If you were to interview someone, who would it be? What questions would you ask? If you were to be interviewed, what questions would you want to be asked?
My friend Mary has been telling me for years and years that there’s an expansion that happens with different forms of media.
If you’re a book lover, like me, reading feels like the ultimate experience. Who needs anything else! If you’re a writer, you think writing is the ultimate way. Why do anything else? I wasn’t terrifically interested.
Mary was trying to open my eyes to the possibilities. She’d tell me how when she heard a writer give an interview, she knew another dimension of that person. A person’s voice was another “dimension.” Seeing the person “live” via video on YouTube or something like a TED talk, added another dimension – that of sight. The more each of these dimensions were available, the more her senses were given the chance to “take in” the person, and the more she felt she knew them. Even a picture is always nice, she’d say.
I could agree – about other people. She was right. I liked seeing a picture on a book jacket. I always read the blurbs about the author. I wasn’t much of an audio/visual person, but when I’d happen to hear or see an author, I did like it. If I got really enamored by someone’s work, I’d occasionally go on-line to read more about them and if I found a short audio or video, I felt “lucky” to get to hear or see them. I knew what she meant. I did get a fuller picture. But I didn’t think it was for me.
Yet I began to feel an urge, about a year ago, to do interviews. I’ve met so many fascinating people over the years. Lots of these “meetings” were taking place via email and after a while I’d long for something more and I was really intrigued by the idea of turning the tables. What does the reader of a book like A Course of Love have to say about the experience? I’d still like to try out this idea. But did I have an urge to “be” interviewed? To have someone ask me questions that I’d have to come up with answers to off the top of my head, (so to speak), live, in the moment, under pressure? Not really.
It’s been interesting to have a couple of interviews under my belt now, to see how different each one is, how different people have dissimilar questions, how their questions are prompts that help me discover a spontaneous expression. How seldom I have to “go to my head” and how I can answer from the heart. I spoke of this quality of difference that is found in relationship during a recent radio show on ACIM Gather. It was the first time someone from the listening audience posted a question “to the board.” That question made the rest of the hour feel so much more personal. I was grateful for it and it was a really lovely shift into a more communal feeling zone. Finally, here is a portion of a “live” interview I just posted on YouTube (short and sweet, only 6 minutes).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GpvboEmaKU
