English 145 (6): The Art of the Interview

In English 145, we talked about the art of the interview. About framing the conversation without boxing it in. About listening for the tangent and knowing which tangents count. About never pretending to understand more than one actually does. About follow-up and follow-through. We had the fabulous Paris Review interview of Truman Capote as a model Q and A, and then we turned to one another, or the students did, for trial interviews.

I took a walk while the students dialogued. Found my way to a garden that I'd never seen before —a place tucked behind the Penn medical buildings and dedicated to a son. It was damp and chilly out, and there was just one young man sitting on one bench, looking out over the garden-wrapped pond. I missed, I realized, my students, asking and listening a mere ten-minute walk away, and soon I was hurrying back toward them, to that warm hearth that is the Kelly Writers House. Their interviews were done. There'd been some homework; we discussed it. The conversation then could have gone a thousand ways, but it went toward the personal—toward their lives, their decisions, their ideas about ethical living. For thirty minutes, perhaps more, they were the teachers. I listened.