Notes from Cynthia Stokes Brown's Like it was: A complete guide to writing oral history

Paying attention is very difficult work... Listening well is much more important than consulting a list of questions, especially if your narrator wants to talk. Nevertheless, it helps to have prepared the questions. Writing down the list makes you think through what you hope to get on tape (or paper) and gives you practice in generating good questions. Also, having the list helps you feel confident that you know what you are doing.
Make a short list of general questions you would like to ask. You will need to personalize them when you are actually talking with your narrator. After the interview you can check off the ones you covered and remind yourself to ask the others at the next interview.
After you've decided whom you want to interview, write down ten reasons why you chose this person to interview. What is it about this person that interests you? Now take your list of reasons and develop out of it some questions to ask. What kinds of question words are more likely to produce interesting responses? Are any of your questions "leading"? That is, do they lead your narrator to give a certain answer that agrees with what you think, or with your expectation of what the narrator thinks? Interviewers should refrain from indicating their own opinions and expectations. Analyze your questions to see whether they reveal your attitude; all too often they do.
Don't be afraid to ask questions in order to get beyond the surface answers. This can be difficult. But in an interview the usual roles for social conduct do not apply; you are likely to be rewarded for boldness.
Answers that are interesting include not just information, but also feelings and interpretations. What does your narrator's life mean to him or her? How does he or she make sense of it? What are the main themes?
If your narrator is a big talker, your job as interviewer will be easier. If you narrator is quiet and shy, you may need to come back several times before he begins to feel comfortable. Good listeners remind their narrators that they are right in there listening by making comments such as "Uh huh," "Really?" "What next?" "Just what I needed to know," "Go on." These non-directive comments are often better than questions; they keep your narrator going without steering his remarks in any particular direction.
Don't expect to be able to complete an interview in just one visit; plan to come back a second and third time. You and your narrator will both appreciate having time to reflect about what came up during the first interview, and during the second or third you will both be able to achieve greater depth.
Remember that interviews are unpredictable. Narrators will respond in ways that you didn't expect; surprising topics will emerge that suddenly seem more important than what you had planned. Go with these surprises--play detective--follow your instincts.
Even if your interviews are going extremely well, some of your questions might be painful or discomforting to your narrators. Some aspects of their lives will be difficult to discuss. If your narrator is uncomfortable, drop it for now. Come back to it later from a different angle when you have established a closer trust. Life has its dark side, and to leave it out is dishonest. Conflict, challenge, obstacles, tragedies--these are the times when a person's real spirit emerges.

Practical Tips for Interviewing

1. Making Arrangements

Make a visit to your potential narrator to describe what you want to do and to solicit his cooperation. Agree on a time and place for the interview, give them an idea of the topics you want them to talk about, and suggest about thirty minutes for the first interview. Describe how you intend to use your story and ask permission from your narrator.

2. Setting Up

Try to minimize interruptions. Find a place well away from other people. Having spectators doesn't work--they can't avoid jumping into the conversation. (Trying to interview two narrators also doesn't work; they often contradict each other and even argue. Do this only if both narrators were present at the same event you are investigating.) Make sure your narrator is comfortable; don't let him give you his favorite chair.

3. Interviewing

It's a good idea to take notes. The main things to jot down are questions and topics that you want to come back to, or questions you didn't get to ask because you didn't want to interrupt. It is also a good idea to jot down the names of people and places that the narrator mentions. That way you can check the spelling with the narrator after the interview. Remember to let the narrator chat in a natural way. Don't hustle him along by rapid-fire questions. Ask only one at a time. Give him time to reflect. Silence is wonderful; use it to jot down a note rather than to leap in with another question. Usually the narrator will reveal the most sensitive material only after hesitating; if you rush in with a question, you will miss it.

4. Ending the Interview

Interviewing is tiring; stop before both or you are exhausted. Agree on a future time and place; plan with the narrator what topics you want to cover next. Ask the narrator how he is feeling about the interviews. Is he enjoying them? Could anything be done to make them more pleasurable?

