I publish my own books, so there isn't a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.

The weird thing is that working within an established story was actually kind of liberating. You know the beginning and middle and end, more or less, so there's less pressure to figure all that out.

Pain comes at me and I take it, chew it for a few minutes, and spit it back out. It's just not my thing anymore.

Why shouldn’t your curiosity about the world be rewarded?

I love to be surprised or challenged or told that I know less than I thought that I knew. I know it's an old saw, but the older I get the less I know I know.

It's so easy to print in the Midwest. You're saving months in shipping and customs, so we have started printing a number of books there.

The idea of 'Voice of Witness' is to let survivors and witnesses of human-rights abuses tell their story at length. It started with a course that I co-taught at U.C. Berkeley journalism school back in 2003.