This is the Right Honourable John George Diefenbaker, 13th Prime Minister of the Dominion of Canada, being interviewed by a very young and very green reporter, me. My interview with Dief, though I am loathe to give it that much credit as an actual interview, stands as my personal benchmark. Nothing and I do mean nothing has ever, nor do I believe WILL ever be more intimidating than that interview.
It should probably be used as a textbook example of how NOT to interview.
Basically Mr. Diefenbaker talked about what he wanted to talk about and nothing else.
“About the Avro Arrow-”-asks callow youth.
“Ancient History! Next question!”-bellows The Chief.
“Young man, read that it says on that scroll on my wall!”-orders JDG.
“I can’t sir, it’s written in Latin,” -I apologize.
“You can’t read Latin young man?”-he says lowering his estimate of me yet again.
“No sir, but I could read it if were in French!”-shoots back smart-ass me. This went over like un ballon de fil since his expertise en français was merde!
I survived the interview and I have done many better interviews since. Whenever I get a challenging one, like Orhan Pamuk, Richard Ford or Eleanor Wachtel, I just remember Dief and it all falls back into perspective!
DIEF IS THE CHIEF!!!
I have reached something of a milestone with Bookbits for 2007. My 150th interview is up on YouTube and on my Bookbits.org/ca site. I think the site is starting to reach some sort of critical mass. In 2008 I intend to do more about promoting the site to publishers, authors and most importantly readers…oh ya and drop a good fifty pounds…SHRUG you never know!
Aside from my careers as book interviewer and morning show producer, I have also been a screenwriter. I haven’t had anything produced in the last few years as I’ve been concentrating on Bookbits.
Then today I stumbled on the theme for a TV show I worked on several years ago. “I Was A Sixth Grade Alien” was a YTV/FOX Family/Disney U.K. production based on a series of novels by Bruce Coville. One of the kids playing a fairly minor role, the uber-nerd kid Larrabe Hicks, was one Michael “Superbad” Cera. He was WONDERFUL to work with. Michael quickly became a favourite for the writers. Whatever weird thing we threw at him, he did it with endless enthusiasm and fantastic comic timing.
I’m pleased to see that Michael and Daniel Clark from “Sixth Grade” will be reunited in the upcoming film “Juno“. I wish them both well.
A funny thing happens inside my head. After I record an interview, I am frequently positive that it just sucked! This was the case with my interview with CBC Radio’s “Writers and Company” host Eleanor Wachtel. Her new book “Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields” is quite wonderful. But I managed to completely psych myself out before the interview. I remember trudging back up her street to my car berating myself for making a total ass of myself in front of the Dean of Radio Author Interviewers.
Happily today, when I finally summoned the courage to edit it, I discovered, it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. Here it is paired with my interview with the late great Carol Shields recorded more than ten years ago.
I was one of the first to interview Yann Martel about his 2002 Man Booker prize winning Life of Pi. I am pleased to see that six million copies later, he is still the thoughtful, non-materialistic, sweet, intelligent man he was back in September, 2001. He reminded me that his book was published on 9/11. It is a testament to just how good it is, that it was not lost in the torrent of those days.
Yann was in Toronto from his home in Saskatoon to promote a beautiful new illustrated edition of the book. Frankly, I was worried when I heard that idea, but I needn’t have. It is gorgeous!
It also doesn’t destroy the images I had created in my imagination.
It was great to sit and talk about the book without having to go through the whole plot explanation since I covered that the first time we spoke.
And there was a delightful bonus to meeting Yann again. I was introduced to his companion Alice Kuipers.
Alice is a writer and teacher and belly-dancer and pilates instructor and a bubbly fun joy to be around. My friend Jenn, who came to take pictures for me (and get her hot-tub fatigued copy of “Life of Pi” signed by Yann), and Alice got along brilliantly and were soon swapping e-mail addresses. I am really disappointed that I didn’t have a chance to interview her. In fact, I’d like to have been able to interview both of them together talking about the process of writing and leading a writing life under the same roof. Next time!
I’m a freak. My great-grandfather was a freak. My grandmother was a freak. My mother is a freak. My brother isn’t a freak. But I am happy to say my son is a freak too!
We have a freakish ability to read very, very quickly. My typical reading speed is more than 100 pages an hour. I’ve never taken a speed-reading course. It is just the way my brain works thanks to some mutated reading gene on my mother’s side of the family. The words go straight into my brain in big chunks off the page. I don’t hear the words in my head.
Being a freak is very handy since my job is to read a lot of books every year. This week tested me rather severely.
A publicist from Knopf Canada called mid-week to say she had an opening for me to interview Orhan Pamuk at 3:15 Friday afternoon. Pamuk is Turkish writer and professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. He is famously the 2006 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. This was a great coup for me. She said she’d send off the book by courier immediately.
Friday morning at 10 AM and there was still no sign of the book. A mad dash to Toronto followed. Happily I was able to contact my friend Jennifer Taylor, who had just the day before reported on her Facebook page having finished “Snow” one of Orhan Pamuk’s books. I asked her if she wanted to join me for the interview and she jumped at the chance. I sneaked her into the interview as my photographer.
