Poured Over: Corban Addison on Wastelands

“It was the people really, that convinced me that this was a story not just worth telling, but needed to be told, and needed to be told the right way, in a way that would actually be fun to read and engaging, that would reach broader than an academic audience that would reach deep into the community and say, you know, this is a story about ordinary people trying to get justice in a time and place in America where it’s pretty hard to do that…”

Wastelands is the true story of an epic battle of power and justice, good and evil, with heroes to remind us that there is virtue in the world. Corban Addison joins us on the show to talk about his nonfiction legal thriller—a book John Grisham says he wished he’d written—centered on the Black and brown residents of eastern North Carolina, two million hogs and the men who run the big business of pork, along with the ways story connects and empowers communities, the hours of personal interviews and research that informed his writing, what next for him, and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer.

Featured Books:

A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr

Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

City on Fire by Don Winslow

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays).

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

B&N: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Corban Addison has a story that I had not heard until I read his book, Wastelands, and I can guarantee you. Yeah, no one’s gonna forget this book, no one is going to forget. And here’s the other thing. John Grisham has written the introduction. And Grisham says he wishes he’d written wasteland. So before we get too deep into things, I’m going to ask Corban to set up the location of Wastelands because it’s a place I’ve never experienced until now.

Corban Addison: First off, thanks so much for having me, it’s really a great pleasure to be here. So, you know, I had never been to the coastal plain of eastern North Carolina. And the way I imagined it, and the way I’ve come to think about it is it’s basically the world that King Tobacco use to reign over. It’s the old tobacco lands. It’s the remnants of an ancient sea and very severely flat, sandy loam soil dominated by, you know, both pine trees, the lovely sort of lob lollies and longleaf pines that are native to North Carolina. And, and also now, in today’s world, these large scale factory farms, and many of America’s market hogs and chickens are grown in eastern North Carolina, because it’s the old tobacco lands, its current population is dominated largely by the grandchildren and great grandchildren of people who were alive at the time of the Civil War. So you imagine the heirs of the planters and the planting class, and the heirs of the enslaved African population as well. And, you know, in today’s world, and really wasteland sets up, you know, a clash between those heirs, you know, for the people who live there, it’s a very outside community, it’s, you know, especially the Black folks, you know, of modest means, you know, that live in these communities that I talk about in the book, they love their land and consider it, you know, God’s gift, you know, to the earth, they have inhabited these acres, these precious acres for generations, and care deeply about the environment and about, you know, their ability to have cookouts and friends over in family gatherings and do things outside. And unfortunately, the hog industry has made that pretty hard over the course of the past generation.

B&N: And it really took off in the 1980s. That least the industrial hog farming the way you talk about it, in the book, the 80s, that was the moment, and we’re talking about how many pigs per person and I should say hogs, how many pigs per person in this particular stretch of North Carolina?

CA: There are 9 million hogs in the state, which basically means that virtually every person could have one as a pet. I mean, it’s a lot of hogs, but most of them are concentrated in this coastal plains. So there are places like Duplin County, which is you know, basically the densest population of hogs on the planet, where there are 2 million pigs and you know, that’s 33 animals per person. So you’ve got a whole lot, and then they get crammed into these sheds. And they’re, you know, roughly 1200 per shed and some of the farms have 15-20,000 hogs on one plot of land.

B&N: And these hogs are grown to roughly 280 pounds. I looked it up on the USDA website before we sat down. Two hundred and eighty pounds per hog. Yeah, before they’re sent off to be processed. That is a lot of waste from those animals. And that is a lot of smell. And I say this is someone who as a child, I grew up near working farm, mostly Black Angus cattle. And when I say probably like 20 heads, so not like crazy, huge. But there was a hog and the hog was behind all of the barns, you had to walk into the woods to visit the hog, because they smell really, they smelled worse than the chickens smelled and the chickens they smelled. I have not been on a working farm in a very long time. And I still remember what all of that smells like. And also there’s a cattle ranch between Los Angeles and San Francisco. And if you’re driving up, you know when you’re there. It is best that windows are rolled up and vents are closed. We’re talking about a community of people who are living with this very aggressive smell. And this very aggressive waste disposal problem is the politest way I can say it because I do try not to swear on the show, but it’s gross. Yeah, it’s gross. How did you find the story? How did you find these folks? How did all of this come about? Because you’ve written a literary thriller? about justice? Yes. Send about community and about story and family, but also about giant hogs and hog waste.

