questions of question-making 

and collaboration

To what extent are the interviews done collaboratively?

In Issues in Writing, it seems as though you’re all sitting together in a room doing the interview. Is that really how it goes?

Wade MahonThat’s pretty much how it goes. It depends on each interview, each issue. Once we decide on an interview subject, we’ll ask for volunteers to be part of the interview team (anywhere from two to five people). Beforehand, everyone will do research, read up on some of the things they’ve published, and contribute a few questions. Sometimes we’ll get together ahead of time and sort through the questions, then decide on fifteen to twenty possible questions and send them off to the person we’re interviewing. Usually most of the people who are on the board end up being part of the interview process. It works pretty well to not have one person who’s solely responsible for that.

And then it’s almost always a phone interview, and we just sit around the table with a speakerphone and take turns reading the questions. Usually the one who authored the question will be the one to ask the question. We’ll kind of give each other signals around the table, if we are running short on time and we want to ask a question, or somebody’s against one of the questions coming up on the list—we kind of tell each other not to worry about that one. We usually end up with more questions than we can get to. And different people have different follow-up questions.

Eric Schroeder: I would say that of the interviews I do these days, John Boe and I do most of them together. We have a kind of hit list of people we’d really like to do and we try at CCCC each year or at least every other year to do one from our list. 

It’s a pleasure working with him. He’s one of the first people I met when I came to UC Davis in 1984. Our sensibilities are pretty similar. Our styles are extremely different. I will never follow him on a panel anymore because he’s one of the world’s funniest people. He’ll just make fun of everything you just said, in a very kind, not mean way. And nobody remembers what you’ve said because they’re still laughing about John. I love working with him.

  

 

 

 

Tell us about your invention processes. How do you orchestrate or choreograph the collaborative dynamic? Is the interviews editor in charge?

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 As far as the dynamic, it depends on who’s taking responsibility to oversee the interview. Usually the person who comes up with the idea for a certain interview subject is the one who’s in charge of things. So sometimes it might be me, sometimes it might be Dan Dieterich, then somebody else. It seems to work pretty well as a collaborative process.

We just speak as a board, as a chorus. A lot of times the questions are generated collaboratively, so they don’t necessarily reflect just one person’s interests or concerns. No one, so far, has had a conflict over that. But we usually sit around the table with the speakerphone, and we have very state-of-the-art tape recorders—well, not necessarily state of the art, maybe from the 1970s. We had just a little ordinary tape recorder and as a backup we had a jam box, vintage 1980s, as a backup recorder. We staggered two tapes to catch conversations if one of the tapes ran out and we had to change it in the middle.

We usually compose questions collaboratively, which means that 3-4 editors who have volunteered to conduct the interview read up on things the interviewee has written and then submit 4-5 questions each to the whole group. Next this list is shaped either by the whole group or the lead interviewer into 15-20 questions that seem to cover all the ground we want to cover. Then we email this list to the interviewee, who has a chance to prepare a little for the interview if he or she wishes.  

This, I guess, is a kind of choreography. There is a good deal of room in the interview itself for improvisation and follow up, but most of the questions are pretty scripted.  The raw transcripts often contain text like “Editors: OK, now on to question 4—It says here, ‘You once wrote that  . . .” or “Interviewee: I know you might want to touch on this when we get to question 18, but . . . .”  So both interviewee and interviewer know what the next question is, for the most part. In many ways the interview and editorial process are devoted to constructing the illusion for readers of a spontaneous and erudite verbal exchange in which the “choreography” before and after the fact is carefully hidden, or at least downplayed.

Does the interviewer have a map, a sense of the geography of the terrain she or he wishes to cover?

Wade MahonI guess we do operate with a kind of road map that has a fairly well-defined starting point and destination but that is not as concerned about which specific route to take along the way. We usually start off by asking how the interviewee got started in his or her field of study, which means we tend to narrow the focus of our questions to subjects' professional rather than personal lives. 

Given the nature of our journal’s focus on writing instruction, it seems like we’ve asked a number of people some version of this question: “You did your dissertation on Robert Browning’s use of metaphor. So how did you go from there to become an expert on Scientific and Technical writing?” Starting off with a focus on biography also tends to help interviewees (and interviewers) ease into the interview process. We don’t want to start off with “How do you respond to critics who think your theories on _____ are complete and utter nonsense?” or “When did you stop sleeping with your graduate students?” The end of the interview is usually handed over to the interviewee to expand on things they wanted to talk about but that we neglected to ask about. 

Between those two points we try to address things like changes they have seen over the course of their career, what they consider to be the key issues facing their field, and who their major sources of influence were. We also encourage them to elaborate on or clarify statements they have made in print.

Eric Schroeder: I teach a lot of journalism and I always insist that my journalism students do advance work. One of the assignments I give is a profile, and they have to write it based on an interview. And I give them really specific directions. There’s a format for interviewing, and one of the things you do is write out what I call your script -—your questions-—and put them in a particular order. When I was interviewing the Vietnam writers, I found the order of the questions was really important.

I always wanted to have ten questions and always wanted number one to be a big, slow pitch where I already knew the answer, so I could calm down and relax. I always wanted number seven to be the difficult one. For the most part, the model has served me pretty well. 

I only got in trouble with it once with Seymour M. Hersh. He hated my opening question. He started yelling, “I can’t believe you’re asking that question. You could find the answer to that anywhere you want. You’ve got to make it interesting for me.” Finally I looked down and asked him number seven. He got a big smile on his face. He relaxed and he said, “Now that’s a good question.” And I thought, “Yes, it’s my best one. I don’t know where I go from here.” When I got around to the time to publish it (about three years after), I sent Hersh the interview. He thought it was terribly dated since it focused on Vietnam. As a journalist, he was more interested in what’s happening this minute. He said, “Nope, I don’t want you to run that.” So, I didn’t.

Do teams of interviewers submit material to you?

Eric Schroeder: Occasionally it happens. We neither encourage nor discourage it. Some of the early ones we got I felt were a little awkward. Often interviewers were working, not quite at cross purposes, but they didn’t seem to be working in concert. I think more and more people, especially in our field of composition studies, understand the nature of collaboration. I’d say that in the last few years when we have gotten stuff like that, it’s been good.

Cross-Conversations on Writing, Interviewing, and Editing:
A Meta-Interview with Wade Mahon & Eric Schroeder

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 10.1 (2005)
http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/10.1/