Interviews

The Kenyon Review blog questions how interviews should be done:

But if timeliness isn’t an issue, repetition may be. I’m not saying that Ian McEwan wasn’t sincere or fully engaged in speaking with me–I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. But today there are so many interviews of this sort. Believe it or not, author interviews were something of a novelty when Plimpton and Matthiessen began to do them in a serious way back in the 50s.  Before then they had mostly been more gossipy, newsy, or, to use a wonderful new word, snarky.

These days, however, well known authors are interviewed at every turn, unless they run for cover like Thomas Pynchon or J. D. Salinger.  Such public performances are a necessity of the book tour, of various awards, of pestering by students, friends and strangers.  As a result, I sometimes sense as I read an interview that the author is recycling answers to questions they have been asked many times before. Isn’t that natural?  How could they not?  But the results can feel a bit warmed over.

Again, I’m not suggesting that literary interviews are bogus or that KR, let alone other journals, should no longer publish them. But maybe–and here’s the point I’ve been toying with–they’re best suited to the new resources and the new media of the Internet.

I’m kind of sympathetic to the argument here, but I don’t see how Internet resources would solve the problem of the "recycled"-sounding interview. Wouldn’t the proliferation (and greater speed) of web-based interviewers just lead to even more canned answers?

The answer, I think is to interview people who aren’t Ian McEwen; i.e. people who, although they are writing interesting books, aren’t getting hounded for interviews. There are certainly enough of these people to go around. And, as for the people who are interviewed to death, the challenge is to get them out of that comfort zone where they won’t be able to give you the same answers they give everyone else.