CA: Yeah, you know, it’s not a story that I probably would have picked, had it not landed in my lap simply because I remember when I was first introduced to Mona through a mutual friend who is from her hometown of Salisbury. So I say Mona, I mean, Mona Lisa Wallace, that lead trial attorney in the case that, you know, from North Carolina picked up this this issue, she frankly, she didn’t even know about it. I mean, that’s, that’s how wild it is that this story, kind of even though it got press back in the 90s, it really did kind of ride below the radar for a long time, even for local people. I certainly had never heard about it. But when I first connected with Mona through a mutual friend, I honestly, you know, she was calling because she she had been approached by some people about telling the story. And she was smart enough to know, hey, I should ask an author I trust, what am I getting into? So she called my friend John Hart, who’s a fantastic novelist, and a dear friend of mine. And John called me up and said, Hey, I think you should talk to this woman, you know, she’s a really successful lawyer. And it sounds like she’s got a really interesting story. And who knows where it’ll go. But I remember having this conversation and thinking pigs, you know, a trial about pigs. You know, I’ve written about a lot of different things in my novels. And I love getting underneath, you know, corporations that are doing bad things to people and to the environment. But I honestly didn’t think initially, this is a story that I would have a lot of interest in. It was the people really, that convinced me that this was a story not just worth telling, but needed that needed to be told, and needed to be told the right way, in a way that would actually be fun to read and engaging, that would reach broader than an academic audience that would reach deep into the community and say, you know, this is, this is story about ordinary people trying to get justice in a time and place in America where it’s pretty hard to do that with corporate capture in the legislatures and, you know, with money, basically, driving so much of what happens in the world. But after my first conversation with Mona, she invited me, I was fortunate the timing was good, because the fifth trial, there were five federal trials, the fifth one was about to launch. So she said, Hey, you’re in Virginia, why don’t you drive down to Raleigh, and sit in on the opening day of the fifth trial, and then you know, you can meet some of the clients and meet my team. And, you know, she said, I haven’t really decided if I want to be open with this my story. But I feel like at least the client story deserves to be told, and you seem to be know what you’re doing. So I went and it was a dramatic day. And it convinced me immediately, really, immediately that I wanted to tell the story.

B&N: You describe Mona as a woman who can bend gravity, or at least make it look that way. And she brings in a lawyer from Texas to help with the case, Kaeske. And, according to you, he’s a nuclear reactor in human flesh. So we’ve got a couple of powerhouse lawyers, but they are very connected to the community. Even though Mike is from Texas. He’s very committed to the plaintiffs, because really what’s happening to these people, and has been happening? I mean, I’m gonna quote you for a second again, where generations of people have been trying to make noise and explain what is happening to them. There’s one woman that we’re going to get to in a second, who realizes that there is pig waste being sprayed onto the roof of her house.

CA: I was a lawyer before I became a full time author, I’m still a lawyer in my heart. You know, love the law. I believe it’s a noble profession, in the hands of the right people, the law can do great things in the hands of the wrong people can do bad things. So, you know, it’s kind of like money in that way. I love telling stories about lawyers, particularly good lawyers. And when I met Mona, I realized she was the best kind of lawyer. She’s been really successful. She’s super smart. She’s deeply connected to her community, she’s rooted in her hometown she has never left could have easily gone anywhere and done anything and, you know, decided to stay put and fight for the people of North Carolina. And that’s really been her stock and trade for, you know, 30-35 years, I can’t remember maybe even 40 years now. She picked this story up, this issue, and ran with it, you know, investing millions of dollars of her own money over the course of seven years of litigation, and going up against you know, this massively powerful multibillion dollar, you know, international conglomerate, and really risking quite a lot, risking her firm, her reputation, you know, on behalf of these people that she came to love and I will tell you like, they came to love her and the number of times Instead, I was invited into people’s living rooms. Because you know, somebody from Mona’s firm, placed a call and just said, Hey, this is a good person, you can trust him. And they would sit me down and tell me the stories about how much they love Mona, how good she had been to them, how fairly she treated them how it really, it felt like she was family over and over and over again. And I spoke to so many different people who said that, in fact, you know, one legislator, and I quoted this in the book, because I just loved it so much. One, this beautiful legislator who helped out in the State House called her a national treasure. And, you know, I mean, I’ve gotten to know her well enough to know that like, that’s actually not an overstatement. You know, so she was fortunate, because she’s got a lot of friends in the trial bar, was able to, you know, get somebody like Mike Kaeske to come along and say, Yes, Mike is one of the best trial attorneys in America. Though he flies beneath the radar himself, he is kind of happy not to be in the limelight. Though this book, I hope puts him in it. He kind of deserves to be put in it.

