Key points to remember for interview preparation:

1. Choose a person who genuinely wants to tell their story. You also should be genuinely interested.
    I suppose it would be kind of difficult to interview someone about something you could care less about, especially when the point of your project is to make others care about that topic/person.

2. Write a short list of questions
    Important word = Why.  Why questions are key for pulling details out of people's responses. Do not expect to read questions off of the list during the interview, it will take away from the fluidity of the responses.  It's okay for the interview to take an unexpected turn (something I am sure I will struggle with). Research your topic for a better list of questions.  Pictures from your narrator's past can also be a useful source for compiling a list of questions - they can help to evoke stronger memories, and give you more possibilities for discussion.

3. Write reasons why the person interests you.
    For more in-depth topics.

4. Analyze your questions lists.
    This will give you the opportunity to check for leading questions and decide which questions could lead to boring answers.

5. Practice questions.
    Obvious reasons. You won't be reading off of the question list, and it isn't a terrible idea to have a clue about what you will be asking.

Questions regarding the interview:

If the interview is not working out the way you intended, is it worth going back for another try, or should you try to find another person to use as a source for your oral history project?

When you are putting together a written piece from an interview, are you supposed to write everything word for word?

If a film maker can edit an interview, does a person creating a written piece or using a recording have the right to edit things out for effect, or does this make the piece less genuine?

    This reading has definitely helped me to expand my understanding of what oral history is.  The first thing that was reinforced was that there are different ways of going about an oral history project.  It can be a formal or informal interview.  It could be rehearsed or on the fly.  It can also be a collaborative piece - which was something that I had no previously considered.  An example given in the article is that John G. Nicolay and William Herndon took recollections from different people about Abraham Lincoln, and several of them were oral accounts.
    I especially liked the idea of having a similar theme to interviews with different groups of people.  The article mentioned interviews with people who are illiterate, and I think that this makes writing more accessible and is an important way to include other persepctives that would have not otherwise been involved in the history of an event.  It is certainly giving me more ideas about the different options that are out there for our oral history project.
    The article states that in an interview, "the questions of the interviewer, deriving from a particular frame of reference or historical interest, elicit certain responses from the narrator, deriving from that frame of reference, that persons sense of what is important or what he or she thinks is important to tell the interviewer".  This made me realize how important the conversational aspect of an interview needs to be. The interviewer has to act as a driving force, constantly pushing the narrator and affecting the narrator's responses.  As scary as it is to engage in such an unpredictable pattern, I am kind of excited by the idea of doign something that I can't necessarily plan until I'm blue in the face.  Allowing the narrator's emotions to come through and change the course of the interview as necessary gives oral histories a genuine quality that

“With this sense of Dewey's foundational place in our thinking about narrative inquiry, our terms are personal and social (interaction); past, present, and future (continuity); combined with the notion of place (situation). This set of terms creates a metaphorical three dimensional narrative inquiry space, with temporality along one dimension, the personal and the social along a second dimension, and place along a third.” (50).

            This could be one of the most helpful things I’ve read all semester.  Clandinin and Connelly have given us a blueprint for understanding the interactions that exist within narratives. I feel that this has also given me direction for writing my own narratives and engaging in narrative inquiry.  I will have a better understanding of what a writer is trying to accomplish and what I am expected to feel from a piece.  I can see how context is so important, and the idea of place/situation gives us that context. 

“Moreover, his encounter with Ming Fang led Michael to wonder about himself, his family, and his community life and how his story of himself in relation to other cultures was shaped by family and community stories on the rural landscape.” (52)

            I feel that this directly connects to what I will have to do as a teacher for every single one of my students once I have my own classroom.  I will have to place myself in their shoes by remembering and cross-referencing my own past to gain a better understanding of what kinds of backgrounds they come from, as well as what kind of dynamic this might bring to the class.

“Working in this space means that we become visible with our own lived and untold stories.” (9-10).

                This quote resonated with me because of what we are going through in our class now with the Twitterive assignments.  We are putting ourselves in the three dimensional space that has been described in this reading by sharing our Twitterive projects (which put ourselves in a specific place).  Many of us have included all three dimensions in our projects without even realizing that this has happened.  While projects are being shared and I find that I have more and more in common with my classmates, I find myself doing exactly what “Michael” from this reading had done with Long Him and the Chinese woman he was working with.  I am analyzing and comparing and contrasting my experiences with the experiences my classmates are describing to gain a better understanding of our perceptions of our experiences. 