Questions created by FoxFire students

1. What were times like when you were a child?
-How did you and your family live?
-Were times better, or worse? Why?
-What is your earliest memory?
2. What types of things did you do as a child?
-What did you like to do most? Why?
3. How did your parents treat you?
-What did they do with you that you remember best?
-What times with them were the most enjoyable to you? Why?
4. What advice or training did your parents give you that has helped you to lead a better, fuller life?
-What examples did they set for you?
-How did you profit from them?
-Do you feel your parents prepared you well for life?
5. As a teenager did your parents let you socialize with boys/girls?
-Did you have “dates” as we call them now?
-Where would you go when you went out?
6. What was it like when you first went out on your own?
-Were times hard?
-Did you marry?
7. What kind of work did you do to support yourself?
-Was it difficult?
-What did it mean to you?
8. How do you feel about living in the country?
-How about the city?
-Which do you like best? Why?
9. Do you feel there is a difference between country people and city people?
-If so, what is it, what makes it so?
10. How big a part has religion played in your life?
-What are your feelings on it?
-What is your proof for your belief in God?
-How has he shown himself to you?
11. How do you feel about life in general today?
-How different is it from the way it used to be?
-Is the quality of life better or worse now?
12. Are people different from what they used to be?
-In what ways?
-Are these changes good or bad?
13. How do you feel about the youth of today?
-Are the teenagers different now, from the way you and your friends are?
-What has caused these changes?
14. What do you think of the direction our country is going in today?
-Is American being run well, or badly?
15. What do you consider to be the most valuable possession you have ever had?
-(something you could not have done without in your lifetime.) Why?
16. Have you done everything in your life you wanted or planned to?
-If not, what were you not able to do?
17. If you could go back and live your life over, what would you change?
18. How do you feel about:
-money
-friendship
-kindness
-honesty
19. What do you consider to be vices, or faults, in people?
-Why are these things bad?
-How can they be overcome?
20. What advice could you give young people which would help them to lead better lives?
-What experiences have you had that they could benefit from?

Project 2: Oral History (adapted from Derek Owens’ Composition and Sustainability, 189-91)

Oral History Preservation Project

As older generations pass on, so too do their experiences—the unique ways they responded to the circumstances of their lives and places. This assignment gives you an opportunity to play the role of preservationist: you will record and write an oral history, thereby preserving portions of one person’s life, memory, and history.

Step 1
Find someone who matters to you, ideally someone much older. This person could be an older relative, a friend of the family, a neighbor, or an acquaintance. The person need not be living nearby, so long as you can talk to this person on the phone at least three times in the next three weeks for at least thirty minutes per call. After you’ve selected your person do the following:

a. Write down a list of questions you’d like to ask this person. Let this list be at least several pages long. Be sure the questions can’t be answered with “yes” or “no” but are worded to get the interviewee talking as much as possible.

b. Interview the person for at least half an hour.

c. Write down the results of that interview. It’s up to you whether to print this up in an interview format or to compile the results in a narrative. In the former case the text will read something like a play, with each paragraph preceded by your name or the interviewee’s name, followed by what was said. In the latter case your text will look more like a narrative, in which you’ve compiled and probably rearranged the results of the interview, “gluing” it together with your own comments. Either way, be sure to accurately and truthfully record what the person says—don’t “clean up” his or her English, or alter what he or she said because it “sounds better.” The more accurate you are in getting down the person’s voice, and his or her responses, the better off you’ll be.

Step 2
Go back to this person and conduct a second interview. Let this be your opportunity not only to ask new questions but also to go back to the person’s earlier responses in order to get more information and further clarification. As before, you can either stick to the interview format or assemble the results of your interview into a narrative.

Step 3
Conduct one final interview with your person. Ask questions that might get the interviewee to supply more anecdotes and insights. Also, ask the interviewee what he or she would like to talk about and why. Let him or her play a role in selecting the topics discussed.
After this final interview, look at all the information you’ve collected and put together a brief oral history of this person. The end result can look like an interview, or you can assemble the material into a narrative. As you put together this assignment, ask yourself: What information should I include, and why? What might get edited, and why? How might I rearrange this material for better effect? Are there any themes I find running throughout this person’s life? What exactly makes this person’s history worth recording? Don’t just attach all three interviews together; think about ordering and arranging them to make a more finished, coherent product.
It would be a good idea to write an introduction to your interview and maybe even conclude it with an afterword in which you provide some additional information about the person you’re interviewing: why you chose this person, any details about your relationship with him or her, any closing thoughts you have about this person and what you learned from these interviews, and so on. It’s okay—preferable, really—to let the introduction and/or conclusion be fairly long.
Also, if you wish, you can interject commentary throughout the interview, inserting your comments in parentheses or italics to differentiate it from the main narrative. For example, in the past, some writers have indicated stuff like: “At this point we moved into the living room; my mom put her feet up on the coffee table, obviously exhausted from having worked in the bakery for thirteen hours that day. I started asking a few more questions…”

(This is optional, and only if your subject gives you permissions: take some photographs of this person, or gather up some that you already have, and bring them to class to show the class as we read and discuss your interview.)