B&N: And story is the thing that connects good guys, bad guys. And there are some doozies in here. But you’ve got scientists who step up in great ways. One of whom goes home to Northern New York State and realizes his glasses, his reading glasses have picked up the smell of the hog farms. And he can’t figure out why there’s still this scent around him. It’s like I’ve showered, I’ve washed all my clothes. I’ve washed Oh, my gosh, he didn’t think to wash his reading glasses. And once he did that, the smell finally dissipated. So sorry, I’m gonna let that hang in the air for a second. Because one, I can’t resist, and two, he’s miles and miles and miles away from the last lagoon that he was at. I mean, lagoon is the right, right. And he brings the smell home with him. Yeah, 1000s of miles away, or at least hundreds of miles away?So I’m just trying to really get in there and help people understand the scale of what’s happening. I mean, it’s environmental racism, on a level that made me really think of the 1970s when we really had not as a country, tried to address you know, what was happening, and you even call it out. I mean, you’re talking about the number of Black and Native American and Hispanic people who are more likely in this area end up living next to a hog farm, and they’re stuck and you can’t sell a house that has a sprayer coming by. So they’re stuck. They’re absolutely stuck. So we’ve got Mona, we’ve got Mike, we’ve got some former hog farmers who are just saying, this is really wrong. We’ve got some current hog farmers who are saying, I’m trying to make it better. But Smithfield, which brings us to the ultimate bad guy in this, Smithfield is not helping me. And you talk about how a lot of these hog farmers are, in fact, modern day sharecroppers. And I just want to go into that for a second, because I don’t think a lot of folks outside of the area know what the business is structured like. So can we talk about that for a second?

CA: Yeah, no, actually, this is one of the points that when I was I remember, coming down, during jury deliberations in the fifth trial, I wasn’t there for the final verdict. But during jury deliberations, I remember having conversation with Mike Caskey, in which he said the next case that I would love to bring, but I’ll never be able to bring it would be on behalf of the contract farmers, the growers, as they call them because the growers have been exploited in ways that I really, you know, when you look at the business model, it really is like modern day sharecropping. So back in the 80s, it was a great deal. I mean, a lot of these family farmers that were tobacco farmers and couldn’t make money anymore. In tobacco, were quite happy to raise Wendell Murphy’s hogs and Wendell Murphy was the Godfather, the modern hog industry, they were quite happy to say take Wendell Murphy’s golden promise of, you know, a buck ahead on the back end, they had the land and they made the investment. They said, Now, this is a business model that could work, you know, but over the course of time as the industry consolidated, they got long, I mean, far, far away from those early contracts. And so now, you know, you’ve got the very first grower in the first trial guy named Billy Kinlaw. This sweet old grandfatherly type, had a 15,000 head that’s 15,000 hogs on his farm, and he could not clear enough profit to pay him a salary, his farm 15,000 animals at any one time, was just paying for his truck and his life insurance. I mean, truly, you got to you have to step back and say, That’s insanity. How is it? I mean, so who’s making the money? It’s you know, it’s the organization in this case Smithfield that owns the animals that owns all of the profit making centers of the enterprise and who owns you know, the waste. What’s ironic is that the waste from those 15,000 animals, each hog produces five times the average human waste, you’re talking about a city of 75,000 humans is the equivalent of Billy Kinlaw’s farm. And that waste is owned by Billy Kinlaw. Like it is his responsibility to dispose of it. And that’s the way the contract set up.

B&N: But Billy also didn’t want to build his hog farm where he did, he wanted to use a piece of land that was far far away. And he was told by Smithfield that they wanted a different location, which was really close, to private residences. And that’s barbaric.

