interviewing

I came across this thoughtful Nick Flynn interview today. At first I thought the interviewer was being brutally confrontational with Flynn, but by the end of the interview, I decided that I liked the kinds of questions being asked. Flynn is a poet whose poems I find myself going back to and re-reading, at least once a year. Some Ether is one of my favorite books of poems of the last 10 years.

I've been reading a number of different interviews with writers and poets, in order to get ideas for my own interview questions. I'm working on a project that I hope will turn out to be something really useful--some kind of permanent resource--that involves interviewing a variety of writers and artists in my community. So, if you're a writer living in or near Lawrence, I may be darkening your door, or at least your inbox, in the next few weeks.

I set up a time to interview Cote Smith this week, and I also asked Chloe Jones, a.k.a., Lil' Mumbles if she'd be willing to let me interview her some time soon. I'm amazed at how much I feel like I've been learning through reading these interviews. I've been a fan of reading interviews with writers for a long time, but this recent, concentrated dose has been motivating me to finish a number of projects, writing and otherwise. Doing all this research has also made me think a lot about the rhetorical act of interviewing. There are such a variety of approaches. In some of my readings for a course that deals with Everyday Life theory, we've been studying different interview techniques employed by The Mass Observation Movement and several Surrealists. I like the idea of juxtaposition, in terms of question types/moods, in the interview process. Interview really strikes me as a form of collage, at its heart. In order to prepare for my Lil' Mumbles interview, I spent about four hours going through iconic interviews conducted with other famous rappers. I've been collaging questions from these interviews into a kind of UR-document that I'll use for the Lil' Mumbles interview, usually using the phrase "contemporary fiction" to replace the word "hip-hop" or "rap" in the source material I'm sampling from.