In April 2005, in New Orleans, author Dave Eggers was interviewed onstage by Anne Gisleson at the Tennessee Williams Festival. Eggers talked about his firsthand experiences with the Patriot Act and the perils of one’s private sketchbook falling into the government’s hands. The following is a slightly edited transcript of that interview.

[IN 2004] I HAD BEEN GRANTED a press pass to the Republican National Convention in New York City. I was sitting there, and I was trying to take notes and I couldn’t because I realized I didn’t have my notebook with me. And at that moment I realized that I had left it on a plane. It was just a plain black notebook. I called the airline from the convention and I said, “Have you found a notebook? It was on this flight at such-and-such a time.” And the woman at the airline said, “Oh, actually a notebook was turned in to the lost and found. We have it right here.” I described it, and she said “Yeah, that’s the one.” And I asked her if she could send it to me and she said, “Yeah, sure we can send it to you.” And I gave her my address, and she said she would send it to me. It was altogether the most satisfying customer service experience I’ve ever had in my life. I mean, you never think you’re going to find something you leave on a plane. So that was it, and then I went about my business. I thought she was going to send it back to me in San Francisco.

Then I got a call two hours later, no more than two hours. There was a message on my machine saying “Hi, Dave. This is Mike McGillicutty”—that’s not his real name—“from the State Department and I’m in possession of your notebook. Why don’t you give us a call back to talk about it?”

And I have to admit, I was pretty excited. This was the first call I’d ever gotten from the State Department, and I just thought, “Okay, this is going to be great. No matter what happens, it’ll be an adventure.” So I called him back, and he said, “Yeah, you know, there was some concern about the contents of your notebook. The lost-and-found woman and the Port Authority police . . . .” Apparently my notebook, and the concern about it, had gone up about four agencies in those two hours and eventually got to the State Department. I was pretty amazed, and even more excited about what was happening. I mean, this was getting good.

So I said “Okay, so what happens? I go to jail, or what happens?”

He said, “No. I just want to talk to you about it.”

And I said, “Okay, are we going to talk now?”

And he said, “No, no. Let’s see. I know you’re flying out tomorrow on JetBlue at 8:10 a.m., so why don’t I just meet you at the gate?”

And of course that was kind of alarming, that he knew when I was flying back home. But anyway, I said “Okay, I guess I’ll meet you there.”

McSweeney’s #14
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“I don’t have a sketching routine per se, but when we’re coming up with a new McSweeney’s cover, I usually start with a sketch on paper.

With the cover of McSweeney’s no. 14, I had just read a story about soldiers who had been injured in the war, amputees in particular. And I was so angry about the poor planning of the war, and the lack of foresight, and the lack of compassion, and the stupidity that I thought drawing Bush as an amputee might be a way to vent. So I sketched it out. Some people were pleased and others obviously upset by it.”

—Dave Eggers

I still didn’t want to tip him off that, you know, I wasn’t a dangerous guy. So I just let it go, and in the meantime, all that night, I was thinking about the meeting the next day. I mean, first of all, what do you wear to something like that? I was going to meet him at the gate and I didn’t really have anything nice or dressy or anything. I thought I could at least bring a flower or something, like a rose maybe for him. I didn’t know the protocol.

I had asked how I would know him, and he said he’d be holding my notebook. So the next day I came into the JetBlue gate and he was there with the notebook, but otherwise he was dressed like he’d been playing golf. He had khakis on, and a polo shirt, and he looked about twelve years old. And this was the guy from the State Department!

So I walked up to him, and we stood at one of those high café-type tables, and immediately I was sort of disappointed, because it became apparent right away that somewhere between the phone call and that morning he had looked me up and realized that I wasn’t a dangerous guy—which was too bad. I was really hoping there was some list out there of dangerous writers and I was one of them. But no, immediately he said there was no big problem, he knew who I was, and I guess more importantly, who I wasn’t.

So he asked me some really basic questions. The first question he asked me, honest to God, was my Social Security number. Now, this threw me a bit. He knew my flight number and time, but he couldn’t find my Social Security number? If the State Department doesn’t have access to your Social Security number, there’s some kind of disconnect with the information flow, right?

I gave him the number, and then I had to ask him what it was about the notebook that had triggered all the concern. And so together we started flipping through it, and what we saw was actually pretty alarming. I had just been at this Sudan conference, so words like Sudan, war, SPLA, rebels, Osama bin Laden—these were all in the first five pages. Bin Laden had lived in the Sudan for five or six years and had been harbored by the government and paid for a lot of their terror. Then on the next page I’d written Colin Powell, Condaleeza Rice, State Department, things like that, because Rice and Powell actually had a great interest in Sudan; they’d helped broker the peace agreement there. Later in the notebook I’d written some details about the Republican National Convention, dates and times and locations of various meetings I planned to attend.

That was all fairly interesting, I guess, to any sort of authority tasked with protecting everyone at the RNC. And then we kept flipping through the notebook, and we came across something even stranger. See, when I’m bored at a meeting, I’ll sometimes draw in my notebook. I use a china marker, which has a rough edge to it; it has the effect of looking like it was done in crayon. And when I was sketching in this particular notebook, the drawings happened to be of huge furry creatures with big teeth. And alternating between the drawings of creatures with teeth were these big drawings of flames. Sometimes I draw sort of cartoon-versions of flames. It’s something I needed to do for an illustration assignment years ago, and I just kept in the habit of drawing them sometimes. They’re very cute flames, I have to say, but in the context of this notebook, they had a different implication. Any reader of this notebook would be concerned, for sure, when you put it all together: bin Laden, Sudan, Powell, Rice, State Department, Republican National Convention, New York City, huge furry monsters, flames, flames, flames. It definitely would raise eyebrows on anyone.

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