Kevin Fagan walked into Mary Collies’ Twelfth-grade classroom at Marin Academy in San Rafael on a current Friday to guide a category dialogue on his e-book, “The Misplaced & the Discovered: A True Story of Homelessness, Discovered Household and Second Possibilities.” He held a guitar, its case lined in stickers like ‘DEMOCRACY will depend on JOURNALISM,’ a mixing of his careers as a journalist and musician.
Fagan exchanged introductions with Collie after which launched into tales of his youth: falling in love with a Wellington, New Zealand woman, scraping by as a low-paid United Press Worldwide stringer, and busking on the aspect to earn $300 on good nights.
Kicked out of the home at 16, Fagan’s e-book attracts on his private expertise of homelessness and many years of expertise reporting on it for the San Francisco Chronicle. In it, Fagan finds his private historical past and intertwines in depth analysis on housing and inequality with the tales of Rita and Tyson, two homeless San Franciscans he met on the streets.
Following his class dialogue, Fagan joined Mission Native for a Q&A on his profession and the shaping of his e-book. His subsequent occasion is scheduled for Sunday, Sept. 14, on the Roxie Theater for The Therapeutic WELL fundraiser, “Hope Lives Here: The Tenderloin Speaks.”
How did ‘Misplaced & Discovered’ come about, and what was your writing course of?
The e-book grew out of journalism. In 2003, I used to be put out on the road by the San Francisco Chronicle managing editor, with Brant Ward, a photographer, to attempt to determine why there have been so many homeless individuals in San Francisco. After six months of being on the street with Brant, we did a five-day sequence that attempted for instance the depth of the issue, after which it moved to proposing options based mostly on greatest practices.
The primary day of the sequence was specializing in a colony of a few dozen addicted homeless people on a visitors island at Van Ness within the Mission, a colony referred to as Homeless Island. They had been hooked on heroin, crack,
booze; some had been turning methods to get cash. All of them had been panhandling in a technique or one other. One of many people in that story was Rita Grant. She was not turning methods. However, she was hooked on heroin and did crack and had HIV. After the story ran on Rita, Rita’s sister, Pam, who was in Florida, learn the story on-line and used that story to return out and discover Rita and rescue her. She wrote me a letter saying ‘I’m popping out to get her, thanks for writing the story.’
I waited a yr and went again to see how issues had been going with Rita and so they had been fantastic. She had
rehabbed superbly into the particular person she was meant to be. She had been an Olympics-bound gymnast, a surfer woman. They referred to as her homecoming queen. She was stunning, good, charming, well-liked, and had simply tumbled into homelessness by a sequence of occasions. You don’t simply turn out to be homeless in a day, you rattle down a ladder of going by your mates, your loved ones, crises, in fact, dangerous selections, dangerous luck.
After overlaying numerous homeless tales, I’ve turn out to be a homeless specialist in my profession, together with different issues too, however homelessness is the closest to my coronary heart.
I bumped into Tyson Filzer once I was doing a narrative a few proposed shelter on the waterfront in San Francisco. Tyson was sitting on a bit of cardboard on the Embarcadero and he gave me a extremely considerate Interview, so I put him within the paper and we ran a photograph. His brother in Ohio learn this story on-line and referred to as me up and stated, I haven’t seen him in seven years. I do know he’s homeless. I do know it’s dangerous. I’m elevating cash on a GoFundMe to get him into rehab – assist me discover him.
I’ve helped lots of people attempt to discover their homeless family members, generally efficiently, generally not. Tyson’s brother flew out right here and we discovered Tyson in a day. I knew the place to look, and it wasn’t very arduous.
He was well-liked in the neighborhood as a result of he was a kind of guys you would belief to observe your again. Sensible, an excellent dude. Baron, his brother, took him again to Ohio after he detoxed and did some rehab and it was a beautiful success story. However then, arduous issues occurred. I don’t need to give away the ending of the e-book, nevertheless it doesn’t finish properly for Tyson. Shortly after that, I assumed, I can write a e-book about this. I had pitched a e-book in 2016 to an agent about Homeless Island nevertheless it bought rejected as a result of there have been too many characters. Nicely, this time it was simply two. So, Tyson and Rita represented a few actually necessary points of homelessness to me. Their backgrounds, how they wound up the place they had been, and what occurred to them afterwards.
How did you get your begin in journalism and reporting on homelessness?
