Another Fishing Line

Thus far, I have been working as a line catcher for celery soup, reeling in the best stories in hopes of an exciting tale. Usually I am collecting stories from locals in order to write them into a future play. This week, I spent time line catching from the play actors themselves.

          This past Saturday Touch and Go became the first community production on the stage of the Dr. Philip’s Center in downtown Orlando. 

In between their performances this Saturday, I had the opportunity to ask the performers and stage crew questions. How did you get involved with Celery Soup? What has been your favorite scene to perform or watch? What would keep you from working with Celery Soup in the future?  What do you hope this play will teach the actors, the audience, the Sanford community? Several of these conversations stayed brief and to the point because the speakers were busy with their families, preparing for the show, or unwilling to share very much. Fortunately others were very willing to talk and our conversations brought about both laughter and tears.

I also got another perspective of the stories when I talked to several audience members. They did not let me record their interviews, but I did learn from them. Like many of the actors, they were amazed and delighted the bonds between actors and stories despite the actors’ background, origins, or ethnicity. Like many actors they congratulated the play at both promoting that and living it out.  

Conducting these interviews will help Celery Soup through the rigmarole of paperwork. But that is not all it will do. Because of their testimonies I better understand what sorts of stories the community is interested in and what aspects of those stories make them fascinating and engaging for both the actors and the audience. As I transcribed this week I continued to think about this. What stories would be best in a play? What themes might be prominent in the next play? What keywords should I highlight to make that more possible? 

Posting Questions

          This week I am spending almost all of my time transcribing. I listen to the audio we’ve recorded during the interview (at .75 speed) and I still have to pause every thirty seconds or so because the speaker is talking too fast. (I’m very excited because I’ve finally finished transcribing the longest interview!) Instead of subjecting y’all to another blog about typing, I am going to talk about using questions to direct interviews.

          One of the hardest things about conducting an interview is staying on task. During our first interview, Trish took the lead which meant that I could interject thoughts or pose questions whenever they occurred to me. However the lead interviewer cannot respond willy-nilly to the interviewees. In their mind there must be a preexisting map with broad strokes on where the conversation needs to go.  As an example, in this series of interviews, we are specifically looking for stories of romance, stories about hard times, about times when the community came together, about someone’s help in desperate times.

          Yet, we still need all of the stories that do not fit into these categories. If we limit ourselves to just our keywords, we will miss all of the story gems that litter the periphery of the tales. Discerning the line between superfluous detail and becomes the interviewer’s task. My task. So far, I have found that the best tool for to directing the conversation is preparing questions beforehand which apply specifically to the interviewee’s life and which will likely lead to both interesting stories and tales which incorporate the themes we are looking for. 


Some generic introduction questions are always helpful: 
Include community based questions: 
  o Describe two things that make you distinctly you?
  o How long have you been here in Sanford?

Before the interview I knew that Faye was a gospel musician, so I prepared several questions (20) about that. If you know anything about the interviewee, prepare questions which specifically relate to their life.Here are my examples:
    o What is the most important thing your family taught you about music?
    o What was the first tune(s) you learned?
    o  How has your religion affected you music?
    o  How has your heritage affected your music?
    o   Have you ever seen God do something miraculous here in Sanford?
    o  Has your singing ever been on obstacle for living life?

Avoid technical questions, questions which will result in a one or two word answer, or questions which are too specific to the interviewee:

    o Have you been in competitions? Any prizes? 

    o  How do you handle mistakes during a performance?

Don't forget romantic questions:
    o   When you went on a date, what did you do? where did you go?
    o   When did you first meet your husband?

Ask questions about their connection to this town:
    o  How has your music (or life) impacted Sanford?
    o   How has Sanford affected your life (music, whatever they do)?
    o   Describe an event that changed the appearance or character of Sanford?
    o   What was your favorite location in Sanford? is it still here?

Ask questions about community and friendship:
    o Can you remember a time when someone helped you just when you needed them?
    o Describe a day when you are most happy to be in Sanford.
    o If you can pass one thing on to the next generation, what would it be?

