How a Former neo-Nazi Became my Esteemed Client

Breaking Hate

*Apologies: This was sent out this morning but only to 70 people for some reason. I emailed Substack for help. Hopefully this reaches everyone.

^^^

It was 2014. I was 31 years old. At the time I’d been sober a little less than four years. Several of my short stories had finally been published in various magazines, which had started occurring two years prior, when I was 29. At last, after more than a decade and seven different colleges—mostly various community colleges and San Francisco State twice—I’d procured my bachelor’s degree in creative writing. I was living in a tiny illegal shoebox apartment (a split-in-half former garage) on Alcatraz Ave in North Oakland for a now-unbelievably-low $750/month, all utilities included.

Recently, I’d finished interning for a literary agent in Tiburon for nine months. Without question I’d learned more than I could swallow about the practical side of book publishing: How to draft query letters; what to look for in a synopsis or book proposal; what agents liked and didn’t like, wanted and didn’t want from hungry new authors. I’d learned about contracts and negotiations, foreign and other subsidiary rights, and what word count was acceptable for a new book (not 100,000 words, excepting science fiction).

And I also learned the craft of developmental editing.

The agent I interned for had been an editor at a medium publishing house before becoming an agent. I shared some of my writing with her, including my first try at a novel, an autofiction based on my wild, lurid high school punk rock anarchy days, as well as the most structurally complicated novel I’ve to this day ever written—a novel about a sober man who gets out of prison and seeks his ex-girlfriend, knowing he shouldn’t, and gets into more trouble than he can handle. The novel includes four points of view. It required easily hundreds of hours of research, mostly about crime and prison, which I knew little about. (Surprisingly, given my sordid drinking past.) In short: Said agent encouraged my writing and also noted that I had a sharp eye for detail. This led to her asking for my editorial feedback on her acquired clients’ books.

The editing started out small but then grew. Soon I started to truly enjoy the process. Developmental editing—focusing on Big Picture issues of a manuscript such as structure, plot, characters, story-arc, dialogue, tension, etc—was very attractive to me. It wasn’t line or copy editing or proofreading, going ruthlessly over the language and the syntax and the grammar. That sounded boring to me. No, I got to open the hood of the car and really pull apart the engine. That was superb, in my book. (Pun intended.)

Eventually, in late 2013 I left the agency and started my editing business. At first it was made up of a website—www.michaelmohrwriter.com—which included a regular blog about my agency experience. That started to gain followers. I began to get requests for editing. I charged a very low rate at first. I was new, cutting my editorial teeth as it were. After not too long I began attending writers’ conferences—my first was the San Francisco Writers’ Conference. I learned more about the trade. I had editing cards made with my photo in black and white on the back. I got more work. I raised my rates. Some basic, classic mistakes were made; I learned from them.

In 2014, scrolling eLance—which was later bought by or became Upwork—I saw an ad which caught my eye. It was afternoon, a lazy Sunday in fall. “Ex neo-Nazi seeks Editor for Memoir.” I immediately clicked on the link. I read Christian Picciolini’s shocking story. Born and raised in Chicago, at 14, in the late 1980s he’d been lured into the white power neo-Nazi underground. He came from a good, hardworking non-racist Italian immigrant family. But his parents both worked multiple jobs and he was lonely and bitter, wanting desperately to fit in and be accepted somewhere. He’d go on to lead one of the biggest, scariest North American Neo-Nazi gangs ever. In the mid-90s, still in his early twenties, after having two sons, he broke from the “movement.” Eventually, he changed his ways and became a staunch opponent of racism, and finally shifted to being who he is now and has been for the past quarter of a century: An important anti-hate activist who pulls people (mostly but not exclusively young white men) out of hate groups. You can read more about Christian HERE.

