Eloquence happens

I worked on profiles of two different men this week.

If they were to sit next to each other on an airplane, which is where I can best imagine them meeting, they would assume after exchanging just a few words that they had little in common. Though close in age, one grew up in Minnesota and became a professional football player. As an offensive tackle, he was a two-time All-Pro, a six-time Pro Bowl selection, and played on one winning Super Bowl team. The other was raised in India and came to the U.S. to attend a college none of his friends back home had ever heard of – Dartmouth. (“So you didn’t get into any of the good American colleges?” they asked him at the time.) He stayed at Dartmouth for medical school, where he earned a Ph.D. in cellular biology, and became a senior policy advisor for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

No, the two men might not find much to talk about on their hypothetical airplane ride. But to me, having interviewed both of them within a matter of days, they have something profound in common: both men are passionate about their work, and both speak about it with the eloquence born of unwavering devotion to what they do.

Eloquence matters to me as an interviewer. I don’t mean that someone needs to have a fine vocabulary or a poetic sense of sentence structure. I just mean it’s much easier to interview someone for whom the thoughts and ideas, and the answers to my questions, flow rapidly. And this happens, I’ve come to realize, not when someone is particularly well-educated or even naturally verbose, but just when they are talking about what they love.

Of course, this is true of me as well, in my own work of helping people tell their stories. “Don’t get me started,” I sometimes caution friends who casually ask what I’m working on. I know they’re just being polite, and yet I can’t hold back once I start describing my latest project. Names and identifying details of my clients are kept confidential, of course – I leave it up to my clients to decide when and how they want to reveal themselves through their work – but once their stories get into my head, I can’t stop rummaging through the details. “She had her first child at the age of eighteen – with her husband off at war!”, I find myself saying. Or “They met at an art opening in their sixties and moved in together the following week.” “He stole a police car at the age of twelve and no one ever found out.” “She first learned about Thanksgiving when her boss invited her to his house to celebrate it.” “He was the only volunteer firefighter at the firehouse who couldn’t drive a firetruck– he was still too young to have a driver’s license.” Like both men I wrote about this week, I too find it almost impossible to hold back when asked about my work.

So once again, it was an illuminating week for me. I learned about what it’s like to be drafted by the same NFL team you used to race home from church to watch on TV as a kid – and then sit on the bench for your first two years on the roster. And I learned what it’s like to advise Bill Gates on cholera research.

The two men will probably never meet, and probably wouldn’t see many similarities between themselves if they did. But both left me feeling full of enthusiasm to write their stories, because both loved talking about what they’ve done. It’s a contagious kind of passion – and one that makes my job easy.

Empathy in interviewing

Much of my workday is spent interviewing people about subjects important to them: projects, initiatives, passions, experiences. After the publication of my memoir last fall, I had a small number of opportunities to be an interview subject rather than an interviewer. The host of a nationally syndicated show on NPR interviewed me for a whole hour, a reporter for a community newspaper in our region came over for coffee to interview me, and one of my colleagues at the Boston Globe even did a short phone interview that she later wrote up into a brief blurb (reasonably enough, the Globe prefers not to give a great deal of coverage to its own writers’ projects).

At the time, I told some of these interviewers that I was tickled to be “on the other side of the counter,” because it was just fun to have people asking questions about me rather than vice versa. (I’ve sometimes imagined a New Yorker cartoon in which Terry Gross is approached at a cocktail party and snaps, “Listen, I’m really not interested in hearing about you! Let’s make it about me for once!”) But as more time goes by, I realize that it was not only fun but also professionally beneficial for me to be interviewed, because it reminded me to be more empathetic of the people I’m interviewing.

Specifically, when I have numerous quotes to gather in a little time, I tend to grow secretly impatient with people who have a lot to say. Though I have enough experience as a journalist to know it really doesn’t help to try to hurry people, I also tend to know before our conversation even begins what it is that I need from them, and it’s tempting to try to race through the discussion to get to the part I’m after.

But then I remember how as I was falling asleep the night before my NPR interview, I was still thinking about what I would say, how to tell my story, the right words for framing certain thoughts.

