From Telling True Stories

Isabel Wilkersons section "Interviewing: Accelerated Intimacy" hit very close to home for how i felt as a student community organizer in our very own Building Blocks program two years ago. I remember knocking on many doors in my assigned neighborhood and after only one or two sentences of my introduction and explanation to the residents, many of them slammed the door in my face simply because they saw me as an intruder.

Although I wasn't interviewing the residents to write an article, the idea of myself, a perfect stranger, wanting to talk to them about their community and their views was understandably a little unsettling at first. After the third or fourth time the residents saw me walking up and down their block or talking with their neighbors, they became a little bit more comfortable with me and the idea that i was just a college student promoting a program that was more beneficial to them more than to me.

I intentionally held off with a few of the residents, only asking basic introductory questions about their families, hoping to find something in common i could latch on to in order to make a deeper and more personal connection - or as wilkinson put it "making a connection with the person to accelerate getting to know them" (32).

All of the phases of this "accelerated intimacy" are pretty much exactly what i had to do to accomplish my goal as a student community organizer. My only qualm with Wilkinson's advice is that at the end of the interview, the relationship is pretty much dead. As soon as you reach "the center of the onion" as a reporter, you've got what you wanted, the subject knows nothing about you, and your work there is done.

This makes me incredibly uncomfortable simply because I believe in cultivating mutual relationships in order to get a fuller picture of inside the subjects life and mind. Building Blocks taught me that the more you share about yourself and the more you can empathize with the subject, the more they trust you and are willing to tell you their experiences.

While Wilkinson provides a good feel for how to initiate an interview, I don't believe I myself could ever judge and report someone else's life without sharing a little bit about myself in exchange. That is of course, only if the subject had an interest in me and my motives for writing their experiences. Is this something I need to get over in order to successfully write Narrative Journalism?