On Saturday, October 24, The Pickup will host a one-day symposium at the Metro Library in Oklahoma City featuring a keynote conversation between Pickup editor Matt Carney and The New Yorker staff writer Burkhard Bilger. You can read more about the symposium (and RSVP for it) here. This story, about Bilger's life and career spanning from Stillwater High School to Brooklyn, New York was originally published in the June 15, 2013 issue of This Land.
Burkhard Bilger suffers from an incipient case of wanderlust. After nearly 14 years writing features for The New Yorker, he hankers for a place he can lose himself—maybe a sabbatical with his family to Morocco? Istanbul? A brief palate cleanser from New York might be just the thing. Bilger’s had, by his estimate, “a long, wonderful, extremely stable period here in New York.”
“Long-form journalism is at its best in The New Yorker,” Bilger said. He’d always dreamt of writing for the magazine, and “that nice feeling hasn’t worn off,” he said. He then reflected on his only dilemma.
“How do you leave to write a book when you’re given the opportunity to regularly cover huge topics in such a complete way?” He writes articles that could be small books. And, after 13 years on staff, and he still reads each issue cover to cover.
Bilger covered the Mars rover landing, which took place August 5, 2012. We were scheduled to meet over burgers on that exact date, which he had to move so he could be present in Los Angeles during the landing, a location he likely couldn’t reveal at the time. Writing for The New Yorker means getting top-level access to most subjects. It also means writing with a partly obsessive fear about getting it right every time.
“Partly I’m just obsessive,” he said. “Partly it’s anxiety. Fear of disapproval … That’s the nature of the job. It’s a jury of your peers.”
Bilger covers what many out on the coasts refer to as “the flyover states”—“That is what attracted Remnick (New Yorker editor) to me,” he says—the rich center of America he mines without cartoonishly painting it in the “Southern grotesque” style other writers choose for such topics. He’s carved a niche out of the lesser-explored and -understood characters of Americana. “I am interested in them, not in a ‘Woohoo, check out this wacko!’ kind of way. What makes them interesting is that they’re interesting.”