I was born into a tightly enclosed world in New Orleans where everyone knew everyone else, not just in the present but going back three or four generations. There is not a natural fit between living happily in that kind of place and spending your career investigating and then publishing your findings, at least if your investigations are local. In MFA programs, I hear, you’re told to write about what you know. For me, a great appeal of being a journalist is that you can escape that dictum and turn your focus outward. In particular, my family owned sugarcane plantations in 19th-century Louisiana—it should be obvious why one might find it more comfortable not to investigate the details of that.