CA: Thank you for that what was very unique about that situation was that the land that he wanted to use was it was family land, but it was closer to another Wendell Murphy, allied hog. Murphy’s company said no, we’d rather you do it somewhere else in the structure to go back to the structure. I mean, you have, you know, these contract growers, who make these massive investments to build, so they own the waste, but they also own the debt. I mean, in many cases, you know, the investment for 15,000 head hog farm, for instance, is a million plus. And none of these growers have that money. They get it from, you know, lenders who are making a buck off of their debt, they will lose their farm, they will lose their land if they can’t service the debt. And yet every year, you know, they’re getting squeezed more and more on on the contract. So that’s why I think about them in terms of like, you know, sharecroppers, because while there isn’t an iota of freedom in the mix, in so many ways, the landscape is dominated by, you know, the, the 800 pound gorilla, by the integrator by Smithfield, and the grower really has virtually no recourse, you can’t sell a hog farm. Like you can’t get rid of your hogs and turn it into something else. I mean, once it’s almost like, you have to get environmental remediation, I mean, it’s not easy to change, once you’re in it, you have to stay in it, or basically, you lose your shirt. And so in that sense, you know, it’s a form, it’s not indentured servitude, but it’s definitely closer to that than it is to our ideal of, you know, the kind of free American farmer that our founders allotted.

B&N: And part of what you’re writing about isn’t just the community. And it isn’t just the legal bits, which were kind of fascinating because they really moved but we’re gonna stay away a little bit from that piece of the story only because there are spoilers, and we don’t want spoilers right now. One of the things I do also want to bring up though, is Smithfield created a lot of astroturfing. And they would create these sorts of farm families for North Carolina and all of these different groups that they presented as working independently, but really wanting to look out for members of the community. And they were just PR moves, and they were really cynical PR moves. And then we also had members of the North Carolina legislature who, frankly, I’m just not going to name because they don’t need any more press. You can read about them in Wastelands because it is part of the fun of the story. And I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that you are telling a story. And there’s some personalities in here. But I think it’s important for us to look at this astroturfing and also look at the role of social media because Mona had to hire security at one point because people were not responding well, to what was happening in the cases. They weren’t responding well to the idea that the plaintiffs were finally being heard and not called liars. All of this. I mean, we’re seeing this years later, I mean, the bulk of the book takes place between 2013 and 2018 is the bulk of what you’re writing about. Yeah, here we are in 2022, and everything is to the nth degree. It’s all gone completely. But if you look at a lot of what happens courtesy of Smithfield, we’re seeing it now, on a national level, we’re also still seeing it at the local level, but we are seeing a lot of money and a lot of aggression, and a lot of rage, play out in ways that would not happen prior to social media. So Corban, we have to talk about this.

CA: It’s a great point. And it really was interesting, because once the trial started happening, and you know, no spoilers, you know, but they it became obvious, I think, to the industry that this was a challenge they’d never faced before. Their tried and true tactics of deflecting and denying and delaying were no longer going to work, that they were not winning motions in court that these cases were going to be tried. They really stoked the flames down east and that’s the term that locals give to eastern North Carolina. They brought out the growers. And they really did that from the very beginning from the first complaints that were filed in these community meetings and where they would gather people together, not just growers, but people in the community, all of whom are in one way or another there, you know, are a lot of whom had their livelihoods connected to the industry. And the goal was to keep the growers on side I mean, because unfortunately, if growers were honest about like Billy Kinlaw had to be in trial, if they were honest about how little they were making, how hard it was to make money under Smith fields program. You know, if they couldn’t hold the line, in that sense, Smithfield would have nowhere to hide. I mean, it would be obvious that Smithfield is this multibillion dollar corporate baddie, who’s been polluting the environment and the air and making it hard to live for people of color of modest means in eastern North Carolina for a generation. But Smithfield smartly, looking at it from their perspective. You know, they they used PR very cynically, but very powerfully, to say no, actually, what’s going on here is these greedy trial lawyers are trying to, you know, take the shirt from our poor family farmers. And we are a company that supports the family farmer. And look, by the way, here’s some family farmers right here that will get up and tell you like how sad they are about getting sued, even though they hadn’t been sued. And I mean, in reality, though, the original complaints and State Court did name the growers, they were never the target. And the federal complaints did not name the growers. They went directly after the hog producing division of Smithfield, Murphy Brown, it really was this interesting shell game PR shell game that Smithfield was playing with great effect, they were able to hold the line, and the growers never broke the line. You know, they were able to keep putting this out there until the trials happen until, you know, the world got to actually see the truth, got to see inside the barns, got to hear from the scientists got to hear from the neighbors. And all of a sudden, you couldn’t keep that, you know that going except ironically, except through social media, and except in the community Downeast, which did not attend the trial and was only hearing about it through the channels of blogs and social media posts to the point where they were getting an alternate reality of what was actually being said, what was actually being testified to, and there came a point where it all kind of coalesced in this, this firestorm that led to death threats and led to, you know, a judge doing something a judge almost never does, which is issue a gag order to try to tamp down the flames that were were happening during the second and third trials.

