This week I interviewed my mother about one of her favorite sweaters! She wanted us to introduce ourselves first so that it would feel formal, hence the strange beginning to an interview with my own mother

Me: Hi, I’m Molly and I just wanted to interview you about an object of significance to you, so what have you got here?

Participant: Hi, I’m Linda and what I have here, although it’s quite warm out today, I have one of my favorite sweaters. Um, it’s a favorite sweater of mine because it belonged to my uncle Bill, who is my great uncle

Me: Oh, can you tell me a little more about him?

Participant: Yeah, he was, um… an interesting… man. He grew, he was from, Scranton, Pennsylvania and he was a musician and he spent his whole life in, um, in love with a woman named Annette but they never got married, and one day she left Scranton and moved for, moved to Philadelphia and he followed her and he followed her and he moved into the YMCA and then he stayed there at the YMCA until he, um, got very old and Annette died, and after that he came to um… live by my parents, um, and when he died I Have his sweater from when he, from when he was an older man… and that was when I was a young woman so I’ve had this sweater about um… maybe already for about 30 years

… (discussion of finding things in pockets)…

Me: Oh, so it kind of bridges the memories?

Participant: mmhmm, yeah, it allows me to have past memories and other memories really long ago that were from even before my life probably that I knew about stories, old stories from the family and then umm, my own stories that I find in the pockets, so I think I have an eyeglass cleaner in the other pocket *laughs*

 

The sweater!

 

This week I chose to interview my mother about her favorite sweater, which she inherited from her uncle. It was actually a very interesting and enlightening experience, as I had noticed my mother wore the sweater regularly but did not really know the family history behind it, or the reason she liked the sweater so much, and I was actually surprised at the answers.

Once again, I feel like my weaker point was preparation, as Sophie commented on. Sometimes we had awkward silences, or I phrased questions in ways that were not necessarily the easiest to understand. I still am struggling to find that balance between structured and unstructured, and the balance between allowing the person to say what they wanted to and guiding the interview. I think this might be an issue that can only be resolved through more experience and practice. I would like to learn to make the silences less awkward, and definitely how to come up with questions on the spot and phrase them well enough to keep the conversation moving forward.

Sophie noted that she liked that I transcribed the interview copying the language fairly exactly, allowing the reader to follow the speech patterns of my informant. This mainly referred to the decision to leave in “uhhs,” “umms” and punctuation showing pauses, stops, and starts. This was something I did not necessarily even realize I was doing when I transcribed it. I just recorded all of this on my phone as an audio file, then immediately put in headphones and typed what I heard. The process was fairly automatic, so I was not actually thinking much about what I was typing, just trying to get down what she was saying as quickly and accurately as possible. Although this was not necessarily planned, or an active choice, I was happy that it had this effect on a new reader.