I reached Random House just before noon. A copy of the book was waiting for me. Damn, it was fairly large. I flipped to the end of the book. 438 or so pages. Time remaining until the interview 3 hours and twenty minutes.
I raced to a restaurant around the corner, grabbed a burrito and started to read. When the restaurant began to fill with the lunch crowd I headed back to RHC-HQ. One of the publicists let me into an empty office and I furious dug into reading “Other Colors: Essays and a story”.
You may have noticed that they don’t give Nobel Prizes to idiots. His essays were very complex. His arguments about politics, literary theory, authors like Proust and Dovstoyevsky, were well-reasoned but dense. I felt dense. But not in a good way.
I finished the book just after three leaving me a couple of minutes to say hi to Jenn who had been waiting for about ten minutes at Random House reception. Then it was off to the interview. Did I mention they don’t give the Novel Prize to idiots? They also don’t give it to writer’s for being easy interview subjects. A few times he bristled when I asked him about things he had written in the book. He just didn’t want to talk about them. Now this is understandable because a few years ago something he said in an interview led him to be charged in Turkey with “Slander Against the State”. A major crime with a major sentence attached to it.
I presumed he was short with me because he sensed I was an idiot and never going to get to Stockholm to hang out with the King and get a medallion named after the inventor of dynamite. Apparently not. Sunday morning I listened to CBC radio’s Michael Enright, a fairly bright chap, interviewing Orhan Pamuk. He too was getting snippy answers. Finally Enright said, you don’t like journalistic questions do you! Vindication!
After the interview I had him sign my copy of the book for Jenn. She was thrilled and I have pictures of me with a Nobel prize winner! Seemed like a fair trade.
And now a brief digression from the business of books.
I’m a radio-rat. I started doing high school reports for the local station in Cambridge, Ontario (CFTJ) and eventually was hired to do some shifts.
My best job ever was producing the morning show at CKFM in Toronto where I had the honour of working with Don Daynard.
He was a truly BRILLIANT morning man. He was funny, real and just a delight to work with. My on-air name was R-2. It was a fun, but very stressful job. (I still have morning show nightmares…can’t find music or news clips or anything!…Daynard says he still has them too!) Eventually Don grew tired of being kicked around by the new management at the station and took a gig as morning man at CHFI.
A lot of morning men have switched stations over the years in Toronto. All but one of them bragged that he would bring his audience along with him. Only one morning man didn’t make that claim and he’s the only one who DID bring his audience. That was Don Daynard.
Last week a group of radio-rats from around the Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo-Guelph area got together to chew the fat (literally! Man that food was bad!) Here we are reunited about twenty years after we kicked butt on Toronto radio…okay HE kicked butt, I went along for the ride.
Thanks Don. It was an honour working with you, sir!
When I’m interviewing it is important for me to make eye contact with my interview subject. You can learn a lot watching someone’s eyes. What they want to talk about. What they don’t want to talk about. What areas about which they have more to say.
Making eye contact also tends to relax authors and make them believe you are concentrating on what they have to say, which for the most part is what I’m doing.
Then along came William Gibson.
First, let me say I’m a fan of his. He coined the term ‘cyber-space’, but had enough guts to admit that the cyber-punk look he was working on in his novels, was best expressed by the Art Director in “Blade Runner”. I was really looking forward to our interview. I’d read “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and while I didn’t feel it was his best book, it was enjoyable nevertheless.
I swear he never made eye contact with me once. His head was turned about 45 degrees from mine and he was looking up at the far upper corner of the Penguin boardroom. Nothing I could do would bring his gaze down and over to meet mine.
IT DROVE ME NUTS!!!
Over the years, I’ve come to conclude that:
a) He’s a very shy man.
b) It wasn’t his problem, it was, and is, mine.
He is still a fascinating writer and one of the best in his field. And on listening to it eight years later, I don’t think it sucks as much as I thought it did at the time.
I am just thrilled that I have interviewed three of the five 2007 ScotiaGiller Prize Finalists on Bookbits.
YouTube Link
I’m not sure who to cheer for because I liked all three books. Congratulations also to Daniel Poliquin for his novel A Secret Between Us, trans. Donald Winkler, published by Douglas & McIntyre and some guy named Michael Ondaatje for his novel Divisadero.
It is always fun to have a book assigned which I would like to read anyway. Having a hugely successful fantasy/historical series like Outlander could easily go to a lesser writer’s head. Not so Diana Gabaldon. I have interviewed her three times over the years and she’s still just as charming as ever. She likes to come to Toronto so she can take a side trip to the Fergus Scottish Festival and Highland Games.Originally she went to Fergus, which I swear has fewer people in it than any one of her books, because one of her characters was named Fergus. They liked her, she liked them and now the town invites her back for their festival every couple of years as a guest of honour.
YouTube Direkt nolink
Diana Gabaldon’s ‘Outlander’ universe now has two narrative strands. The story of the time-travelling Claire and her love for Jamie Fraser an 18th century highlander has spun off one of the major-minor characters into his own series with the latest “Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade”.
