Jarrett Fuller

My favorite part of giving talks in different settings is the Q&A after my bit. I know what I’m going to say but it’s far more interesting to hear what’s on the mind of the group before me. In the best circumstances, I say something out loud for the first time, changing the way I think about something.

This happened recently after a talk I had given about Scratching the Surface and what I’ve learned from interviewing people for almost a decade now. In an off-handed comment after my talk, I said “I used to tell guests that these were conversations, not interviews. I don’t say that anymore.” I’d never said that before and, honestly, I’m not even sure it’s something that had crossed my mind before it came out of my mouth. Yet since I said it, I’ve found myself thinking about these words often.

I used to call my podcast episodes conversations for a few reasons: a general insecurity of calling myself an interviewer, an attempt to put the guest at ease, and because I truly through of them as conversational. I didn’t — and still don’t — prepare a bulleted, numbered list of questions I’m trying to get through. When I started Scratching the Surface, I was listening to a lot of what I’d now refer to as ‘chat shows’ — Marc Maron and Bill Simmons immediately come to mind — and I thought I was immulating them.

As I kept doing the show, there are many parts that have gotten easier but there is one piece of the show that takes longer than it used to: research. I’m much more conscious, I think, that this is not a chat show. There are specific things I’m trying to get out of this exchange. I might not have specific questions written down but there are specific questions about someone’s work that I’m trying to understand (and then, of course, share back).

This is why I hesitate to call what I do a conversation. Sure, they read as conversational. They are meant to sound like two people talking in an informal, casual way. But there is a clear power imbalance in the conversation. I come to the episode after weeks of reading, listening, and looking at the work of the other person. I almost always know more about them than they do about me. What’s more, I’m always (hopefully!) in control of the conversation. I’m dictating where we go and the themes of the back-and-forth.

I’m reminded of the writer and critic Thyrza Nicols Goodeve who talks about the interviews she does as “collaborative conversations.” Here she is in conversation with Jarrett Earnest, from his book, What It Means To Write About Art¹:

They are really essays—an essay built from the dialogue between me and the other person. I’ve come to call them collaborative conversations, because they are really built in writing after the initial moment when I sit down to record a conversation with someone. I see the moment when you sit down as just one occasion, just the start, where you lay out material and follow paths and discover new connections. I am like you, I try to read everything, to see what’s been said, and I have a notebook in front of me with notes, but once I’m with the person it’s, Okay, now we’re here, what’s going to happen?

This feels right to me. I have an arc in my head of where I want it to go and what I hope to get from it but I’m also prepared if it seems like it wants to head in some other direction. My goal, going into every interview is to hear my guest say something I haven’t heard them say before. Even better if they say something they haven’t heard them say before. (This is why I like the Q&As after my lectures too!) To get there, I think, requires more than chatting. The prep, the research, the framework for conversation create a platform for exploring ideas together. It’s a fascinating balance between structure and improvisation. The structure has to be there for the discovery to happen.

This, of course, happens in the classroom too. I like to say that I follow my students; that I will not dictate what their work should look like, feel like, function, like, etc. I claim to be democratic, anarchic. That there is a flat hierarchy. But like a ‘conversation’ on my show, this is not true. There’s an immense amount of work that I put into the class beforehand. A structure is in place that the students get to play on top of. The control comes first, so only later the experimentation can happen.

In 2010, Steve Martin was interviewed on stage at the 92nd Street Y in New York by Deborah Solomon about his then-new novel, An Object of Desire. The book takes place in the art world, Solomon writes about art. The conversation they were having was about art. The audience was bored; they wanted to hear about comedy, about acting, about movies. Halfway through the interview, a staff member handed Solomon a note on stage, asking her to ask Martin about his career. After the event, the 92nd Street Y issued a refund to attendees. Responding to the interruption in The New York Times later that week, Martin wrote:

But I can’t help wondering what we might have said if we hadn’t been stopped. Maybe we were just around the corner from something thrilling. Isn’t that the nature of a live conversation? It halts, it stutters, it doubles back, it soars. We might have found a small nugget, something off topic or unexpected.

Maybe we were just around the corner from something thrilling. This is why I put so much time into my interviews, into my syllabi. This is why what I do are no longer conversations and why my students don’t actually get complete creative freedom. To make space for new ideas, that space has to be made. This is the balance between structure and improv. I’m trying to create a structure to help us get to something thrilling.

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