If you're a regular listener of NPR, you're familiar with today's interviewee's voice and name. Currently she works for the National Desk in LA but before that she was a foreign corresopndent, where  she covered international events including the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, Middle East uprisings associated with the Arab Spring, and the Syrian civil war (while also being a wife and mom.) If you have an hour, I recommend you listen to this amazing audio diary she put together earlier this year for Transom, in which she examines the psychological and emotional aspects of voluntarily putting oneself in harm's way as a career. Currently she is working on a series on the dwindling middle class, inspired in part by a visit to her own home town. You can learn more about her here and follow her on Twitter here.

I've listened to NPR all my life and I always knew your name--but I've never really kept track of which reporter is assigned to which beats. And then I realized that you were coming home from the Middle East--they made it a story, and they don't typically do that.
Yeah, we do that sometimes. It's like an exit interview: What have you learned? You know, I think they did it with Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, when she left the Middle East. It's like, what do you know? You've been in the Middle East for ten years. Tell us what you know, tell us what you think, any predictions. I think it's a cool thing that they do.

I've been on the radio a couple times--I'm always terrified that I'll be completely blank, or that I'm going to swear for no reason. How much prep do you do when you're being interviewed about yourself?
Zero. [Laughs] We do two ways. One, you know, say, Steve Inskeep's gonna call me on a Tuesday morning, kinda just do the rundown: Boom boom boom, what's happening in Syria. Those are the kind where I write out suggested questions, I write out the introduction, I type a bunch of notes as a guideline for the way I'm going to answer the questions. Obviously I don't read them as I would sound terrible doing that. A lot of it is based on your reporting: "Sources are telling me that 8,000 of these people were actually killed by Sarin gas, whereas, blah blah..." That's the kind of stuff you want to have written down. When it's personal stuff I feel like--and this is just me, everybody has their own way--the more extemporaneous I can be, the better. Then it actually sounds like a conversation as opposed to something canned.

What are you currently working on?
I'm working on a bunch of different things. I have some stories going on about the dwindling middle class, income polarization--I've got some more stuff coming out about that. I'm working on an investigative project regarding the identification of soldiers who are lost or missing in action from Vietnam, Korea and WWII. And in January I'm going to be working on a series with Morning Edition about the Mexican-American border.

Roughly how many of these stories are pitched, and how many are brought to you?
It just depends. When I was a foreign correspondent probably 90% was generated ourselves from the field. Same with being a national correspondent. Some of these more special projects were brought to me.

I know that when you were abroad that it was not a shopping expedition and obviously you had to travel  light. With that said, is there anything you brought home physically that lives in your house that will always remind you of a certain country or city?
Oh my god. So much. I have an entire storage space full of that kind of crap, are you kidding? Carpets, I have these old doors from Yemen, these amazing lanterns. I have this brilliant light fixture from Egypt. Textiles, Turkish towels, orange blossom water from Lebanon that you put in hot water and drink as tea after a meal. I couldn't even begin to list the physical things that came back with me. My abaya from Saudi Arabia, which is the long black robe. My naqaab from Yemen which is a thing that covered my face. The black gloves I wore in which I had to poke a hole in one of the fingers so that I could use my iPhone. I have some amazing paintings from contemporary Iraqi painters. Iraq has some of the best painters in the Middle East. I have these huge things on my walls that will always remind me of where I was and what I've done. Maps of the region.

Did I hear you correctly earlier that you have doors?
Yes, old wooden doors from Yemen. They have these amazing handmade wooden doors and I got a couple of them. I have all these old, amazing textiles from Yemen that hang on my walls. I have this table that was built in Damascus that I bought in Baghdad--this tiny little vanity table. Yeah man, it's everywhere. I lived in the region a bunch of years so it just sort of collected, and then I recently shipped it all by boat in one fell swoop. But I also used to come back and forth with crap too.

You have a husband and daughter and they lived in Istanbul while you were in Baghdad?
While I was in Baghdad they lived in Istanbul. Before that, we lived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, my husband and I. My daughter was born there. And then I got assigned to Baghdad and my husband and daughter moved to Istanbul. When you're in a war zone it's like two month on, one month off kind of situation, and so I would go be in Istanbul for like a month every three months. And then, we all moved to Beirut together.