In short, it was a big deal to me to be interviewed, and I wanted time and space to tell my story clearly. And it helps me to remember that when I call other people for quotes, I myself may know that they are just one of a half-dozen people I need to talk to on the same topic, and all I really need is a sentence or two – but to them, it’s a big deal to be asked to share their thoughts, and they too probably thought long and hard about just what they want to say.

The bottom line is that no matter whether the end result is an article or some entirely different product, empathy almost never hurts, and being an interview subject, even just for a very short phase in my life, helped me to see that. It’s good for me to remember that I’m asking people about issues that are important to them, and they want to be heard.

So now I try to slow down. Even when an interview subject is explaining something to me that I already understand, I let them process it in their own words. Even when they’re straying far from the important part of my question, I let them meander. Every last element of their response may not matter much to me, but it does to them. And the more I can remember that feeling when I had it myself, the more I can ultimately do justice to their perspective. Which is, after all, why I bothered to called them.

Tim and me - Live on NPR!

Admitting this may irredeemably brand me as a nerd, but I have to confess it nonetheless: being interviewed by an NPR personality was a truly thrilling experience for me. The broadcast aired today, and I’m pleased to say I’ve listened to it from start to finish only once. It’s not the sound of my own voice that brings me such delight; it was the interview process itself. Today I get to have my fifteen minutes of micro-fame – after all, this is NPR, not Oprah – but it was the taping two weeks ago that really caused my heart to sing.

This is for two reasons. The first is the same reason that probably most NPR interview subjects are happy to be on the air, especially those in feature stories like this one. It’s just really gratifying to have someone take an interest in something we’ve done. Tim and I embarked on a daily running challenge in August 2007; for the next two years, we both ran a mile or more every single day, usually together though sometimes separately. When Tim gave up the streak after exactly two years, we had logged a total of 732 consecutive days of daily miles. During that time, we struggled through snow, ice, heat waves, thunderstorms, arguments, and chest colds, but I never imagined that someday an NPR personality whom I listened to daily during the four years he was broadcasting from Boston would be asking me about it.

And Tim, though he’s not the NPR fanatic I am, knew this was something special too. After all, he got to leave school two hours early for our taping session at the WGBH studios in Boston last month, and when I gave the reason as “media appearance,” his teachers asked him about it. He doesn’t have the same reverence for NPR figures that I do, but he still felt honored – as anyone would -- that someone was asking him about himself.

But for me, the second reason this was such a thrill is more specific to my situation. I’m a journalist myself, and the bulk of my portfolio comprises stories like these: human interest stories about interesting people doing unusual things. But I’m always, always, the one asking the questions. Until now. I make a living taking an interest in asking other people questions about their lives, and I genuinely enjoy it. I wouldn’t be in the field otherwise.

At the same time, there’s always a tiny part of me that feels like no one ever asks about me. I like to imagine an apocryphal New Yorker cartoon featuring my professional role model, Terry Gross, attending a cocktail party at which someone innocently says to her “I want to tell you about this great project I’m involved in” and Terry snaps, “Oh no, tonight it’s all about ME!”

I’ve heard that Terry Gross actually doesn’t like to be interviewed at all, and submits to interviews reluctantly only when she’s promoting one of her own books. I’d like to think I’m equally modest, far more interested in hearing about other people than talking about myself. But in this case, first when we were interviewed two weeks ago and then hearing the broadcast today (okay, and admittedly, then sending out the podcast link to the 200 people at the top of my personal contacts e-mail list), it’s only fair to confess that I really loved the switcheroo, the chance to be the one graciously thanking the interviewer as I attempted to answer questions with clever sound bites and evocative descriptions.

Tomorrow it’s back to being the one asking the questions. I have four interview stories to conduct over the next week. One is with a shop owner, one a champion in the sport of orienteering, one an opera librettist and I’ve already forgotten what the fourth is. Oh, right, a woman who started a public service organization in Rwanda. Which is way cooler and more important than going running every day for a year. But today I got to sit on the other side of the counter for a change, and let me just admit it outright one last time: What a thrill.