B&N: And on the flip side of this is someone like Elsie Herring, who is one of the plaintiffs. She lived in Brooklyn for 30 some odd years and went home to North Carolina moved in with her mom and her brother. It was her roof that was being pelted with pig waste. And this is a mix of liquid and solid pig waste shot through a hose. I just want to be clear what’s hitting LCS Ruth. And from the minute she gets back from Brooklyn, she’s saying this can’t be right. She’s going to local government. She is very politely in her Elsie way, making a lot of noise and she is being ignored. Until Mona.

CA: Yes. Oh, my gosh, Elsie, I mean, and the saddest thing about it is that though she did live to see the end of the story, she didn’t live to see the publication of the book. She had cancer and died very suddenly in early 2021. But I love to think about her spirit being with me because the truth is that and with every everyone who is continuing to fight because she was one of the trailblazers, truly suigeneris, unique individual tough as nails smart as a whip, only in a high school diploma, she didn’t go to college, but she made her way in ironically on Wall Street in a time when you could do that. As a Black woman with a high school education who just knew how to get stuff done. And she did and then she came home to care for her 90 year old mother and her brother with Down Syndrome who was you know, just one there were 15 children in that campaign, amazing. Beulah, her mother had had 15 children, all of them lived all of them, you know, had gone off and done things in their lives with the exception of Jessie who had Down syndrome. So Elsie came home to care for her mom. And there was a day she told me about and she told the story before but it’s just so vivid that I had to tell it again. I mean, the day when she realized that the hog farm was next door And it was ironically a family. The hog farmer was a family that was related to her, you know, that was doing it. It was a white family. So Elsies grandfather was mixed race. He was born of a black woman who was enslaved and a white master. And he was born into slavery, but it acquired the land after at the end of the Civil War. And the hog farmer was related to the herring family. There was a day when he brought out this big gun that you know, I like to sort of talk about it, like, imagine your sprinkler, and then make it prehistoric size. Like, you know, Jurassic sighs, this gigantic sprinkler. He hooked it up next door to Elsie’s house, where mother and brother live, they were out on the porch. And all of a sudden, they heard this crazy spray sound, they felt it and smelled it at the same time. Ran indoors it was she Elsie called that the live scent of hogs. And he could just imagine that I mean, just absolutely putrescent cannot breathe goes inside and here is on her roof. Paul grain, I mean, really like the droplets of hog waste landing like rain on her house, that would place her great her mother had lived her whole life. So you know, it really personalizes it, Elsie was so good about this, she told her story and every venue, you know, in legislative hearings on, you know, in the media, she was fearless. She never minded repeating her story. Because she just felt like, you know, one of these days, they’re actually going to do the right thing, one of the these days, the industry is actually going to change. She believed that to her dying day, and she did live to see some change. But sadly not enough, we’ve got a long way to go.

B&N: And speaking of change, you spoke to 60 some odd people who from all parts of the story, you spent time dug in with all of the public records, because when you’re talking about lawsuits of this size, the paperwork that goes with it, and all of the things that you now have access to, which is great. That’s a lot of time and a lot of energy. But how did writing this book change you?

