Before going further, turn back to your Neighborhood composition and draw a line around the one most important sentence in it. 

English 111
Fall, 2001
Don Maxwell

Interview

So far I've been inviting you to write mostly from your own perspective, sometimes about your immediate feelings, sometimes about events stored in your memory, and sometimes about what you see in front of you and about how what you see is related to your emotions. In case you're wondering, these invitations have been mainly exercises in observation. That is to say, you've been working as a scientist- explorer.

Now I'd like to invite you to explore a few other perspectives of your world--other points of view. I think you'll learn some surprising things (and not only things about writing).

Last time you wrote about your own neighborhood as you see it--and perhaps also about how the world looks to from your neighborhood. This time, get another person's view of it. Find someone else who lives there, preferably someone whose experience of the place is likely to be different from your own--a long-term resident, if you're a recent arrival, say, or maybe a man if you're a woman, or an old person if you're young. It might be good to pick someone you don't know well, but that probably isn't important. The most important thing is that you try to find somebody who interests you.

You know that no two persons can ever see things exactly the same way, so find out what your informant's view of the neighborhood is and what the world looks like to that person AND how your neighbor's view differs from your own view. In other words, explore your neighbor's neighborhood--the way an anthropologist would study such a place..

You may feel apprehensive about this. But don't worry--just go ahead and do it. When you get back home, report on your exploration. Write it in the form of a story, if that feels most comfortable to you, but remember that’s to be a report on your interview of a neighbor. Among the things you might consider telling us are:

  • Whom you talked with and why you selected that informant.
  • How you conducted the interview.
  • What the circumstances of the interview were--the place, the time, etc.
  • What was said. (Use direct quotations if your informant said something in a really nifty way; otherwise, just summarize or paraphrase.)
  • How you felt before, during, and after the interview.
  • What you learned about the neighborhood from your informant.
  • Anything else that interested you. 
  • AND as a kind of summary:  how your informant's neighborhood differs from your neighborhood.


From now on, after you finish a primary writing, please write me a postscript-a note about what you did during the writing and how the course is going for you. This time, for example, you might mention something about your interviewing process--whether or not you took written notes, for example; whether you used pre-prepared questions, or just winged it; what worked for you and what didn't. And maybe something about the relationship of the interviewing to the writing-up part of the job.

As usual, address the entire class in the main part of your writing, but me in your postscript.  You can email the postscript to me if you like, or just attach it to your interview report if you wish.
 
 


Invitations to Write