Open Our Eyes – an interview with Kevin Hendricks

Last week, I told you about Kevin Hendrick’s latest publication – Open Our Eyes: Seeing the Invisible People of Homelessness.

The book officially releases today but I ordered an “advance” copy and loved reading it over the weekend.

Kevin and the other collaborators did a great job to help share the message Mark Horvath has been sharing at invisiblepeople.tv since 2008 — and all the proceeds from the book go straight to helping Mark continue his great work.

Plus – I believe it’s the first book (other than my own) to make mention of our podcast… so that makes it cool in it’s own right :-).

Kevin graciously agreed to take time away from writing his next novel to do a short interview with me via e-mail. Here’s what he had to say…

First off, can you tell us a little bit about this book? What’s it about? What can readers expect?

It’s a collaborative book. We have more than two dozen social media experts, nonprofit heroes, technology executives and more reflecting on homelessness and the impact Mark Horvath has had with InvisiblePeople.tv. But the backbone of the book is really the 35 stories of homeless people retold from InvisiblePeople.tv videos. It’s a chance to read their stories and see what homelessness is really like. The book is also full of action points and dispelling myths. I’ve started calling it a manual to motivate action.

I launched the book because I thought it was just dumb that Mark Horvath was doing all this incredible work to help homeless people, yet he’s been on the brink of homelessness himself–for the second time in his life–for two straight years now. I wanted to write Mark a big fat check. But then the bank would have laughed at him and his bouncing check. So I thought maybe we could put a book together and raise some money for him. That sounds kind of funny now because books don’t make any money, but maybe with all the amazing people involved we can earn a few bucks for Mark and InvisiblePeople.tv.

This is your third book to publish this year. Wow! One a post-apocalyptic novel, one book that shared your story of adopting your son Milo and now this one — telling the story of homelessness through the eyes of Mark Horvath. I imagine you had to approach each project differently. Can you share how you worked through some of that?

Yes, this is my third published book of 2010. My name is Kevin and I have a problem…

Each project did come together differently. Addition by Adoption had been on my mind for a while and the actual editing and writing came together pretty quickly–it was mainly the process of curating tweets. I had to figure out how to string a story together with those pre-existing Twitter posts.

The Least, my novel, was the easiest of the three. I just cleaned up an old Word doc and hit publish. Honestly, that one was more of an experiment to try out self-publishing again (I experimented with it back in 2004 and my first novel, but I hadn’t published anything since). It’s kind of cool how easy and cheap it is to create your own book. Actually selling copies and making money is an entirely different matter.

Open Our Eyes came together because I wanted to help Mark. I finally stopped dreaming about it and wishing someone would do it and just started it myself. Mark put me in touch with a whole bunch of his supporters and we started pulling content together. I started the project in January and ridiculously thought we could have it out by March, maybe April. I wanted to rush it and get it out there quickly, but it just didn’t work that way.

How has Mark and his work shaped your view of homelessness?

Homelessness first became real for me in 1999 when I spent a summer living in Chicago and working downtown on the weekends. As an idealistic college kid I just couldn’t ignore all the homeless people and befriended a guy named Leon who sat across the street from the Art Institute. Since then I’ve always had a heart for the homeless, but never found ways to get involved. Then my church took part in an event where you slept outside to raise money for homeless shelters and I dove in. We were supposed to raise our own support and when I asked folks to donate, Mark was one of the few who did. This was in the fall of 2008 when Mark had just been laid off and was facing homelessness. That got my attention. He started InvisiblePeople.tv at about the same time and I’ve been a big fan of his work since.

What’s so amazing about Mark is that he just gets out there and puts it all on the line for people. He’s one of these pushy people, like Shaun King in Atlanta, who just won’t let us ignore the real needs out there.

I wish I could say I do more to help the homeless, but I do pitifully little. I’m not in a place where I can make commitments like that (see: father of three). But I do try. This year I did finally volunteer when my church hosted the local overflow shelter, which we do one month a year. It’s an eye-opening experience to see families with kids–even babies–who are homeless.

How do you hope people respond to this book?

I hope people read Open Our Eyes and see the homeless for who they really are. They’re our moms and dads, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers. People say that the homeless should just get a job–almost everyone in this book talks about how badly they want a job. People think it can never happen to them–I lost count of how many people said this could happen to anyone. So many of us are just one tragedy away from being on the street. I hope people realize the reality of that and take action. And Mark’s a great example of how to get involved and do something.

You’re also working on another novel for NaNoWriMo this month. Can you share a little bit about it and the unique promotion you’re doing with Como park?

Yeah, I’m doing National Novel Writing Month for the fourth time. This time it’s a book called Lost & Found in Como Park and I’m trying to draw on my love and appreciation for this amazing park we have in St. Paul. So the story takes place there and I use a lot of the history of the park to delve into some of the book’s themes (or at least I’m trying).

I also set up a little Kickstarter project trying to raise a little support and connect fiction and reality. If the project succeeds (we need another $870 in pledges) we’ll publish the book (yes, book #4 of 2010) and place a commemorative brick in Como Park for a fictional character from the book. That’s my grand plan anyway, we’ll see what happens.

As of today I’m about 8,000 words into the novel (50,000 words is the goal) and I’m plagued with doubt. This is about the time in NaNoWriMo when the plot starts to take on a life of its own and changes get introduced that I didn’t envision. That’s starting to happen and it’s always a little scary. Honestly, part of me hopes we don’t make the Kickstarter goal because I’m afraid whatever I come up with won’t be worth publishing.

But we’ll see. I really do NaNoWriMo for fun. Hopefully the end result is fun as well, but that’s not really the point. If the Kickstarter project gets funded that’d be awesome, but if it doesn’t I’ll still have written a book and we’ll just move on.

Kevin D. Hendricks lives in St. Paul, Minn., with his wife, three kids and two dogs. He runs his own freelance writing and editing company, Monkey Outta Nowhere. He’s been blogging since 1998, tweeting since 2007 and generally enjoys being a web geek.

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Huge thanks to Kevin for not only taking the time to do this interview, but for putting this book together.

It’s a great read and he did a great job taking the raw interviews that Mark has done and interspersing short entries from a great list of contributors as well as 6 short essays dispelling some of the many myths about homelessness.

I would say it’s a great entry point and/or companion book for those wanting to get a real feel for homelessness in America. And I would rank it right alongside Under the Overpass as two great books that offer a great insight into the invisible people that live all around us.

You can order your copy of the book from Kevin’s blog and also find out how you can help Kevin (and ultimately Mark) by promoting the project to your sphere of influence.