courting the subject

Do you just drop folks an e-mail, see if there’s interest, and take it from there?

e d i t o r s'  n o t e

b a c k g r o u n d s

e a r l y  i n t e r e s t s

s u p p o r t

j o u r n a l s

n u t s  &  b o l t s

r e c e n t
  &  f o r t h c o m i n g

l o c a t i n g  s u b j e c t s

c o u r t s h i p

q u e s t i o n i n g
  &  c o l l a b o r a t i n g

t r a n s c r i p t s
  &  e d i t i n g

e t h i c s  &  v o i c e

g e n r e  &  m e t h o d

r h e t o r i c
  &  c o m p o s i t i o n

c o m m u n i t y

Wade Mahon: Nobody’s ever tried to play hard to get. [laughs] There’s nothing much in it financially, anyway. We usually e-mail. There are some cases where we just cold-call people. Recently we started doing special topics issues: on plagiarism, electronic writing, and writing with computers. The most recent one is on assessment. We’ll come out with one pretty soon on “Writing the Personal Statement.” Since we have a topic in mind to begin with, it’s a little bit different and guides our decision about who to ask. We just send off e-mails to people we thought would be good. For electronic rhetoric, we talked to Cindy Selfe and she agreed right away; she was willing to do it. We talked to Brian Huot on the topic of assessment. Again, he was very willing to do that. And actually, those have been good. 

Actually, there have been a couple of other instances with special topics issues, where other people outside of our editorial board have contacted us and wanted to do guest interviews. For example, in the plagiarism issue, Michelle Eodice (from the University of Kansas) did an interview for us with Rebecca Moore Howard, and that ended up being great—an interview to anchor, to introduce the topic of plagiarism.

So there are a number of different ways to identify potential new subjects. I think maybe underlying all those different methods there is an interest in finding people who have some kind of notoriety or experience, in particular areas relevant to our journal. Probably we’d like to have more variety outside of academia. And there have been a number of people in the past who we’ve interviewed, but aren’t necessarily academics. But that’s who it tends to be.

Eric Schroeder: I just loved that use of that word “courting” because in some sense that obviously needs to be done at times. I mean I certainly needed to do that when I did the Vietnam interviews because I was just a green rookie graduate student and as I was approaching people like Tim O’Brien and Norman Mailer. 

I just came up with a standard little form letter that seemed to work really well. I always tell my students, “Never say, ‘I am a graduate student who’s trying to finish his dissertation.’ Say, ‘I am doing research and your work is central to my work. I would appreciate an hour of your time.” I always tell my undergraduates that if they are trying to interview a famous basketball star, don’t say, “I need you to talk to me for my homework” because no one wants to help them with their homework. Not even their parents are doing that any more.

If we get graduate students from UC Davis interested in conducting interviews, I can sit down with them and say “Look, let me give you some pointers and let me show you some examples of ones we’ve published that we really like. This is why we think they are so successful. Here’s how I’d go about setting it up and doing it. Here’s what I’d avoid.”