The title of this post (also an episode title from the West Wing) came to me recently during a class discussion on the pros and cons of conducting Oral History interviews.
When another student mentioned that oral history narrators will sometimes experience continuity errors in their own memory that can lead to skepticism over the validity of oral history interviews, my professor took it one step further to say that often narrators will also attempt to think of their lived experiences rather linearly.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore, because of this) means that one thing follows the other, therefore it was caused by it. But it’s not always true. In the context of oral history, it could be as simple as the narrator creating a linear connection between getting married back to when the couple first met when in reality, the couple didn’t get married just because they met. There was a complex series of lived experiences that led and built to a relationship and into a marriage that are all important to the larger story.
This discussion led my class to a point where we got to break into pairs and interview each other using different types of questions we’d discussed (open-ended, closed-ended, leading, etc.). My partner had experience in conducting oral history interview and was very good creating questions. I have a bit of interview experience from a number of years ago, but I was not prepared to be the narrator this time. She asked me excellent questions but when I had to answer, I found myself grasping at straws for answers. “Tell me about your childhood” sent me on an internal monologue of whether or not I’d even had a childhood because in this moment I could not remember a single thing I had done as a child whereas “Where were you born?” led me to detail the town, the population, the name of the hospital, and the fact that said hospital is now a retirement home and was also home to my pediatrician’s office until I was 12.
The difference in the experience moving from interviewer to narrator was quite astounding to me. I never expected to be so unfamiliar with my own story as I was. I was perfectly capable of reciting known facts (maybe offering too many at times), but when it came to constructing a story from memory, I found it much harder to find a place to start and to know what to include. I found myself wondering what I thought the interviewer wanted to hear about my childhood. Did she want to know that my friend Julian used to come over after school? Did she want to know that I almost always went to my Grandma’s house for lunch or that I started walking to school alone in grade 6?
In all, I think the experience of mock interviews has given me a lot to think about when it’s time to create my own questions for interviews. I see an importance in awkward silence as the narrator contemplates what information to include in a response, but also in having questions that help to lead the narrator to an answer without being a leading question. Perhaps rather than “tell me about your childhood” I would ask “tell me what it was like to be a child in this neighbourhood” and then progress to “so what was it like being the youngest of 8 children?” so as to separate the childhood at home from the childhood led with friends – but then again, depending on the context of the interview, maybe I would want to have those stories combined.
This discussion has left me with a lot to consider going forward in oral history, but I am definitely glad I got to experience the narrator side before starting any interviews as I feel I am a bit better equipped to create questions that help rather than hinder the interview process.
It has also left me with a West Wing reference that I will be carrying forward with me to every oral history interview I conduct in the future.