Cross-Conversations on Writing, Interviewing, and Editing

Does the genre of interviewing have limitations?

Eric Schroeder: [Pause] I almost gave you a knee jerk response, “Oh sure it does,” because I tend to think of everything as having limitations. . . but I’m not sure it does when I really think about it.

It strikes me that it has conventions that we impose upon it, but then sometimes, we’re “writing on the edge” and we do wacky things. One of my all-time favorite pieces we ever published was when Steve North interviewed himself . . . as Stephen M. North. It’s hysterical when I go back and look at that. There’s a photograph of him in the bathtub talking into the faucet as a microphone. I wanted to put that on the cover and I was outvoted on that. That was just a kind of wacky piece and I loved it. There was a seriousness to it certainly, but it was fun.

Self reflexivity, of a sort?

Yes. I didn’t know Steve before then, but now any time I see him at CCCC, I go talk to him. I love anybody with that kind of sense of humor, somebody who can be so self deprecating too. Steve just has a wonderful sense of humor. So, on the one hand, there are conventions we impose upon the interview. On the other, occasionally we throw the rule book out.

You admitted you prefer person-to-person over telephone interviews. What kind of dynamics do you pay attention to in a face-to-face interview?

That’s a great question too. I guess I have to answer that by telling a story first. The funny thing about interviewing Ken Macrorie was that he illustrated every point he made by jumping up and either grabbing a book or rifling through a stack of papers to pull out a student paper and read us a quote. He was constantly doing that. If we had tried to interview him on the telephone, I don't know what we would have made of every time he would leave the phone and go away.

In person, we could see what he was doing, and after he did it twice, we knew it was a convention of the interview. We knew after every question, Ken was going to jump up and grab something. It was startling at first and then it just got to be fun.

I have a better sense when I'm interviewing somebody face to face what they really think of the question. That is, if they are having trouble hiding their disgust or their amusement or whatever. I will put occasionally a stage direction in an interview that I’ve done. If somebody’s laughing, I’ll almost always put "laughs" in brackets. I am not heavy handed, but occasionally where I think it merits it maybe I will insert even "[laughs hysterically]." If I were doing a telephone interview, I would be reluctant to put in any kind of stage directions because, for instance, the quality of the laughter is something that I would not be assessing in person. I guess there’s a lot of little things like that which seem to add up to something biggish.

John Boe is always tuned into our surroundings: Are we interviewing somebody in a hotel room? Are we interviewing them in their study? We write a half-page introduction to the interview in WOE, and when John is writing that introduction, I’ve noticed there’s almost always a context cue in there. He is very tuned in to that, much more so than I.

Do you do follow-up interviews?

We have. It depends. It’s just a question or two. If something really needs clarification, then we put that in an email and send it with the transcript. You know, “On page seven, you’re talking about such and such, but it’s not clear. Do you mean this? Do you mean that?” Once in a while we’ll even say, “Gee, we did something kind of bonehead and we forgot to ask you about X.” Then you’ve changed the terms because it’s no longer an oral interview . All of a sudden, it becomes “Write down your answer.” They can get to be hybrid products.