CA: I feel like every journey that I’ve taken with the book has changed me and made me a better human and just expanded my heart. I mean, I feel like that’s the gift of storytelling is that, you know, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, you meet people, and you get to know what’s going on in the world and a new way. And, and you get to, you know, just again, I mean, sort of become a better human, through just the process of education, personal education, and through relationship building, and trust building, you know, but these people just became special to me. And they really, I think that’s why I’m so excited about this launch in a new way from my fiction, because I feel like I get to share this launch with every person that was in the story. I mean, because in reality, like, Yeah, I told it, but it’s their story. They lived it. Yeah, you know, it was it was an immersion experience. It was, you know, it required years of work, tons of interviews, lots of document reviewing, lots of trial transcript, reviewing, you know, a lot of time Downeast I mean, I’m not someone who’s interested in just doing interviews on the phone, if I can meet somebody in their living room, if I can ask them, Hey, show me what you’ve seen, or better yet, in this case, help me to understand what you’ve smelled. I mean, that was one of the things that, you know, out of the gate, I was like, I’ve got to go down there. And I’ve got to try to recreate this, like, smell is this weird, like, ethereal thing, you can’t reproduce it. Sight you can reproduce and sound and video and photographs, you know, you can kind of imagine taste through description. And you could imagine tasting something. Smell is just this really unique, you know, feature of human experience that you kind of have to be there, right. And part of the challenge of writing the book was, how do I describe this? How do I help my reader engage with scent? You know, and that was a challenge that trial lawyers had to figure out what the juries how do we get the juries not only to care about these people and about what they were, they’ve experienced, but to see how damaged it’s left them? I mean, you kind of think, oh, this stinky thing. I mean, is that really has that really changed your life that much, you know, and so, so all of that was an experience for me, I mean, to be able to get down there and to meet these folks and to see and hear and to smell, you know, their stories and the reality of Smithfield’s domain and I came away from it saying, Look, you know, I’m not gonna give up eating bacon. I love bacon, but I definitely am not going to ever give Smithfield a dime of my money. There are a lot of you know, people who still raise hogs in the old fashioned way, in the way that frankly all of these neighbors, every single one of them, when they were growing up and still to this day, in many cases, they still have hogs or that had hogs, you know, a few of them out back in a pen. It was their, you know, their holiday ham, it was their Sunday bacon, as they described it to me, they have nothing against hogs, nothing against farming, that was the way they were raised. They just have a problem with the mechanized industrialized overpopulated farms. And the way that waste has been disposed of in a medieval manner without any concern for their livelihoods and for their quality of life. They’d like it if the farms clean themselves up, they can stay. They don’t have any problem with that.

B&N: I mean, that’s a question. I think people really need to ask what’s the value of a human life? Right? I mean, that’s essentially what we’re asking is how much is someone’s not just the pleasure of their space? But it seems like a simpler situation than some of the story would have you believe. And I’m dancing around the behavior of some folks that readers should encounter on their own. I mean, yes, the story moves. I mean, you’re covering quite a lot of time and quite a lot of ground and some slightly esoteric stuff. Like, it didn’t occur to me that this was technically a nuisance suit, I would have thought that it was, you know, somehow a much more bigger sort of environmental story. And no, legally, it had to be filed as a nuisance suit, which, okay, so there are moments like that, that I think readers are going to be surprised by the characters are amazing, the people, not just the lawyers, but the plaintiffs and the experts. And some of these farmers, like there is a lot of good in this book. But I have another question for you. Because story is clearly something you care about a lot. And you’ve written four novels. Can we talk about your literary influences for a second?

