Books — Talk to Me: How to Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers, and Interview Anyone Like a Pro

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

Talk to Me: How to Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers, and Interview Anyone Like a Pro

Dean Nelson, Harper Perennial (2019)

Find the book here. Check out Nelson’s website here.

Being a writer means I have friends who are also writers. Working for years in three different forms means those writer friends are a diverse group. As such, my reading list might seem a little weird to people who are more married to a particular form or expression.

Take, for instance, my friend Dean Nelson. A journalist and one of the best interviewers I’ve met, he and I go back to my teen years and were colleagues in the same department for four years. We are both irreverent and caring in equal measure, which means we are trouble when we find ourselves in the same room.

So, when his book Talk to Me came out the summer of my sabbatical, I was stoked to read it. Ostensibly a primer on how to interview others, I had a suspicion that Dean would be getting at more than just good journalistic practice. 

I was not incorrect.

Talk to Me is, of course, a useful professional aid, making plain the ways that one can build or burn even the best interview situations. And, Dean manages to find the proper balance of useful, direct craft advice and interesting anecdotal illustrations that underscore rather than overwhelm the technical information people came for, a balance so many writing guides fail to achieve. 

It’s also a sneaky memoir of a guy who’s spent a life learning how to listen, more in the vein of Francis Flaherty’s The Elements of Story than Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. And anyone who knows Dean knows he’s got stories worth being interviewed about himself, stories he opens up on the pages here.

But the book is just as much a reminder that listening with intent rather than speaking with authority is a crucial human skill, one I fear we are losing in our hyper-polarized and self-segregated digital present. In many ways, it’s a call to push past replacing interactions with suppositions to discover what lies beyond our assumptions about others.

“Paradox is always worth exploring, in my opinion, because it shows that human beings are never entirely this way or that way. Every fundamentalist has his caveat. Every liberal has a conservative exception” (25).

And, when confronted with the paradox, Dean’s advice is a very sound endorsement of quelling our knee-jerk need to frame those contradictions by talking over the person in whom we find them. Rather, the real work is maintaining a posture of listening as a form of accountability for both ourselves and others.

“Silence is part of the grammar of an interview….Using silence means you are telling your source that you can wait him out. It tells him that silence isn’t an answer, and he’s not going to get out of answering…” (189, 191). 

It’s of note here to recall that meditation is so often silent and the learning it generates paradoxical to the noisy confines of a world of people trying to speak their truth into larger existence. Maybe that’s the message here as well.

Injuries, Meaning, and Grafted Essays

If trying to understand our lives is this cloud, the hole where the light shines through is so often opened up by the injuries we experience along the way.

This the fourth installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

As a writer, I find myself pulled between writing multi-voiced fictional stories and multi-concept literary essays. Another way to put it: I don’t make it easy on myself and writing is already difficult enough. 

But I am drawn to the narratives found in the spaces between people’s varied accounts of the same events or ideas. I also love when I find connection where there should be disjunction. Maybe it feels like meaning when there shouldn’t be any. Maybe that’s just faith found in another form.

Anyway, one of my creative projects over the sabbatical was planning a series of pieces I’m calling grafted essays that bring together injuries I’ve had over the years and a seemingly disconnected topic or concept. This form has been working its way to the surface of my aesthetic for a while now, as can be seen in this essay I wrote about a terrifying medical moment in my dad’s life and the way it intersected with a realization about my own role as a father.

The challenge of each of these pieces is connecting the reader with the ways in which my view of life is so often bound up in how I’ve been hurt…something I think is fundamentally true for all of us.

This work has been, surprisingly, enjoyable despite that fact that I am dredging up some physically painful experiences and casting a very wide net in looking for complimentary ideas that feel estranged from my personal stories while remaining connected in relevant ways in my head.

That last part is as confusing while I’m working as it was when you read it.

But the process has opened up some perspectives into how much I’m still carrying the injuries I thought I had walked off and how centrally my systems for making sense of the world run through the less-than-conscious remnants of those pains. This was the through line of an essay I wrote about the relative difference in thinking about my own childhood injuries and those of my children, which found a home at Punctuate Magazine.

So, I’ve been spending time in the middle of my most painful moments. The night I tore my ACL and the afternoon it was my hamstring. My bouts of depression and my more than 30 years of regular periods of severe insomnia. Losing my singing voice permanently at 19—which subsequently found print life in The Jabberwock Review—and greeting my 40s with a heart scare.

All of these bear on the way I see the world and move through it on a daily basis. The remnants of my pains—small and large, physical and psychic—are often the glass between me and my experiences, generally transparent but definitely impacting how I see what I think I’m looking at. And sometimes, the most surprising thoughts come when I take the time to look at the window rather than the view. 

Sometimes you have to see the dirt before you know what needs to be cleaned, and there’s nothing like writing to highlight where to starting scrubbing.  

Books — Heavy

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

Heavy

Kiese Laymon, Scribner (2018)

Find this book here. Check out Laymon’s website here.

I spend my time—writing, reading, and teaching—moving between the ways we consider some stories true and some invention, most often left in the uncomfortable in-between where neither of those descriptors fit because they both apply.

This is likely why Kiese Laymon’s Heavy was such a powerful read when I encountered it. Laymon lays bare his life in a stunning fashion, wrestling with the truths and fictions of growing up Black and male and large in America. Constructed, in some ways, as a letter to his mother, the author frames the entire work in the midst of that contested space, as can be seen in the last lines of the introductory chapter. 

“I wanted to write a lie.

You wanted to read that lie.

I wrote this to you instead” (10).

The constant metaphor of the book is weight: physical, spiritual, emotional, and cultural. Sometimes those burdens were visible and others so embedded in his experiences it took years to identify all the ways he’d been carrying them. In some instances they led to stark truth, while in others they birthed inventions required to survive, even as those inventions ate away at him.

Truly, this is a stunning work that lays bare the effort required to endure the shadowy spaces where we either make our stories concrete truth in order to preserve a fundamentalist’s certainty of our self-perception or shade our truths with self-preserving fictions because the rawest parts of ourselves are most difficult to look at.

Resisting both of those impulses, though, is exactly central to Laymon’s efforts in writing Heavy and the dominant preoccupation I carried throughout my reading of his work.

“For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words. Revisiting and rearranging words didn’t only require a vocabulary; it required will, and maybe courage. Revised word patterns were revised thought patterns. Revised thought patterns shaped memory” (86). 

This is the benefit of a work like Heavy. It holds us in a posture of attention, both to the weight Laymon carries and our own burdens. But, if we’re attentive and willing, it also forces us to consider the ways we may have weighed on others, intentionally or not. And that is work we all must do.