Following Mike Sager: The Path of the Unusual Storyteller

Recently, I interviewed journalist/author Mike Sager, discussing his writing process. Sager had published two books in quick succession in September 2020 and February 2021. The first book was Shaman: The Mysterious Life and Impeccable Death of Carlos Castaneda and the other, Hunting Marlon Brando: A True Story.

Sager and I go back some years. The last time we met was at a conference for the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies about a decade ago in San Francisco. Sager got his start at Creative Loafing, a monthly alt-weekly serving the Atlanta metropolitan area covering local news, politics, arts, entertainment, food, music and events. His temperament and sensibility as a writer has been tuned in that direction ever since, despite the hallow halls of journalism he found his way into. 

Sager is a best-selling author and award-winning reporter, he is a former Washington Post staff writer and contributing editor to Rolling Stone magazine. He has written for Esquire for more than 30 years, and he is the author and editor of more than a dozen books, including anthologies, novels, biographies and textbooks in 2010. He won the national magazine award for profile writing and many of his stories have inspired films and documentaries. He is now the editor and publisher of his own publishing house, Sager Group, LLC, in which many titles such as Shaman and Hunting Marlon Brando are now available.

Back when we had talked at the altweekly conference in 2012, I read a 6,000-word profile of television personality Brooke Burke he had published in Esquire magazine under the headline, “The Secret Life of a Beautiful Woman.” The writing was such that it caused me to scratch my head and say to myself, “My, this writer certainly has a curious appetite for strange stories.”

The hardest part about writing is sitting down and just doing it. I’m reminded that even John Steinbeck, the famous novelist, struggled with writing and you can see it in a lot of things. Some of his novels were just brilliant and well-crafted and some of his other stuff is difficult. You can see him struggling with it and then documenting the struggle in some ways. 

It was in this space I wanted to engage Sager about Shaman and then continue it on with the rather oddly funny Marlon Brando book. For me, the thing that sort of connected Sager’s two recent books was the fact that in both instances, he never actually got to interview the subjects of the books. 

For the first 20 years of his career, Sager said he basically wrote about dead people. 

“Everyone I ever wrote about was dead,” he said. “One of my most famous stories, ‘The Devil and John Holmes’ [the famous porn star] became Boogie Nights and Wonderland movies. You know, he was dead when I started and, you become, as a journalist, well acquainted with writing about people who are no longer with us.”

Sager recounted the initial assignment that led to his writing his first profile of Carlos Castaneda, the Mexican American author of The Teachings of Don Juan. Castaneda wrote a series of books describing his training in shamanism, particularly with a group whose lineage descended from the Toltecs. Sager explained that he got assigned the Castaneda story because Castaneda’s adopted son went to the Los Angeles Times and published a little story. This was during a period of time Sager was freelancing for Rolling Stone, GQ and Esquire magazines at any given time where he was earning $6 or $7 a word for a feature story. 

Sager explains that the editors at these magazines weren’t “silk-stocking folks.” 

“And so by a series of circumstances that are too long to go into, I was working at GQ in the mid 1990s and the second-in-command guy left and went to Esquire and it caused all these dominoes to fall — one of which was me getting shit-canned for no reason by the powers that be,” Sager said.

“I started from nothing, but at some point I was making kind of like what a small town internist would probably make for doing these stories, which is like amazing,” Sager said.

Sager explained that he moved to LA, to California City, to San Diego, and got shit-canned (fired) and was in need of work. His old Rolling Stone editor, Bob Love, said, “We’d like you to do a 30,000 word story … investigative thing on this story,” Love just hands him, this was still the early days of the internet, an emailed clip, something that so often happens with many stories Sager explained. 

“And so I agreed to do this massive story for like 30 grand and I had a wife and a small kid and a new house and I just did a bunch of landscaping, and I just got fired…” 

Sager would have just continued on if I didn’t just remember what I wanted to know from him.

“Yeah, but what about the writing process?” I asked him.

As a fellow writer, I was curious because it’s evident that there was a significant amount of research done about Carlos Castaneda before Sager even started. That sense was even more evident in the Brando book. But what I wanted to know was, what was Sager’s actual process in terms of research and then locating subjects to interview who would not necessarily be the obvious suspects?

Sager finally comes back around and says, “I like to teach. When I teach kids … Whenever I teach, I try to curse as much as possible and use a bunch of esoteric ways of speaking because they’re bored and they don’t listen.” 

“So I have this thing,” Sager said. “I call it the ‘Toilet Bowl Theory of Journalism,’ which I think beautifully explains what I do. I kind of  jump into the bowl and, I guess I flush and jump in because there’s no one helping me, or maybe the flush is symbolically the magazine. But I jump into the bowl, I swirl around and then eventually I go down into where Nemo is, you know, swimming with the fishes. He’s … underwater in the world I’m trying to get to. I’ve never been that guy who’s a big internet person. I do a shit ton of background research and reading, but usually my work starts with someone or I track someone down. And then it’s always a version of one person telling another person and then telling another person. I honestly cannot remember how I found the followers [of Carlos Castaneda]. I honestly just cannot remember how I found them. Somebody must have just told me about them and I was like talking and people I knew probably talked to the LA Times guy, but somehow I found them and that was my technique of journalism. 

“It was like, I’ve never been that person who writes a bunch of questions before I get there. I just like, go there and then I like to shut up. And I look around or I just love to follow somebody like I don’t know what to do. It’s like if you’re a waiter or a server at a restaurant. You train with another server and you learn your job, but when you’re a reporter, it’s like they just send you out there. And, you know, you use your wiles and I somehow had an affinity for this sort of anthropology. I have an affinity for being with others in a non-judgmental sort of way.”

If you want to see the interview in its entirety, visit the main page of www.randomlengthsnews.com, the video is reflected there from our Youtube channel.

Terelle Jerricks contributed to this story.