Blog Assignment for Friday, Sept. 11

If I let you borrow my time machine, where would you go? What time,specifically, and what place, specifically? In order for the time machine to work properly, you have to choose a precise date and a precise place. Why this time and place? Explain your decision so that we clearly understand your interest in this particular time and particular place. Compose your response as a New Post on your blog for class on Friday.

PROJECT 1: “Where I’m From”

Introduction
One of the most familiar tenets of writing is: “Write what you know.” Everybody knows the place he or she calls home. Or we think we do. But to know something—anything—in its richness, complexity and contradiction, one must write about it.

Place is a space with a story. It’s a simple question then: Where is your place? But it is followed by two not-so-simple questions: How did that place shape who you are now? What do you like and dislike about your place?

Describe this place so that readers will form a detailed and relatively accurate picture in their minds of what it is (or was) like, and of its influence on you. You may want to identify a prominent geological, architectural, social, or cultural feature as a focal point, and develop a fuller picture of your place around this central feature. For example, my place is transected by a river of great historical import. By focusing on the river, I am able to reflect on geologic time as well as cultural history—the ways the river has intersected and helped pattern peoples’ lives, including my own, down through the years.

If you are writing about a place you can visit now, get a hold of a camera, take some pictures that are illustrative of this place, and include photo-images in your essay. In my case, these pictures are mostly scenic, but your pictures don’t have to be. You might include images of features and scenes that are symbolic of your attitude toward your place—dumpsters, strip malls, abandoned swing sets, street corners, parking lots. Just make sure your images are of actual places that appear in your mind when you think about your place. If you’re unable to take pictures, perhaps you can obtain some old photographs from other sources. Images, of course, are optional.

GOALS:

-create a dominant impression of the place you call home.
-experiment with concrete, physical description and reflective/emotive, sensory description.
-develop paragraphs with topic sentences and supportive sentences of varying length and pattern.
-arrive at original answers to the questions above (particularly “How did that place shape who you are now?”)

Readings (on reserve):

“Scary Places” by James Howard Kunstler
“The Unsettling of America” by Wendell Berry
“Working Landscapes” by Tony Hiss

Circular Patterns: People and Place ARE the Environment

The river was once a source of life, a clear, sustained note resounding in every inhabitant’s daily existence. Its current rhythmed vital domains of life and community. Today, however, the place of the river in the geo-mental schemata of inhabitants has undergone some profound re-channeling. Once an economic and cultural conduit connecting inhabitants of the High Bridge area to distant peoples and places, the river is no longer a vital component of the community’s infrastructure. Instead, the river serves mostly the recreational whims of anyone with a boat. Most people living in and around central Kentucky give very little thought to the fact that their daily lives depend on the river—and therefore, on its overall health—as it is the major source of water for most of the towns and cities located along its 259-mile course. With each turn of the faucet, we are indebted to the river. Likewise, with each flush of the toilet, we are indebted to the river. Each day, we consume millions and millions of gallons of its water, and each day millions and millions of gallons of treated (and, unfortunately, untreated) effluent returns to its flow. You need only travel a few miles upstream from Lock seven to experience the awe of what seems to be complete isolation from the workings of humankind. As one of the main arteries out of the mountains in Eastern Kentucky, the flora along the river’s corridor is representative of the incredible diversity of flora in Appalachia. Unfortunately, and without much effort, your sense of awe is despoiled by residue of human waste: plastic bags, deposited during high water, left hanging out to dry in tree limbs that overarch the bank; plastic motor oil containers—known locally as “Kentucky Ducks”—that raft along the banks; plastic and rubber balls of all sizes floating among the flotsam. In the winter, trash is visible everywhere. In the summer, thick foliage subsumes the litter but doesn’t make it go away. All of these things represent the rotten fruits of living a life predicated on consumption and creation of waste.
That people seem to give very little thought to their places and the relationship between their choices and actions and the relative health and appearance of the environment should come as little surprise, particularly in light of Berry’s notion about the impulse to keep moving that dominates contemporary American life. One’s place in the world is reduced significantly when one is in constant motion. Place becomes personal, private, isolated, disconnected. One’s responsibility, then, is truncated, too. The greatest deception of industrial and post-industrial civilization has been to divorce human consciousness from the natural world, a split that imperils every living organism. But, as Jack D. Forbes points out, our well-being and ultimate survival relies not on our functioning as autonomous creatures but on our behavior as symbiotic organisms:
I can lose my hands and still live. I can lost my legs and still live. I can lose my eyes and still live. I can lose my hair, eyebrows, nose, arms, and many other things and still live. But if I lose the air I die. If I lose the sun I die. If I lose the earth I die. If I lose the water I die. If I lose the plants and animals I die. All of these things are more a part of me, more essential to my every breath, than is my so-called body. What is my real body? (145)
For the residents of High Bridge and the surrounding region, if we lose the river, we die. Granted, the river is older than modern humans, and barring the complete destruction of the earth, it will survive in some form or fashion, long after humans have vanished from the earth. But it is a vital resource, and the quality of our lives depends directly on the quality of its water.