CA: There’s one that pops to mind immediately. I mean, and frankly, one that in the moments of doubt that I had, I mean, this is a massive project. And it is really my first foray into nonfiction. I wasn’t sure that I knew what I was doing. And I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to pull it off. But I would often look across my office at my old dog eared copy of Jonathan Harr as A Civil Action, which I read and loved in college. And that was one of the inspirations behind me going to law school. I remember thinking, look, if Jonathan Harr can do it, and he wasn’t a lawyer, he was just a really smart reporter. If he could tell the story of a you know, real life lawsuit in a way that reads like a legal thriller with deep literary dimension, characters rich characterization, if he could do it, I can do it, you know, and that’s kind of always been the hubris that I sort of, you know, smilingly say, look, since my earliest days as an aspiring author, I’ve always had that, that sense of optimism, like, Okay, if somebody else can do it, I can do it. I, I don’t know if I can do it now. But I’m gonna try. I’m gonna, I’m gonna keep going until, you know, until I manage to pull it off. And so I’ve got to say, I mean, one of the great joys of mine was finding Jonathan Haar his email address online. You know, once the manuscript was done, you know, he’s kind of gone dark. I mean, he’s more or less in retirement. He’s working on a new book now, apparently, but it’s taken quite a few years. So I had no idea how to reach him. Even though he was published by my publisher many years ago. They didn’t know how to reach him, but I found him online. I mean, thank God for the internet. send him an email, you know, like a query letter. I mean, almost like, you know, I’m an aspiring author, again to saying, hey, look, I wrote this book, yours was an inspiration. Would you mind reading it? And the beauty was he wrote me back right away said, Send me the galley. And he read it, and a month later sent me this glorious blurb. And it was just like, Man, this is a fantastic book. So that felt like, you know, hey, underscore the fact that you know, that that hubris that I had was justified in looking across my office and saying, if he could do it, I could do it. So, so you asked about literary influences. I mean, I would say A Civil Action inspired this kind of storytelling, you know, but I’ve loved you know, nonfiction like Patrick Radden Keefe, you know, Empire pain is one of my favorite books, you know, of late, the Devil in the White City. I mean, you know, books like that, I mean, but I definitely have, I would say that if you looked at my shelf, you know, apart from the research books, most of the things that I read for pleasure when I have time to do that, are novels, and you know, I love you know, I mean, just everything from sort of the classics, you know, the Count of Monte Cristo, I was one of my my early childhood favorites. Dostoyevsky’s the Brothers K. You know, I love Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. That story really helped inform my characterization, particularly of the Black community in this story, because I was sent said the fact that I’m a white man and I’m not lived their story, the beauty of storytelling is that it offers us an opportunity to live somebody else’s story, but I really wanted to do it authentically. And so reading is about workers Wilkerson’s beautiful portraits of, you know, people. And the great migration really helped me think about how I would approach characters like Elsie Herring, and how I would tell their story. She was someone who could have been in The Warmth of Other Suns as a person, the great migration, you know, so really, I’ve got a lot of different interests and of course, I still love reading thrillers like I’ve got Don Winslow’s new book, City on Fire on my shelf, I’ve loved power of the dog, the cartel on the border, you know, that kind of drug war trilogy, Power of the Dog is one of my favorite books. Great stories is what I love, I mean, things that move things that are fun to read, but also things that that educate me as well.

B&N: Yeah, I was gonna say it was clearly your love of story that connects all of the different pieces that you read. But what’s next for you?

CA: I am in the midst of, you know, something really, I think is special and unique. I mean, for years, my wife, who is from Appalachia, from West Virginia, told me to write about the opioid epidemic. And so I had been thinking about how to do that. And I never really understood how I would do that. Or if I should do that, until late 2020 when it became apparent that the National opioid litigation was actually going to produce something other than settlements, that a case was going to go to trial in West Virginia of all places. And I decided, okay, well, you know, I’ve written this story, which is the inside story of a big, you know, litigation with national implications, and a social sort of message underneath it. And, you know, could I do the same thing with with the reckoning on opioids? Because a lot of books have been written about the epidemic, but most of them kind of end as the litigation is getting off the ground. And the story of the reckoning is happening right now. And we don’t know exactly how it’s gonna go. But I was there in West Virginia last summer for the trial, I was in Ohio, when the first jury came back with a jury verdict against the big chain pharmacies. I was in New York for the New York trial, which produced a verdict against some of the manufacturers, because the only trials that have gone the distance so far, and those communities I’m going to be focusing on in a new book. So it’s going to take some time, you know, but I’ve been able to get deep into the communities. And I feel like in a way, those three communities: West Virginia, Ohio, New York, in many ways, kind of encompass, you know, run the gamut. I mean, you know, there are other parts of the country, but those have been deeply impacted by the scourge of opioid addiction, and the massive, you know, endless it seems profiteering that happened, and it’s still been happening. So that’s kind of what I’m doing.

B&N: It’s a lot, but I cannot wait to read that book. In the meantime, though, I am going to let listeners know that your website has photos of a lot of the folks who are in Wastelands. I think it’s really great that you did that. So corbanaddison.com, spelled just like the author’s name, go check out the photos. They’re fantastic. They’re also some that might make you raise an eyebrow, which, but it’s totally worth looking at the photos. Corban thank you so much for joining us. Wastelands is out now.

CA: Thank you so much.