And your husband is also a writer and reporter?
He's a writer. He's not a journalist, he's more of a creative writer, non-fiction essay writer, book reviewer. He's got a book of essays about the Middle East coming out this spring.

I wonder what it's like when you come home and people sort of have their, you know, first-world problems about their nanny.
[Chuckles] It's all very funny. It's like, who's gonna take care of her when I'm out of town, in Syria? That's the kind of stuff we worried about. We didn't have a live-in nanny, we had a babysitter, and she went to preschool. And the rest of the time he was on point--he was the foreman on the job caring for our child for a couple key years of her life. And now it's much more of a shared venture, like most people in America, and it's good.

Switching gears: what does tear gas smell, taste and feel like?
Horrible. I mean it's just horrible. It's like someone liquefied a chili pepper and sprayed it in your face at really close range. But then it also gets in your throat and it's like dry chili pepper. I encoutered it in Egypt and Bahrain.

How did you learn how to keep reporting when something scary like that is happening? When you're being tear-gassed, or running away from some explosion? Is it something you picked up on the go, or did someone tell you?
Well there's times when you don't report, you just run. But no, there's no textbook or manual on it--like, as your running, do you look at the guy next to you and go hey, what's your name? It's all instinct at that point. You're not conjuring up some set of rules at that point, you're just kind of acting on instinct.

In some of your stories, there will be a part when you're running away and there's an explosion and you say what's happening, as opposed to just running.
Yes, that's true. A couple things: That project in and of itself was all about keeping diaries and that was kind of my assignment and why I was able to do that was because of Jay Allison who produced the piece. All hats off to him for suggesting that I do that, because otherwise I wouldn't have on my own. It wasn't like on my own volition I'd be recording myself talking to myself. But it was a great thing because, in doing it, I learned some stuff, and I also have this record of those moments. So for that personal project, that was very unique. But in general, when I'm making radio, it's become almost a bad cliché of the way I do stories sometimes--I use the microphone as a notebook almost--I'll list, I'll count: One, two, three, four, there's five trucks. Or um, God, there's blood on the wall, flip-flop in the sand, whatever. It's a way to describe and I know I need to get it down, or I'll forget, and then I end up using that tape in the story, because I think in some ways it's really vivid and helps people see. So yeah that has become an instinct. 

You use an iPhone? What do you use when you record?
Sometimes, yeah. A lot of the Arab Spring in 2011 I was going undercover to places that I wasn't supposed to be I was just using an iPhone.

I've read you've been detained in Russia, tear-gassed, run from explosions. What flashes first through your mind when you're having a nightmare? Or the most vividly frightening things you've seen.
That Russia thing was really bad. It was the first time someone had treated me arbitrarily with such cruelty. I think we have a pretty easy life, our generation, and these kinds of things happen to people all the time. Not to us, not to Americans who grew up in the 90s. All of a sudden I was being completely arbitrarily detained and hadn't committed any crime whatsoever and it was clear that I wasn't getting out any time soon and I was being threatened, my life was being threatened. I remember the first several hours I just sat and cried and cried and cried and cried. Because I was so mad! At the injustice of it all. This is not fair, you can't do this! I think looking back, anybody in the rest of the world would look at me and be like, you whiner, life isn't fair. But I was also scared. Because I knew they were being so unfair, I knew they could do anything they wanted, and that was horrible.

I think it's interesting that you went so far away and then you had the story where you were back in your home town where you grew up. Did you think about that ahead of time?
I didn't until I went there, and then I went there, and I was like, wait! I was just going to pick up my mom, and then I was like, hang on a second. It was kind of a good place to engage and try to care about something. It helped that it was a place I knew.

The way I write is so very different from what you do and I get terrified of research and don't know where to begin. When you are abroad as a war correspondent, do you have time to research? Where do you start? Where do you usually go?
Oh yeah. I mean, it's long days, lots of reading. If any single person is talking or writing about Syria on a given day when I was in the story, I'm gonna know about it. Because I know half the people personally because I've interviewed them, I've worked with them, they're next door to me in the office, they're friends of mine, you know what I mean? It becomes a pretty small world when you're on a beat. That's your beat. Now, if covering MIAs from World War II--if that became my beat I think I would get to a point where I knew all the interested players. In some ways you can't help it. The Institute of the Study of War just released a report about the rebel formations in the north--I mean, we're all going to read it. There's no way we're gonna miss it. You almost just can't help it. And Twitter--man, all my Syria peeps on Twitter--if I did miss something, Twitter and Facebook wouldn't let me miss it. It's not like you think, I'm going to sit down and do research now. It's just there. It's always there. And books. I mean, you always have the "definitive book" that was on my shelf, you take that on the plane.