Installment Three

I have left my ancestral home-place several times in search of my place in the world. In my case, the decisions to leave were based solely on the desire to advance professionally. In academia, my chosen profession, common wisdom has it that worthwhile, long-term opportunities are only found elsewhere. Nestlings must leave the nest if they are to take wing, fly, and find territory of their own. Usually, these flights of maturation and identity are significant, take you out of your region and land you in unfamiliar places.
Once you’ve been away for a while, learning the rhythms and resonances of a new place and reliving your old place only in memories, it is easy to recognize change. Each time I return to central Kentucky to visit my parents, I can feel the shifting sand. Fences aren’t where they were before. Old trees are gone. Bulldozers have reconstituted entire hills. Houses spring up in fields I thought cows would graze for eternity. Tobacco fields are subdivided and given quaint names that identify precisely what has been lost: “Rabbit Run,” “Quail Covey,” “Dogwood Trace,” and “Tranquil Estates.” And no one, I mean no one, farms anymore. Once the region’s cultural pride and primary source of income, tobacco farming has gone the way of the condor, if you’ll pardon the expression.
Until only very recently, I farmed tobacco with my father and older brother on a piece of land that borders the Kentucky River. In the days before paved, four-lane highways, the river was the primary means for area farmers to transport their crops to warehouse markets downstream. While this aspect of the river’s utility to farmers disappeared long before I came onto the scene, the importance of the river as a geological and cultural landmark, with its breath-taking palisades and vistas, isolated bottom-lands, and mysterious, remote, yet invitingly lush tributaries, still reverberates in my consciousness in concentric waves. And a large part of my value and respect for the river is tied to knowledge of its past, how it intersected the lives of my predecessors and helped sustain their humble yet fulfilling ways of life.
I’m certain that my predecessors would think me incredulous should I suggest that small farm operations, small family tobacco farms are disappearing along the Kentucky River and that most probably will be all but extinct within my lifetime. Incredible, yes, but sadly true. Tobacco simply isn’t profitable for a small farmer anymore. My father was the holdout, too, the last of the old-time dirt farmers in High Bridge to hang it up for good. Unfortunately, the demise of tobacco farming is in keeping with the trend of this place. At this point in time, the rich, fertile land that supported generations is rapidly becoming a new generation’s El Dorado—developers’ dream-tracts of rolling meadows, cheaply obtained, easily subdivided and sold for incredible profit. Short-term, monetary gain is replacing the long-term, agrarian commitment that protected and maintained the land and sustained the small communities and families.

