Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Making the most of interviews
Empowering research
Drafting, researching, and editing

Interviewing can serve as an integral aspect of research. Although you might assume you can depend on your memory when you write life-based stories, memory isn’t always as reliable as you want it to be. Interviews with relevant family members and friends can supplement your memory and broaden your memoir’s perspective.

The first step is to select who to interview. If your time is limited, or if your family is large and offers many choices, it’s all the more important to identify a manageable number of knowledgeable relatives and friends to interview. For example, Aunt Quanita tends to talk endlessly—all afternoon if you let her. Her conversation seems to have little content as she meanders from one topic to another. Aunt Coco, on the other hand, is an incisive person whose intuition is always informing her (and you) about what things mean. Her many observations and reminiscences are usually interestingly told. Furthermore, they’re consonant with your other research. Can there be any doubt who you should interview first? Show Aunt Quanita some love, but when it’s time to go to work, sit down with Aunt Coco.

Next, ascertain who else is likely to want to participate in the interview, and decide whether that person may or may not sit in. An unexpected, or inappropriate, person can blur the focus of your interview. For instance, your aunt by marriage, sitting in on the interview, might find what you’re doing so interesting she begins to talk about her own life experiences and, in doing so, may not allow your uncle (your mother’s brother) much time to talk about his childhood relationship with your grandparents and your mother. Your aunt’s experience, however interesting, won’t provide the information you need to understand your grandparents and parents. A clever way to get around this is to present your aunt with a gift while taking your uncle out for dinner.

Conversely, don’t dismiss other people’s input too quickly. Their experiences can be valid for your family, too. By listening carefully to an articulate person talk about a general experience, you might learn a lot about your own family. For example, you’re interviewing your mother’s brother, and his wife (your aunt by marriage) begins talking about her family. It’s likely you didn’t know these people she’s talking about, and their lives don’t fit into your story.

As your aunt shares her stories, however, you realize how many of them are about work in and life around the mining towns of southwestern Virginia and southern West Virginia in the 1930s. Your family’s experiences in similar mining communities across the state line in Virginia are not likely to differ widely from her family’s. Use some of the information provided by your aunt-in-law to flesh out your family’s narrative. But don’t get sidetracked on her niece’s love story. At that point, the conversation is slipping into gossip, and you risk losing the focus of your interview.

Sometimes an observer at an interview can provide important coaching. For example, a third party might suggest, “John, why don’t you tell about the time your mother confronted the company store manager?” Or perhaps the other person will offer, “But, wasn’t that before 1937? We were still living on Maple Street then. It wasn’t until a month after Edward was born in January of 1938 that we moved to Elm Street!”

In fact, if you know of a person who might be good at prodding a significant but reluctant interviewee, ask that person to be present. But again, be clear about what you’re asking this person to do: “I’ll be interviewing Uncle Alec about his childhood. Would you come along to encourage him to share his information with me? You might remind him of parts of the story you know when you notice he’s overlooking them.”

Clear communication and thoughtful preparation of your goals for each interview will heighten your chances of success while interviewing.

By way of example, I include here an interview involving three people. Note how the primary writer, Emma Bolden, interacts with the two people with whom she’s lunching:

Regionalism, Fashion, Editing, and Writing: A Lunch Discussion

EMMA BOLDEN, CASEY CLABOUGH, & ALLISON WILIKNS

Writer/editor Emma Bolden sat down for lunch with two of the James Dickey Review editors prior to her Owen lecture at Lynchburg College in Spring 2011. What followed was a wide-ranging discussion of regional identity, fashion, editing, and writing which nonetheless managed to capture some commonalities relevant to the themes of both the JDR and the contemporary literary scene.

EB: Kentucky has been really weird. Since it was a border state there’s such a bizarre conflict—the thing I’ve noticed is how many people are obsessed with the South, particularly Alabama, since Alabama is emblematic of the South, and it’s just really strange since I had grown up being taught to be ashamed about being from Alabama.

CC: I feel bad for some of the Alabamans, Mississippians, and South Carolinians I know because they get a certain Deep South label what with being in the heart of the old Confederacy and all. It seems a little unfair.

EB: I remember my roommate at Sarah Lawrence was from New York, and she told me at some point that when she got the letter that said her roommate was from Alabama, she cried because she couldn’t believe she would have to live with someone from Alabama. [laughs] Most of my heritage isn’t that southern anyway, it’s Sicilian. It’s southern, just Southern Italian. But that whole cultural thing is so strong it just seems to keep on surviving.

CC: Were your people even down there during the Civil War?

EB: No, they were in Italy. God knows what my dad—we have no idea … my dad’s family is like a big, double-sided-tree-question mark. But they weren’t there during the war. What about you?

CC: Well, I seem to get labeled a so-called southern Appalachian writer on account of my people living in the Smokey Mountains for a couple centuries.

EB: Dollywood! I’ve been there!

CC: Yeah, they’ve done pretty well I guess, largely on account of caricaturing themselves.

EB: Do they have Civil War history?

CC: Sure, I have an ancestor out of Gatlinburg who was a cavalry Captain, albeit for the North. It’s funny. Most people tend to think of Tennessee as the South and that everyone there was Confederate, but most of the mountain people weren’t. They were poor, they didn’t have slaves or a lot of land. They were unlettered, but they weren’t dumb.

EB: Yeah, that sounds similar to the fact nobody believes there is a Sicilian community in Alabama. What happened was, they came over, went to Ellis Island, and the New Yorkers were like, “We’ve got way too many Italians already so you have to find someplace else to go.” They got sent down to New Orleans. And so now there are steel mills and a huge Sicilian-American community in Alabama, and people just don’t believe it. “Sorry, New York is full. You’ll have to go somewhere else: Alabama!”

