Author Tracy Kidder on homelessness, hope and telling stories that matter

Author Tracy Kidder has been described as a “master of narrative nonfiction.” Kidder won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for his 1981 book, “The Soul of a New Machine,” about the development of cutting edge computers. He is the author of more than a dozen books including the acclaimed 2003 New York Times bestseller, “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” about the late global health pioneer Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners In Health. The book is often assigned as required reading in colleges.The Washington Post says that Kidder writes about “the moral value of small victories in a world of big problems.”Homelessness is the focus of Kidder’s latest bestselling book, “Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People.” Kidder spent five years following Dr. O’Connell as he worked the streets of Boston. Kidder was moved by the people he met who were experiencing homelessness in Boston and wanted to tell their stories. “If you get to know them, to really look at them — and a lot of people never do — you realize that they're every bit as human as you and I, and that old adage, There but for the grace of God go I.”“The engine of every good story is human character,” said Kidder. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, and the New York Times but he insisted, “I'm a storyteller more than I am a journalist.”“I stopped thinking of myself as a journalist around the time of the Iraq War. I didn't want to be associated,” he explained. “Because there were so many lies told and so much bad reporting… it starts to taint the term. And then you have Fox News. …It's a wonderful profession, journalism. I believe in it utterly. But I want to see it practiced better.”Kidder says of his craft that “the techniques of storytelling don't belong exclusively to fiction.” Good writing should “be like a pane of glass. The writing itself should be interesting but it doesn't have to be flashy. I believe in immersion in the story that I've discovered.”