locating the subject

Do you plan issue-by-issue or try long-range planning?

e d i t o r s'  n o t e

b a c k g r o u n d s

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

n u t s  &  b o l t s

r e c e n t
  &  f o r t h c o m i n g

l o c a t i n g  s u b j e c t s

c o u r t s h i p

q u e s t i o n i n g
  &  c o l l a b o r a t i n g

t r a n s c r i p t s
  &  e d i t i n g

e t h i c s  &  v o i c e

g e n r e  &  m e t h o d

r h e t o r i c
  &  c o m p o s i t i o n

c o m m u n i t y

Wade Mahon: Well, if we did plan long range, I’m sure we would do that. [laughs] Maybe I shouldn’t say that, but it would be nice to plan a little further down the road than we actually do. We usually take it issue by issue, and I guess organic is the best way to describe it. 

We try to select interviewees that reflect a variety of disciplinary backgrounds—compositionists, business and technical writing experts, writing consultants, creative writers, etc. Often we look for people who have well-known reputations within their fields or who at least have many years of experience doing what they do. Even though our journal tries to bridge the concerns of academia and the workplace, we tend to select people with academic positions rather than professional writers outside of academia. I suppose our selection criteria is based to some extent on who we think our readers (and who we the editors) would like to hear from.

There are several different routes by which we choose interview subjects. One route is personal contact. For instance, one of our editors, Dan Dieterich, has many contacts with people in the business and professional writing fields as well as among writing consultants. Most of our interviewees in these areas have been selected based on Dan’s recommendation and his willingness to arrange the interviews. Also, a number of interview subjects in the past have been people who were also on our advisory board. 

A lot of times it depends on personal contacts, especially when the issue is on an open topic and we’re publishing articles on a variety of topics. A lot of times people decide on requests for interviews, or we choose people that we hear about from the advisory board. A lot of people we’ve interviewed because we’ve had personal contact with them before. Sometimes we interview people whom we worked with during graduate school. For example, we interviewed Victor Villanueva a few years ago, and one of our editors, Rebecca Stephens, was at Washington State for graduate work and had a friend from there who had a contact.

A second route is determined more by the content of a particular issue. (We recently began devoting select issues to specific topics like plagiarism, assessment, etc.) In this case we look for someone who has a strong reputation in this area or whose work will complement the other essays in the issue.  In a couple of cases, we’ve relied on guest editors / interviewers to conduct interviews for these special topic issues.  And in the absence of personal contact or a special topic, we usually just look for someone who has an established reputation or an interesting story to tell.

As long as I’ve been with the journal (since 2000), I can’t think of anyone who has turned down a request for an interview.  This is somewhat surprising to me given the busy lives of most of these people.

Eric Schroeder: There have been several points in our history where we've sat down and done some brainstorming. Once I asked a former colleague, Carolyn Handa, "What's the dream list of people we haven't done yet?" She gave me a list of ten names, and I think we ended up doing four or five of them. Then John Boe and I play this game every three or four years considering whom haven't we done yet that we'd really like to do. 

The subsequent interviews happen in two ways: They're either interviews that John and I plan or ones we really try to twist someone's arm to do. We had a graduate student for a while in the English department, Jan Goggins, who was keen on interviews and I think she ended up doing three for us. She was very good. 

But mostly the interviews result from stuff that people email us: "I got this idea. I want to interview this person. What do you think?" Half the time, it's people we've never heard of and that's the first litmus test. Have we heard of these people?

Sometimes I will get a very keen graduate student. I had a student last year who was like me years ago. He wanted to interview somebody he was doing his dissertation on and ran her name by me. I said, "Yeah, I've heard of her but, who else are you eventually going to write about in your dissertation? He said in a year or so he planned to write about Anna Deavere Smith, who did the play about Los Angeles and the riots. I said, "Interview Anna Deavere Smith. We'd love that." 

Another graduate student floated some obscure writer she was writing about by me and then said, "Well, my last chapter's going to be on Toni Morrison." I said, "Well, there's your interview." And she actually interviewed Toni Morrison. 

I always tell them my own story of being a graduate student trying to round up those interviews. Almost nobody said no. It was shocking to me. Tim O'Brien said yes. Norman Mailer said yes. And that's really the lesson for them, isn't it? Just ask. More often than not, people will say yes and then you've got to go and actually do it. [laughs] All you are investing is a postage stamp.