I needed to be a journalist since I used to be 14. My mother had been a Navy journalist and he or she informed me it was the perfect job on the planet. She was proper. And in order that was a ardour of mine. However the core driving motivators for me are that I really like writing, I like having adventures, I like speaking to individuals, and I need to do good on the planet. I feel journalism accomplishes all 4 of these, particularly whenever you’re writing about homelessness.
How did your childhood expertise form your potential to report on homelessness and join with interviewees?
When it comes to empathy, I can relate to somebody who’s poor. I do know what it’s wish to have individuals take a look at you such as you’re bizarre. I used to be the child with the damaged glasses, the shitty garments from the thrift retailer, pants that didn’t go all the way in which right down to your footwear. You get judged as a child, youngsters might be fairly merciless, and so I by no means forgot how my background made me need to discover poverty, which then, in fact, inevitably led to homelessness. I needed to determine why the hell I used to be poor. My mother and father had been educated and we truly had a couple of years the place we had been center class. However then, more often than not, my father was in school and we had three children within the household and my mother might solely do part-time jobs, at the perfect, whereas watching after the youngsters.
It made me mad that some individuals need to be poor on this nation. I hated not having sufficient meals in the home, I hated having shitty garments and I hated having to go away highschool early. I by no means took the SATs. Fortuitously, we had actually good public training in California. San Jose State was a terrific faculty, however I at all times questioned, might I’ve minimize it at Harvard or Stanford? Years later, once I gained the John Knight Fellowship at Stanford, I bought to spend a yr there and I spotted, yeah, I might have completed this. It helped take a bit of monkey off my again, nevertheless it nonetheless leaves scars on you.
What was it wish to construct a reference to Rita and Tyson throughout the span of a few years after which convey life to their tales?
It was like doing a undertaking story, a protracted undertaking story for the Chronicle, which was the place I used to be the longest. Solely it simply stored going. It was a luxurious. I bought to have nearly all of the questions I’ve answered.
With Rita, I figured, all proper, if I need to actually present who Rita is, I want to return to the start. What was it like being raised with a ton of siblings? She had numerous brothers and sisters. I needed to determine, okay, the place did issues flip for her, good and dangerous? How do you hint the arc of somebody’s life when it has turned out badly or turned out properly, what are the junctures? And to try this, I needed to do exactly the identical sort of analysis you do as a reporter. I seemed up data, seemed up her yearbook and the felony data of her in addition to her varied members of the family.
What I favored most is speaking to individuals. I discover some actual happiness in interviewing individuals. I did most likely a whole lot of interviews over years between her and Tyson and all the opposite analysis I did. It was actually enjoyable to take an individual’s life and jigsaw puzzle it, which is what that was like. I did that with Tyson, too.
What have you ever realized about the perfect approaches wanted to resolve homelessness throughout your profession?
I feel the basis of homelessness is greed – if you happen to needed to give it one phrase on probably the most macro stage. One thing that I worth in my perspective is having lived in New Zealand, Australia and England and traveled lots. One instance I give is that England has a inhabitants of 60 million individuals and about the identical homeless inhabitants as San Francisco, which is a metropolis of about 850,000 individuals. They freak out about their tough sleepers, as they name their chronically homeless individuals.
The distinction is that they’ve nationwide well being so that you don’t go bankrupt as a result of you possibly can’t afford a physician. They usually have residing wage legal guidelines so you possibly can work as a janitor, punching a money register, doing, you recognize, low-level paper-shuffling jobs. You’ll be able to work at a kind of jobs in England and be capable of afford hire. Right here, you possibly can’t work a minimum-wage job in San Francisco and afford a single-room residence for your self. Now we have the worst homeless downside of any Westernized nation however we’re additionally the richest nation on earth, which is offensive. It shouldn’t be that means. It’s as a result of we don’t need to share societal accountability. Simply take a look at the revenue disparity: We’re within the Gilded Age, with enormous splits between wealthy and poor.
If readers are left with one message out of your e-book, what message ought to that be?
Be type and see homeless individuals as human beings worthy of saving as a result of they have to be saved. Chronically homeless individuals like Rita and Tyson should not disposable human beings. They need assistance and so they deserve assist.
Kevin Fagan will seem on the Roxie Theater at 3117 sixteenth St. on Sunday, Sept. 14 at 1 p.m. Doorways open at 12:30 p.m. Tickets are $100. Funds raised profit The Therapeutic WELL. Tickets available here.
