Thinking through how you find that intersection between individual, compelling human narratives and structural, systemic injustices - that's the place that's most interesting to me as a reporter.

What narrative journalism does is create a language or open up a space where someone can say, "Oh, this happened to me, too."

The journalist's job isn't to be someone's friend, or their psychologist, or anything other than what we actually are. And at the end of the day, that can definitely seem like such a strange, extractive relationship.

So much of our cultural representation of what an investigative journalist looks like, in movies and pop culture, is about this really testosterone-filled dude screaming, "Give me what you got!" I didn't see myself as someone who would be good at or comfortable with that.

There’s no such thing as being totally ‘found’…the fun, I think, is in the searching.

I think when I was doing my very first interviews, I probably brought a notepad and did ask people my first fifteen questions while sitting in a Starbucks or something horrible like that. And I found that, oftentimes, the most important thing at the very first interview is just establishing a personal connection and developing some sort of rapport so that I can go back to them again, and then maybe again, and maybe again after that.

For me, the part of reporting that's the most rewarding and energizing is just hearing directly from people whose voices haven't often been heard, or incorporated into mainstream media. That stuff is really, really gratifying, and so to realize that you could make a career of that part of it, that appealed to me.