    This reading was very difficult for me to understand at first.  The idea of “narrative research” is a completely new concept to me – I now know that the only research I’ve ever really experienced was quantitative, not qualitative like this reading describes.  It was difficult for me to grasp the idea that there is a type of research which “allows wondering, tentativeness, and alternative views to exist as part of the research account,” (25).  I’ve always viewed research as a pathway to find something that is definitive and absolute – not something that necessarily allows for interaction.  I think that in order for me to really get a good grasp on the meaning of this reading, I would have to see an example of narrative research.

“In turning, narrative inquirers recognize that the researcher and the researched in a particular study are in a relationship with each other and that both parties will learn and change in the encounter.” (9) 

                Upon reading this, I noticed that I immediately put up my guard.  I didn’t want to even think about the possibility that the researcher and researched are meant to interact with each other.  I did not understand how it could be okay for “the researched” to change – this sent up red flags in my head and I argued y way through the majority of the reading because of this.  If “the researched” can change, how is it possible for any researcher or group of researchers to come to a conclusion?  How could you find any truth to what they find?  I thought that this directly contrasted with a later quote “By labeling the researcher or the researched as bounded, we mean that the knowledge of the researcher and the knowledge of the researched are separate and distinct from each other and even when the interact the distance between them can be maintained and guaranteed” (10).  If “the researched” and “the researcher” are meant to interact, how is it possible to truly maintain a distance from it? I cannot help but see these two things as completely opposing ideas.  It wasn’t until I thought about a narrative assignment given in The Writer’s Mind a year ago that I began to start to put some of the pieces together.  I remembered how we were meant to consider audience and develop an understanding of how they will interact with our piece.  I realized that the fact that they were interacting with the piece did not change what the piece was about, and the majority of the audience managed to come to the same conclusions about it.

“a recognition that in translating experience to numeric codes researchers lose the nuances of experience and relationship in a particular setting that are of interest to those examining human experience” (15).

        This piece of the reading was the part that really struck a chord with me.  I worked on a bit of research with another professor for several months, and my jobs were to transcribe recordings of classes, code the transcriptions and blogs from class responses, and help analyze the results from coding.  The coding process involved picking apart the transcriptions and classifying the phrases and terminology used into different categories.  Those categories were eventually turned into numbers, were all used in statistics.  Although I understood the reasons behind coding, even then I felt that this lost some of the complexity of the responses some of the students gave in their blog responses and in class.  It seemed as if it were too simple of a research method to completely understand the way in which students learn.  You lose tone and a real understanding of what is important to the students.

1. How has technology improved your writing?

                Technology may not have necessarily improved my writing as of yet; I still feel as if I am in the rudimentary stages of developing my knowledge of writing and technology.  I am still experimenting, and trying to understand the new avenues technology has given me with writing.  I can say that it has broadened my understanding of what writing is, and has therefore given me new resources for material.  I never considered using “tweets” as a source for writing pieces, and this has forced me to reconsider what I consider writing to be.  This could be looked at as an improvement in some small way, but I am not satisfied enough to consider it as such.

 

2. How has technology connected you or made you more mindful of your writing and place?

                Technology has connected me more to other people’s writing than to my own writing.  It is much easier for me to see how other people are interpreting assignments, discuss, and get collaborate with other people.  Because of this, I could say that technology has changed my “place” of writing – it’s not longer something that is simply shared between me and a professor, it is now something that is shared with the rest of the class and whoever happens to stumble upon my blogs, tweets, and sites, etc.    It is now written in a place that has the potential to receive immediate feedback.  This alone has made me more mindful of my writing – the fact that other people can see my work right away is pretty intimidating.   For me, it makes writing in itself more difficult to tackle, but has forced me to focus more on revision.

3. How has technology impacted your identity construction?

“Online, everyone has bulletproof social armor” “I was sick of being in awkward social situations I couldn'tlogo* of, so I joined SecondLife.”

                Two quotes jumped out at me after reading Rock My Network in reference to this question: “Online, everyone has bulletproof social armor”, and “I was sick of being in awkward social situations I couldn’t log out of”.  Online profiles have played such a huge role in identity construction for anyone who regularly uses them.  Frankly, I find Stites’s description of online identity construction to be pretty damn scary.  How could anyone retreat to “fake” identities as a way to avoid regular social pressures that exist in face-to-face conversation? 

