Sep 22, 2015

When I was an undergraduate, I wrote a lot for my schools student newspaper’ (mostly for the arts section), and hosted a book show for the school’s community radio station for two years. In the course of these activities, I did a lot of interviewing. If a subject ever expressed any discomfort at being interviewed, my standard response was: “You have the easy part: all you have to do is talk about yourself. That’s a subject you should know inside out. I have the hard part: I have to come up with interesting questions and structure them in a way that will make sense to the person listening to the interview!”

As I started putting my fictional writing out for public consumption, the table turned: now, I was the one being interviewed. And, I learned a valuable lesson: talking about yourself is hard! It may be Canadian modesty, or my introverted nature, or some combination of those and other factors, but talking about myself wasn’t nearly as easy as I thought it would be! (My apologies to anybody whose difficulty being interviewed I may have downplayed in the past.)

Being interviewed, like any other human activity, is something you get better at with practice. I like to think I now make an engaging interview subject. But, you can decide for yourself. Last month, I was interviewed by the Web site Comcastro. It was a little raucus and a lot of fun. The interview has just been posted on their Web site – give it a listen (it’s at the bottom of the page). If you’ve been following my posts here, some of the stories will be familiar to you, but there’s also a lot of information about me that I don’t talk about much (like my relationship with Richard Nixon – purely professional, I assure you). 

I may just be getting the hang of this being interviewed thing.