Prepare questions based on other keywords that Celery Soup is currently looking into.

          When you have composed all of these questions, sort them by category, so that you can easily access them in the middle of the interview. Also, accept the fact that most of your questions will remain unused. You need a plethora of questions to choose from, but will never have time address them all in a one or two hour interview. Perhaps rank your question, marking the ones that you absolutely want to address. 

Faye Henderson

          This Wednesday I led an interview with a woman named Faye Henderson. Her husband, John, and she co-pastor a church there in Sanford, and she has a phenomenal voice. Her mother raised her in the state of Florida but they lived in several cities. Faye currently holds a position in Celery Soup’s play this year, using her voice in the rising action of the play.

            Before coming to the interview, it was important for me to think about what I would say during the interview. First I looked her up online and on Facebook to find out basic information about her life. Then I used what I found out to compose questions which might lead to more interesting stories and which would incorporate the themes and keywords which we are thinking about using in our upcoming play. Next I typed up these questions, there were enough to fill an entire page, which is beneficial since I did not know which questions would spark Faye’s interest.

           When I arrived, Trish and I had thirty minutes before the interview to discuss my plan. She asked me to think about which direction the interview might go and how I intended to guide it there. She also critiqued my questions, identifying the most promising questions and cautioning me regarding those questions which would lead to a technical discussion instead of a narrative story. Trish also reminded me how to check the recording devise before and during the interview.

          Our conversation ranged through childhood, to grandparents, love, romance, orange groves, gospel singing, parents, siblings, moving, mentors, and many more topics.        

Overall the interview was a dream... and now I have a lot of transcription work to do.

Touch and Go

          Last night, I had the chance to watch a performance of Touch and Go by Celery Soup (inspired by the touch and go of airplanes practice landing, and the way people and events momentarily touch our lives). Going in, I knew what to expect because I read through the script several weeks ago. Understandably, the performance was not cinematic brilliance since the cast consisted entirely of volunteers. Nevertheless it offered a superb example of good story telling because it got two things right.

First it demonstrated this generation’s connection to the past.

          The entire play is a continuum of recollection about the past of this town. Through words and visuals they impressed upon the audience their own connection to the past by remembering great events in the town’s past and characters who have strut and fret their brief hour upon the stage, but are heard no more. They told stories about the past, and reminded the audience that our present will soon become a new past. How we live, what we do, whom we remember will impact the future. True to good storytelling, they recognized that history has neither beginning nor end. Arbitrarily history chooses one moment or experience from which to look back or, perhaps to look ahead. This method of remembering forced the audience to think about the concept of change: the good, the bad, the inevitability of it all.

Secondly, Touch and Go reminded the audience that history is memory, a tenuous thing.

          

          Once a memory is forgotten, the story is dead. History dies. In a particularly arresting scene at the end of the play, a woman comes on stage and recalls her ancestor’s enslavement from Cameroon almost four hundred years ago. Then she recalls their children, great-grandchildren, great-great grand relations to her. She recalls how her enslaved ancestors told their children stories from the past because they were not allowed to learn to read or write it down. We remember them, she say, in respect. When their memory dies they are gone, and they will end with her. Without children to remember her past, who will listen to her past and remember them? Will we remember them? Will we remember her? Who will remember Sanford?

Another great strength of Touch and Go  was the transfer of true stories, albeit with a little creative re-working.

"Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But you believed it, you found something true about yourself." ― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

          Like most memoir stories or creatively rewritten histories, the playwrights were “less concerned with facts and details than in the “truth” of experience, whether of a moral, spiritual, or psychological nature.”[1] As I said in my initial post, I believe that, while names and dates have their place in recording factual events of the past, the most important aspect of history is the transference of memories from one generation to the future.  

“Some stories demand to be remembered. They help us make sense of our lives, connecting us to one another and to those who lived long ago. As [the] characters come to understand the truths that give their lives meaning, so, too, do we.”[2]