                Through online profiles, we are now forced to analyze ourselves and to convey our characters in ways that we feel would best fit an environment – whether it is truthful to how we are in person or not.  I found a lot of fault in this at first, but then I thought, isn’t that what writing is? Isn’t writing the construction of another environment that we’ve envisioned and the dynamics of the relationships our characters have with one another and the environment?  This is exactly what we as writers are doing, especially in this class.  We are writing to provide an image of perfection (with our class requirements as a reference point) through our writing to our professors and to each other. This isn’t something that simply happens in online writing – it is something that can happen in any writing situation.

1. Does it need transitions, or is it best left alone?
2. Does a piece like this need a conclusion?
3. How can I write to "show" my shyness early on in the job?
4. Was I able to convey a growign comfort level/happiness with the bar by the end of the piece?
5. Are there any unnecessary genres or genres that are missing?
6. Does the Twitterive engage the reader enough, and if not, wht

1. Who are the characters? Me, coworkers, and patrons
2. What connection do you feel to your place? It's become my second home and everyone there has become another family to me.
3. When does the story take place? 2 1/2 years ago to present day
4. Where does the story take place? The bar I work at
5. Why does the story take place? My job has become a big part of my life, it's not just a job to me anymore
6. How are you "delivering"/presenting the story? Through narrative, microfiction, lists, pictures, interview, recipes, character descriptions, songs

I thought that discussing the Twitterive was helpful.  It made me more comfortable with talking about what is going on in my piece, and I feel more confident about it.  Seeing where other people are with it helped me to realize that we are all on the same page with the project, and it is helping me to feel less stressed about completing it.

Stephanie Slammer? Like I’m really scared. My record is like, what, like 50-0 somethin? Whatevs! I got this girl beat! I fight like I fist pump.  You wanna talk about a situation? I’ll give you a situation. So what if I broke my jaw this past summer when that ugly bartender punched me in the face? So what if I got a little tipsy off of the juice and have a hangover? I'll take her even with a broken nail! My personal trainer got me ready – we walked up and down the boardwalk every day, did like 10 jumping jacks twice a week or something – I could fist pump circles around that girl.  I’ll get my GTL on and show this grenade how it’s done!  WHERE'S MY PROTEIN?!

Experimenting with writing in different genres has shed light on differnet aspects if my writing.  For one, I need to vary my sentence structure, and I noticed this the most when searching through my microfictions for the found haiku poem.  Almost every single one of my sentences has the same rhythm to it, and it annoyed the hell out of me when I went back and reread it a few times.  If I could, I would go back and change up the micrifiction about the fire. and developthe style a lot more.  I could stress different feelings just by rearranging the rhythm of the sentences.  It is definitely something I will awnt to pay more attention to.

Another thing that I noticed while writing in different genres is how so much of what I write connects to one specific person/place in my life.  I'm not sure if this leads to something that should be used for e twitterive assingment, but there is most definitely a clear subject and theme that is emerging throughout.

This is a haiku taken from both of my microfictions.  It was constructed like the found poem.  I might add in a few more, it was fun messing around with these. :)

It is all gone now
A monumental failure
Losing sanity


Found Poem:  This was a little more difficult to put together.  It was taken from 11 tweets from my twitter account. Oh, and don't laugh. I HATE writing poetry. Haikus don't count. :P

The tweets (with used phrases/words in bold):
1. "You must not have seen that it was supposed to get cold tonight." Thanks captain obvious.
2. "I could not write that photo."
3. In complete shock
4. "He assimilated and disassimilated the orange." I get that we're talking about Tron, but couldn't you just say "broke up"? interesting language...
5. Clearly misunderstood the blog assignment and did it all wrong. how? i don't know, but i feel really dumb.
6. Desperate to get out and see something new.  I need one damn day off for an aimless roadtrip to get me out of this funk.
7." It takes an ocean not to break"
8. Organized chaos
9. Going to overcome one of my fears, now if only someone would tell me how to convert .3g2 -> mpeg. HELP!
10. I thought my twitter microfiction would be easier. SURPRISE. 250 words of "I just can't get it right."
11. GA(anxiety)D: The little switch to make you feel better is burried deep within you, you just can't access it when you need it most.

Overcome
We were a microfiction,
Disassimilated in complete shock.
Pretending - we must have have seen it coming,
Now both overcome and burried deep under an ocean.
I could not write our future, you could not stand the anxiety.
Desperate to see something-
We clearly misunderstood
Organized chaos.
Dig out and overcome.
If only you would tell me how.


I tried to keep both poems related, just to see what would come of it.