A tale of two interviews

Every now and then I get requests for interviews, usually from some hapless student assigned to do a term paper about my fiction. I don’t mind these and I try to indulge the students as much as I can, believing that we writers should do our utmost to encourage greater public interest in what we write.

I do, however, have some pretty firm requirements. The interviewers should have read whatever it is they’ll be asking me about; they should have done some preliminary research; and they can’t ask me what my stories mean, because that’s their job to figure out and not mine.

I don’t mean to sound like some cranky snob — and I don’t think I am — but the teacher in me wants to train these students in getting the most out of an interview. As I’ve written about more than once in this column, interviewing is an art that requires preparation, flexibility, and a healthy but critical respect for one’s subject and his or her work.

That respect includes setting up the interview properly, giving the subject sufficient notice and, if possible or advisable, a preview of the most important questions to be asked. It doesn’t matter if you’re going to be talking about climate change or peanut butter sandwiches; I can understand and even forgive some sloppiness on the part of students, but professional journalists have no reason not to know and to observe these basic rules.

Last week I got two calls on the same day from two journalists — one from print media and the other from TV — asking me for an interview about, coincidentally, the same thing: my fountain pen collection. 

Now this is, as you know, a subject dear to my heart, and something I’ve written and spoken about many times over the years. I’m not dying to talk about my pens, but if someone asks me about them, I feel obliged to proselytize in the name of good old things. So I gladly said yes, and set a time and date for both people two days hence, in consideration of their impending deadlines.

The print journalist — let’s call her A — thanked me and said she would try to bring a photographer; if no one was available, she would take pictures herself. That was fine by me.

The TV journalist — let’s call her B — called me on my cell phone. (Or called me again, because she’d called very early while I was sleeping. Thankfully — and perhaps people should know this — my phone is almost always in silent mode. I’ve never been a phone person, maybe because I grew up without one. I don’t like being called, and the best way to reach me and get a quick and positive response is by e-mail. I’m online all the time.)

Of course this young lady didn’t know that, so I didn’t take it against her. But what she said did put me off a bit: she would be sending a TV crew, she said, but meanwhile, could she interview me on the phone? She rattled off a few questions, which I tried to answer as best as I could, albeit briefly, as I was working on another book project. I began to worry what kind of report she was going to come up with, even for a one-minute or two-minute clip.

The next morning, Journalist A came on the dot, with a camera. I laid out my pens, and we began a pleasant chat about them and, just as importantly, the collector’s mind. She didn’t know very much about fountain pens — no reason why she should — but she displayed a real journalist’s natural inquisitiveness. She probed the difference between collecting and mere accumulation, and sweated the minutiae of one design over another.

In the middle of this interview, I got another call from Journalist B. How much was my most valuable pen worth, she asked, and how many of them did I have? I’m in a meeting, I told her; give me your e-mail and I’ll send you an essay I wrote about what pens I collect and why.

After the interview with A — which was fun but businesslike — I e-mailed the essay to B. I don’t know if she even opened or read the piece — I received no acknowledgment — but I soon got another text message, asking me more questions about the monetary value of my pens. How many of them were in this price range, how many in that, etc.

At that point I blew up, in a manner of speaking. “Why all these questions about prices?” I texted back. “Collecting is about beauty, not money.” She texted to apologize — of course they were interested in beauty as well, but the value angle was part of the story.

And that was the last I heard from B and from her network. (No, it wasn’t one of the two major networks, with which I’ve had nothing but pleasantly professional experiences. I’ll leave out this network’s and this reporter’s name, as I don’t want her to be unduly punished over some stupid pens.) Her camera crew was supposed to arrive at 2 p.m.; she’d asked for directions and I’d sent them. I’d given up a poker tournament that afternoon to accommodate their request — no matter, maybe they were saving me some money.

Two p.m. passed, then 4, then 6. As the shadows lengthened and Diliman settled into a warm summer dusk with no one buzzing at the gate, and no apology or explanation coming into my phone, I put my pens away, returned to my writing, and let my annoyance subside into amusement over how two interviews and interviewers on the same subject and the same day couldn’t be more dissimilar.

At least I now have some new discussion material for my undergraduate class next month in Professional Writing, where we’ll be taking up, among other topics, the art of the interview.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.