[laughter all around; the conversation turns to attire in the academic workplace]

EB: I was told you have to have a suit, you have to have a suit. Is this going to be on record, because this is very important? I went to Banana Republic with my parents to buy a suit. I put it on and opened the dressing room door already crying, and my mom was like, “Oh god! Oh god!” [laughs] My mom told my dad, “You need to go to the bookstore or something because this is going to take a while. She looks like a damn drag king.” So we ended up just getting dress pants and a jacket, and I thought I wasn’t going to get the job I was interviewing for since I didn’t have a whole suit.

AW: Maaaaaan.

EB: Actually, another one of my friends had a campus visit, and asked all her professors for advice, and got told the last thing you should do is wear a suit. So maybe I just lucked in with my job deal.

[talk turns to the topic of literary magazines]

CC: We have two associate editors, including Allison, but I tend to feel pretty guilty asking them to look at stuff because of their heavy teaching loads. Any release time for you or is it a labor of love?

EB: It is absolutely a labor of love. The head editor gets a release, but I don’t get one. I read every single poetry submission, so everything that comes in under poetry comes over to me. They have a manuscript contest now, but I don’t have anything to do with it. When it comes to the journal itself, I read every submission because I feel it’s important to honor everything, so I do read every submission and then sort of cull it down and decide what we are going to publish. I’m also the one who does all the proofreading.

AW: Lucky you.

EB: Yeah. We’ve had two student editors who are absolutely incredible. They did the job better than I could have; they’re really good. So they did the proofing and a lot of the work too. Then we have a really great compositor I work with. I tend to accept poems that are crazy on the page, and so the most interesting work has been me working with the compositor and talking about how to get things to fit on the page: the combination between the publishing aspect and what the poet wants. And I mean, I’m guilty of this, but I hit that tab key sometimes and think everything’s ok. Apparently, though, it’s not something that works in publishing.

CC: I know what you mean. Our operation has a gifted graduate assistant who taught herself InDesign software. Without her, I’d continually be lost messing around with that stuff. It seems very time-consuming.

EB: Yeah. I feel like if we didn’t have the student editors, or the compositor, there would be no Georgetown Review.

AW: How much stuff do you read?

EB: The Georgetown Review doesn’t have a page limit, right, so sometimes she’s got 20—30 pages of poetry. It’s a little different from 25 pages of short story—it’s a little different than 25 separate pages. A good thing about that though is that we do get quite a few serious longer poems, which is a form I think is really interesting.

AW: It’s hard to get those published most places because they take up so many pages.

EB: Yes, very.

[talk turns briefly to The Love Boat television show, before shifting to future journal plans]

CC: Since you’re leaving the Georgetown Review, do you think you might start a journal at your new university?

EB: I’ve been talking to a couple of friends about starting a journal for a while. It’s something that’s been in the back of my mind. I’ve been thinking about making something a little smaller and handmade.

AW: Nice!

CC: That sounds lovely, but then there’s those problems of carving out some release time and still getting your own work done.

EB: Well, I think one of the best things about an M.F.A. degree is that it gives you time to write your first book. Yet one of the worst things is that you are expected to publish that first book, and I think that first book usually has to just die. It’s your growing experience—it’s where you learn how to put a book together—but you hope maybe a backlog of good poems will come out of it. I do manage to find time to write, but I’ve also got some older material that may turn out useful eventually.

AW: Yeah, you’re learning a lot while you’re in a program so you need time for your brain to process what you’ve gained, and it takes time before you can apply that to the writing you’re working on.

EB: Right. And your writing changes directions when you get out of workshop too. I mean, even as much as I want to fight it, there is the workshop poem. There is that signature poem—and it’s different from program to program and faculty to faculty—that’s obvious to everyone and easy to teach in workshop. And no matter how much of a rebel you are, you’re going to write that poem at some point.

AW: Casey didn’t do an M.F.A. You didn’t take any workshops either, did you?

CC: No. I decided to stay on at South Carolina after Dickey’s death and do a lit PhD. So yes: no workshops, no AWP for me. Just learned the old way, which I’ve found is very unpopular.

EB: You’re so unpopular.

CC: I know.

[laughter all around]

EB: Most of the way I learned was through apprenticeship. I didn’t take a workshop at Sarah Lawrence and with the mentoring you get to see how writers’ minds work. I can’t really say I wrote like crazy, but I learned like crazy: from people, about people and their poems.

AW: Which is a healthy attitude.

CC: It’s strange. I feel like I got more from Dickey just speaking with him in his office, sick as he was. Many of the people I’ve talked to who had him multiple times in class didn’t seem to get as much.

EB: Some of the most important things I learned came from talking with Kate Johnson(?) in her office. She started going to the Westchester Psychoanalysis Institute when I was a junior, and she eventually became a union analyst. That gave her some unique expertise that proved useful for her poetry. Another important lesson—maybe “the most important”—I had was one the time when I brought in a poem and the teacher read the first line and then just looked at me. I looked back at him and he held out the poem over his trashcan and dropped it in. And then he said, “Doesn’t that feel good?” and I was like, “You know what? It does. It totally does. It does feel good.”

[closing laughter]

The least you need to know

·  Reading period material affords your work historical legitimacy.

·  Notes provide resources you can return to for verisimilitude.

·  Travel gives you a powerful sense of setting.

·  Interviews provide other voices to enrich the story you want to convey.