Talking with Eli Cranor and Alice Driver

“For every American dream, there is a corresponding nightmare…”

We recently caught up with two of the authors who will be at the CALS Six Bridges Book Festival at the end of next month. Eli Cranor is no stranger to the Fest, as this will be his third book and his third visit. Alice Driver is an award-winning investigative journalist and Arkansas native. While looking through the Fest books, we noticed that there were some similarities between Eli’s and Alice’s books, despite one being a thrilling piece of fiction and the other being an explosive exposé. So, we got the authors together to discuss their books. This conversation was later transcribed and has been edited for clarity and length.

CALS: Tell us a bit about your respective books.

Alice: My book is Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company. I followed a group of immigrant and refugee workers, many of whom were undocumented, during four years, starting in 2020, really looking at their lives, which are largely tied to Tyson Foods and to labor conditions at Tyson Foods, which impacts their health, their well-being. And it’s really looking at how we treat the people—mainly immigrants—who are processing our meat and chicken. In the process of my reporting, many of them either became injured, became disabled, or died.

Eli: Broiler is a novel, a thriller, I guess. It follows two couples. Luke is pushing to get the production rate [at a chicken plant] up and up and up. And in doing so, he kind of creates the tipping point for the other couple that’s in the story. You have Gabriela Menchaca and Edwin Saucedo, who are both undocumented line workers. The tension that is created by this demand for more and more and more, let’s just say it causes Edwin to make his first mistake. And if you’ve seen Raising Arizona, maybe this one could be like “Raising Arkansas” in some ways. And then it just kind of spirals down from there in terms of the thriller suspense side of it. So yeah, a thriller suspense novel set inside the chicken processing industry.

CALS: Obviously, you have similar topics, but different approaches, with one being fiction and the other nonfiction. What kind of research went into your respective books?

Alice: I’m an investigative journalist and I do immersive projects; I like to follow people over time. This is a very difficult situation that I’m following, where workers, for example, who were dying of COVID due to many times, according to them, being asked to work while they had COVID. But over time, what I hope to show in the book is the resilience of the workers, their strength, and what they’re doing in spite of the situation, like organizing to demand safer labor conditions. And so I’m really looking at the power of worker-led movements when it comes to changing a system that is unsafe and that really preys on immigrant and refugee workers, imprisoned persons, and also children, which was something that I really appreciated when I heard Eli talk about his book and how (because I think you’re still a teacher, Eli) you had children who came to school and they were falling asleep. And of course, they were immigrants, and they were working the night shift at meatpacking plants.

Arkansas was listed in the report from the labor department investigation last year that had six children working there. Also, Arkansas has drafted and approved legislation to allow 14-year-olds to work. Those were some of the issues, and really through interviews and immersing myself with various groups. Most of them don’t speak English and many of them are illiterate.

Eli: Yeah. And Alice hit on it. But even before my students… This story came to me, like, so out of left field. And I say that because growing up in Arkansas, I’ll never forget, you drive around and you smell something, and I’d say, “Oh, Pop, that smells horrible. What is that smell?” And he would say, “No, it smells like money.” And then my wife’s family has chicken houses, you know, growers, stuff like that. But I was teaching at an ALE school, alternative ed. And if you ask those students, they would tell you that they’re the bad kids. You know, it’s not true. They were there for a whole bunch of different reasons. And so I was curious. I was like, what’s going on? I learned that they’re working night shifts, and I was like, well, tell me about it. And so they start telling me about like how the shifts work and how there’s really no real timeline. It just depends on when they get it all in. So that’s why some days they were late. And some days they were earlier. Some days they didn’t have time to take a shower. And they told me about how cold it was and the layers they’d wear. That was the seed of the idea. This was a school where students could come in and they might only be missing like nine weeks to graduate. So usually it was a lot of older students.

This was years ago, so people have asked me if I followed up with them. And a couple of them, I have no idea where they went, what happened. But they were really the reason that got me digging into this.

Alice: A lot of states have strong ag laws against anyone documenting anything in meatpacking facilities. Workers know that they will be fired if they speak to a journalist. Not only that they will be fired, but they will be blacklisted. They will not get a job in this state. And so the only thing that made my story possible was that in the pandemic, people started to die because of work conditions, and their families, and those who were still living said, “I don’t care if I lose my job. I don’t care what happens to me. I am going to get justice.” And so that is why my story exists. Otherwise, it wouldn’t exist because these are workers who’ve been absolutely silenced in every way possible, whether that be legal, whether that be NDAs, whether that be threats, whether that be, like in my book, a pile of dead armadillos under someone’s house. So the difficulty of this story was unreal. Just trying to get inroads into all of that. Wow. Wow.

CALS: What would you both like people to take away from your respective books?

Alice: The first thing I want people to understand is something about the lives of these very strong, resilient, faithful, committed workers who are doing what is the most dangerous job in the United States.

And they are at a time when politicians are talking about immigrants and migrants as a crisis or criminals. These are the people that are upholding our food. This is a global story and my story has people from Myanmar, people from the Marshall Islands, you know, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. These are the individuals, many of whom are undocumented, who are upholding our food system. And we need the conversation about immigration to reflect this.

Eli: As a novelist, I tried to get enough footing in this world to then just be able to… I don’t do outlines or anything like that. So I try to get enough with those four characters that I talked about, like to just let them kind of start unspooling the story for me. And it took about 80,000 words. There’s a line in a draft that I really think summed it up. It comes in the penultimate chapter. It says that for every American dream, there is a corresponding nightmare. And I think that’s the main thing that I want people to understand, you know, because we can point at all the big, big corporations, but it also goes down to us too, like our daily choices, and things that we do.

I think that’s the driving force of my book or the driving point: How much is enough, and what does excess of any sort cost not only you personally, even if you’re not aware of it, but who is it costing? And that was the thing I wanted to really kind of peel back and show through my book.

You can hear more from Eli and Alice at their sessions during the Fest, and you can check out all the announced authors at sixbridgesbookfestival.org.