 Have you spoken much with war correspondents of previous generations and what's their point of view on how things have changed?
It's interesting. Some of them are still doing it, and have adapted really well. They're like, well, this is now a tool of the trade, get with the program. Others are more reluctant and they're able to still do their jobs just fine. It's hard to say. I mean Syria was a really unique war because it's one of the wars we had the least amount of access to. So imagine a Bosnia or Chechnya where you just couldn't go, so you had to rely on these citizens to tell their stories. At the same time it was the war that was covered for the first time by its own people. People were recording their own videos and uploading them themselves. That's amazing. But also, problematic. Because it's like, who are you? Is this real? Can I trust this? It raises a whole different set of issues about verification and reporting that other people in more traditional reporting settings might not have had.

Why did it occur to you or Jay that there was a story for Transom? How did it come up?
Fall 2011. I was visiting and doing a talk with his students--he does a workshop a couple times a year with students on how to make radio. He asked me to come talk to his students, we were all having dinner, and he and some of the other Transom folks--who are all just incredible human beings--started asking me questions, and they were better questions than people usually ask. Not better, but they were like, no, really, how do you really deal with it? They were pushing me, they were being good journalists, they were asking good questions. It got me thinking hm, maybe there's something to talk about, maybe I've got something to say. It started Jay thinking too--I think at about the same time were like, hm, maybe there's something here. Then I left and a couple days later wrote him this really long email that ended up being the first couple minutes of the piece, almost completely unchanged. It all started in 2011. I mean, that was the email that I wrote to him, a few days later.

In the piece you read aloud a letter that you wrote to your daughter in husband in case you were killed in the field. Do you still have the letter?
I do. We're supposed to set it on fire. That's the plan and we're gonna do that. We're getting a new house pretty soon and it's really close to the beach, and if we can get a permit, we're gonna set it on fire.

Did he ever listen to it?
No.

Wow, really? What willpower he must have.
I know. We do these kind of events where we're both sitting in the audience. I don't listen to it to be honest. I never listen to it. I can't. But someday my daughter will probably hear it cause it's out there.

In the piece and in other stories you talk about the thrill chasing that comes with being a reporter. Prior to that life, did you do anything that was thrill chasing?
I always say no, but then people start listing things off that I've done and it's like, oh, crap.

Like what?
Just things I've reported on. Gangs, and pirates, and sex workers, jihadis, stuff like that. So I guess I did.

What in your life pre-going abroad did you think prepared you best for being a foreign reporter?
Nothing really. I think that's the thing right? That you just do it. You have to just kind of dive in. A willingness to take the leap. And know that everything is going to be hard and weird, and just an openness. I think some people will go somewhere where they have family networks or language background--that's great. That just didn't apply in my case. 

When you were at the Chicago Tribune, or before, or after, do you remember one of the first pieces you published where you really felt like a journalist?
I worked on a long project about female gang members in Chicago in 1999. It was a big multimedia thing and a cover story in the Sunday magazine. I got teamed up with a really good reporter who'd been doing that kind of work for like 20 years. They sent her out to kind of re-report some of the stuff I was getting to make sure I wasn't a Janet King kind of character making stuff up. Watching her work and seeing how the final project emerged, that felt pretty cool.

What do you do, if anything, to turn off your brain?
Ride my bike. Go to the beach. Been getting a lot better at that since I left the Middle East.

Do you have a hard time going to sleep or anything like that?
Not anymore. For two years I did. Really glad that's not true anymore.

Do you read or anything before bedtime? What are you reading?
Right now I'm reading this big Alice Munro collection of short stories.

How does it feel to be the 371st person interviewed for Zulkey.com?
[Laughs] Um...wow. I'm honored!