ever seen. The way these men talk about the food they long for or putting their feet in the grass, things like that. I’m lucky to have that perspective. 

Another thing is the potential for writing to change things. Some stories I’ve written made things happen in the world, and that is the greatest feeling there is. And then there are other stories that haven’t done that, but they have put a light on people who really needed that light on them. They’ve highlighted something important to make readers think more deeply, or maybe focused on people working in the trenches where no one’s paying attention, but what they’re doing is so important.

Listen to the full conversation below.