When Warren St. John, author of Outcasts United, Canterbury’s all school read from last summer, visited the school in October, Sherley Arias-Pimentel and Greg McKenna sat down to talk with him. His book shed light on the refugee crisis and how it affected the small town of Clarkston, Georgia.
On the surface, Warren’s two best-selling novels, Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer and Outcasts, both deal with sports. For Rammer, he followed the Alabama football team in an RV to chat with diehard fans, and in Outcasts, he tells the story of a soccer program created for newly-settled refugee children. Warren admits, however, that neither of his books “are about sports at all.” Instead, sports “is the ticket to the main show…humanity.”
Warren thinks that sports are the natural “ticket” because they “distill life and package it into four quarters,” while also intensifying emotions that he sees as “more latent” in everyday life.
Warren views journalism as “a license to tour people’s souls” and simply sees himself as a “curious person” who is “energized to understand something” he did not comprehend or could empathize with before. In both of these novels, Warren uses sports as a platform to do just that. In Rammer, interviewing Alabama fans was the key to understanding “the psyche of people who have given themselves over to something,” while in Outcasts, soccer became emblematic of the struggles and triumphs of the refugees and native people of Clarkston, Georgia.
When Warren first started writing the book, it was difficult for him to get the refugees to open up to him.
“The refugees had been through some very traumatic experiences, usually by the hands of their governments, and as a consequence, they aren’t really good with authority figures,” he recalled. “So when you’re a journalist, as in my case, and I show up with a tape recorder, pad, pen and a lot of nosy questions, you kind of come off like ‘you’re the man.’”
So, a great deal of trust-building had to take place.
“You need to keep being persistent, but also humane. It’s good to be pushy with a politician, but when you’re interviewing people who are not public figures, you have to be very patient and understanding about their skepticism and discomfort with the media.”
It took him about six weeks of persistence and determination to get the refugees to open up to him. And, when they finally did, Warren felt a huge responsibility to get their story right.
After the release of his book in 2009, he received many different responses – largely positive. Many of his readers said could feel the empathy Warren felt toward the refugees, which he himself confirms. He also believes he was empathetic to other points of view.
According to Sherley, his book shows this by the attention he paid to the community members of Clarkston and their concerns. For instance, he mentioned how the townspeople themselves were somewhat like refugees, because even though they didn’t move anywhere, their environment completely changed.
“I like to think about how my grandmother would have responded if she was in a similar situation,” said Sherley. “If her neighbors were very different from her and didn’t even speak the same language, it might disorient her. I think that is what was happening with the native people of Clarkston, Georgia.”
The book also helped Coach Luma and her team by bringing a lot of attention to her work as well as substantial monetary donations.. She has started a school since the release of Warren’s book and was even been nominated as a CNN hero.
Warren is still in touch with Luma and even with some of the boys of the team, especially the family from Burundi. The family has since moved to Indiana, but they stay in close touch and regularly visit one another.
“They have become part of my family,” he said.
He has seen all the kids in that family grow up and graduate high school and even college.
“Because of the book, the kids are somewhat frozen in time for me, which is not really fair, because they are all grown men now.”
Finally, Warren had some advice for aspiring journalists.
The most important step for a young writer is to be “self-aware about the stories that don’t feel like work.” When Warren interviews young reporters for his company, Patch.com, he always asks them what they are passionate about, and he is shocked by the number that fail to give him a clear answer.
Warren believes that this is partially due to the fact that teachers do not spend much time educating students about how certain types of journalism differ from one another. Once a student realizes what interests them, whether it is investigative reporting, breaking news, feature writing, or something else, Warren strongly urges him or her to “study the craft” of the best in that particular field.
Journalism, “is like anything” he says, “it’s fun when you’re good.”
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