early interests

How did you become interested in oral histories and interviewing?

e d i t o r s'  n o t e

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e a r l y  i n t e r e s t s

s u p p o r t

j o u r n a l s

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c o m m u n i t y

Wade MahonI came to the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point in 1999, and started working for Issues in Writing in 2000. Bobbie Stokes and her husband, Jim Stokes, had founded the journal back in 1988, and she was doing pretty much everything as far as editing. She stepped down from that and split up her responsibilities among several subordinate staff, and I took over as managing editor, which involves a little bit more than just editing. I was involved in pretty much everything that was happening. I started out just working with authors on submissions whenever an article came into the journal. 

And actually, another person who has been really involved in the editorial part of the interview process is Dan Dieterich. He’s been with the journal since the beginning. He works in business and technical writing, and writing consulting. He’s very active in those areas on a national level.

The editors and staff on campus read over the articles, sent them to outside readers, and decided on them. Usually one of us volunteered to work with an author, editing the article for publication. So I had some practice as an editor working with authors (polishing up manuscripts of a couple of interviews) before I ever got to a point where I was editing them myself. It was a lot of responsibility, but it was the kind of work that I really enjoyed. In some ways, it was easier for me to work as an editor on someone else’s idea than to do all the work of developing my own. And I ended up learning an awful lot about writing, editing, and publishing—what editors and journals are looking for. So it was a good learning process. I’m sure there are plenty of people who would hate the kind of tedious work that goes with copyediting, but I guess I’m a glutton for punishment.

 

 

Eric Schroeder: As I began work on my dissertation, I started collecting books by the people I was writing about (e.g., Michael Herr, Norman Mailer, Tim O’Brien). At one point, my bookseller friend indicated to me that a book I was purchasing had been written by one of his other customers, John Sack, who was a pretty well-known journalist then. He had written one of the great non-fiction accounts of Vietnam, a book called simply Mfor M company. 

Sack didn’t live too far away, and the bookseller said that he would probably be interested in meeting me and actually gave me his phone number. I called Sack up and asked him if he would consider being interviewed for this project I was working on. It’s such a mundane thing to say, but here I had been working on Shakespeare for two or three years and he and all his contemporaries were long gone. . . . Of the writers at the time (i.e., the Vietnam era), not most, but all of them I was writing about were alive. All of a sudden the possibility arises of meeting them, of talking to them.

Sack agreed to be interviewed and I went there knowing nothing about interviewing. I bought a tape player the day before and drove to where he was living. I had written some questions down, but it was a pretty chaotic interview, complicated by a few factsI didn’t have a sense of how long it should go, so it went for three hours. As he told me later, he was heavily medicated at the time. Contributing to the chaos was the fact that the house he was living in had a forced air conditioning system that came on every twenty minutes, and it sounded like a hurricane was going through the building.

When I sat down to start transcribing the interview, it was just so awful. I couldn’t bear to do it. And at that point, I had gotten the bug and decided to do some more, so I let that one sit for eight years before finally working on it. And it took me days and days. The sound was a major factor, but I had so much stuff that I had to decide what to put in and leave out. Of all the writers I interviewed, he was the one with whom I actually got to be friendliest. When he would come to California, he’d often visit me and we’d go out to dinner. After the book was published, he said to me, “You know, I really love my interview. Either you’re a great editor or I’m a better talker than I think.” I didn’t touch that line. But he knew that I’d really worked on it and was giving me credit for that.

I learned it the hard way. I actually didn’t realize with the first one or two even that I was doing interviews. I thought I was simply collecting data for a dissertation and I obviously used some of the material in the dissertation. But I did two or three or four interviews before I realized that I could take them and maybe do something with them. To this day I’ve never published my dissertation, but I’ve published the book of interviews that I thought was the raw data.


Cross-Conversations on Writing, Interviewing, and Editing:
A Meta-Interview with Wade Mahon & Eric Schroeder

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 10.1 (2005)
http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/10.1/