Of course I was shocked, almost offended somehow, and completely drawn to him and his story. I reached out to him. He said he was asking many applicants (editors) to do samples. He was going to choose his editor. I did the sample and promptly forgot about it. But a week later he reached out and we talked on the phone. We vibed well. He picked me as his editor. He liked my writing. But more than that, he and I shared remarkable similarities. Ten years my senior, he’d grown up in the big city and I’d grown up in small mountain Ojai in Southern California. Yet we’d both discovered punk rock as our savior as teens. We’d both had angry, lonely childhoods in many ways, yet also filled with joy and love and warmth at the same time. For years punk shows, drinking, and the fast life had been our mutual lot. We even had matching Social Distortion tattoos. And “Social D” as fans refer them, was both our favorite band. I hadn’t been a racist, thankfully. But I’d been in that world of darkness and violence and chaos. I’d known many “trad skins” (traditional skinheads, non-racist, whose culture had descended from the 1960s and 70s English working-class Mod movement) and had even befriended, when I was 19, a SHARP (SkinHeadsAgainstRacialPrejudice), an Irish rogue and semi-thug who was just as gnarly and vitriolic as the Nazis but who beat them up instead of minorities.

In other words: We were soul brothers.

We signed a contract and thus began the fascinating journey of getting Christian’s book out into the world. The trajectory was slow and wayward, a zigzagging path that was anything but straightforward. What became his memoir—“White American Youth”—was first self-published and then later picked up by an agent and re-issued (by Hachette Book Group) in a two-book deal. This was in 2018. I was and still very much am profoundly proud of both Christian and his memoir. Later, I worked with him on his second book, a sort of hybrid memoir/case study called “Breaking Hate.” That came out in 2020 and not long after was turned into an MSNBC TV series also called “Breaking Hate.”

Christian is an amazing man with an incredible story. I was honored to be along for the ride. The work he does was, is, and always will be important. In his books he hits on the fact that everyone is seeking identity, community and purpose. He refers to deviations from these inherent human goals as “potholes.” He believes if you hit enough of these potholes as a kid, and the wrong people find you at the wrong time, just about anyone can go down a path of darkness. I did myself, though it wasn’t of the racist variety. If I’m honest with myself though: It easily could have been that road. Like Christian, I felt angry, alone and confused. Like Christian, I wanted to belong but felt like a freak in an uncaring world. Like Christian I sought a community of people who understood, who became a sort of spiritual replacement family. For me it was the punk community. Like Christian I wanted to feel as if I were alive for some sort of reason, some larger purpose. I didn’t find that, really until I discovered two things: Writing, and 12-step recovery.

Christian, of course, had his own journey, as we all ultimately do. One of the aspects of his approach when helping people leave hate groups, which I find deliciously potent and difficult for most of us to do, is having compassion. Yes, even for the wayward white power neo-Nazi. Even now, in 2022. Compassion doesn’t mean accepting toxic, racist views. It doesn’t mean encouraging these people to believe their backwards ideology. It doesn’t mean saying it’s “ok” to be belligerent and racist. But it does mean listening. Many of these people have come from horrific circumstances. Most of them were, just like Christian, seeking identity, community and purpose and, due to a variety of factors (the usual suspects: Poverty; domestic violence; drugs) hit various “potholes” and were lured down the wrong roads. The beauty of Christian is that, just like one alcoholic talking to another alcoholic, he has literally “been there.” He believed what they believed; spewed the same nasty, grotesque words at innocent people; hated for the same young, ignorant reasons he did. So he is in a unique position to compassionately listen to these young people, slowly and methodically dismantle their ideology, show them love, give them support and, ultimately, fill up those devastating potholes.

This is a good lesson for all of us in the current political quagmire we find ourselves in now. Victimization, screaming at each other, passing harsh judgment when someone’s views don’t exactly line up with ours, using social media as a weapon, legacy media bias, etc: None of this, in my opinion, is getting us where we need to go. And where is it we need to go? I think Christian and Martin Luther King would have the same answer here. Just one powerful word.

“Love.”