Changing Patterns of Community

Like my father’s father and his father’s father, I am from a particular place along the banks of the Kentucky River. The community of High Bridge experienced its heyday long before I was born. In fact, over the course of my father’s life, key features that typically come to mind when we think of community—a market, grocery or country store, a post office, a garage, a train station—had already vanished. By the time I was born, only the oldest residents harkened back to those heydays. Before every household owned an automobile, passenger trains stopped 4 and 5 times a day, connecting citizens of this rural, river community with larger cities to the north or south; and on weekends, excursion trains brought sightseers and day-trippers down from Cincinnati to take in natural beauty of ancient cliffs and the confluence of the Dix and Kentucky Rivers, or to dance in the historic pavilion of High Bridge park, attend Sunday camp-meetings or simply marvel at the engineering feat of High Bridge. The train station was abuzz with arrivals and departures, and, for the most part, people living in High Bridge welcomed travelers, sightseers, and day-trippers alike. The river, the palisades, and the bridge had put this place on the map.
When I was four, High Bridge lost its Post Office and its own ZIP code, 40330. By the time I was five, the last general store went out of business. When I was a teenager, public access to the bridge was prohibited. Just in the last several years, Lock and Dam No. 7 has been permanently sealed with concrete, like most of the locks in the upper half of the Kentucky, its massive steel lock-gates welded shut. My father laments that he doesn’t know “a damned person in High Bridge anymore.” As in many small communities across America, young people grow up and move away to find opportunities elsewhere. I know this. I’m one of them.
In America today, everybody, at some point in life, lives in a sort of educational, economic or professional diaspora. Wendell Berry, Kentucky’s most renowned public intellectual, identifies two competing tendencies in American cultural. The weaker tendency belongs mostly to our ancestors, those first-comers who saw a beautiful, rich, open landscape before them and said, “No farther. This is the place” (4). He notes that this was also the tendency of Native Americans—to see the intrinsic, life-sustaining, domestic possibilities of a place and settle wholeheartedly into the rhythms and resonances of that place. The stronger of the two tendencies, and the one that seems to hold sway over our current culture, however, is what Berry calls “some version of the search for El Dorado” (4). The allusion is to the early Spanish explorers on the North American continent, who were looking for gold, which was, maddeningly, always somewhere else, somewhere over the next rise, across the next river, beyond the next plain—somewhere beyond the edges of the map. Today, our continent has been mapped down to the last pebble, yet the tendency to see our own places as existing somewhere “out there” persists and we persist, as Berry notes, “with largely the same motives and with increasing haste and anxiety, to displace ourselves—no longer with unity of direction, like a migrant flock, but more like the refugees from a broken ant hill” (3).

High Bridge: From Pangaea to the Palisades

On the super-continent of Pangaea, there were no children throwing rocks into the water off High Bridge. There were no men and women dancing on the Falls City paddlewheel, no grandmothers shouting “amens” from the front pew of the Union Church. There were no houses, no religions, no railroads, no 40330 zip code, and no destinations on the map. Just a place on earth—an area of rock and sand swirling and resettling beneath the calm, warm waters of an ancient inland sea. At that time, nearly half a billion years ago, Baltica (the continent of Europe) was drifting closer to ancient North America, and the ocean floor separating the two masses was slowly subducting beneath the North American continental shelf, pushing up a chain of very steep and extremely tall mountains, the Appalachians. As the continents buckled, the inland sea gradually retreated to the west, leaving a network of ancient rivers flowing out of the mountains across a marshy plain (in present day Ohio and Indiana), emptying at last into this ever-shrinking, ancient body of water at a point north of Madison, Indiana, much farther north and east of its present confluence with the Ohio River at Carrollton, Kentucky (Ellis 39). What is now the Kentucky River was but a tributary of the larger ancient Teays River system that passed through a tropical paradise of dense rain forests, swamps and marshlands. At that time, the geographical area we know as the state of Kentucky lay squarely on the Earth’s equator. Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, after tectonic shifts further meted out the continents, the Cincinnati Arch (a geological upheaval in central Kentucky beginning in the Pliocene epoch 10 million years ago and lasting until the Pleistocene epoch some 600,000 years ago) and the cyclical grind of glaciation redirected the Kentucky River’s flow (Ellis 1), integrating it with the early Ohio River, and creating the course of the river as we know it today: a deep meander, winding from its headwaters in southeast Kentucky northwest to its mouth at the Ohio River.
Anyone who has experienced the Kentucky River, particularly between Lock & Dam seven and eight, has seen firsthand, the dramatic result of 500 million years of water leaving its mark on a place. The palisades section of the Kentucky River, with its 300 foot cliffs of Ordovician limestone, is not only of great geological import; the layering of human presence has left a mark on this place every bit as profound as the river itself, displaying the evolution of humankind’s conceptualization of our place in relation to the natural world. Written into this landscape of sheer cliffs, forested bluffs, open bottom-land and cool hollows hidden in shadow, is a catalogue of human responses, spanning eons, to the incredible forces of nature. Sometimes the human response has been one of wonderment and awe, or humility, or respect, or even fear. At other times, the response has been arrogance, vanity, vulgarity, disrespect, and even contempt for nature, for the environment—for this place.

Welcome to the motherblog

Hi, folks. Once you've set up a gmail account and created your personal blog, search for my blog--http://1010placespace--and become a "friend." Then I'll be able to follow your blog, see what you're thinking about and writing in relation to our class and assignments! Please feel free to personalize your blog as you see fit. Add pictures and links that you think others might be interested in, but keep in mind that this is a public space, too. Not only that, it's a space directly associated with an academic course.

I look forward to working with each of you, helping you develop as thinkers and writers, and watching as you develop your blogs!