| "Live your life from your heart. Share from your heart. And your story will touch and heal people's souls.”-Melody Beattie |
I chose Sarah John because she was a fairly recent graduate of Hollins and being as close as it get's to graduating myself, I wondered what directions someone's life had gone in since recently graduating from this University. I felt very nervous of the interview process from the beginning. I love talking to people, but usually you encounter the person before you begin speaking with them. However, it didn't work in that way for my first interview with Sarah. Because Sarah lives in Atlanta where she is completing Nursing School at Emory our interview was done over the phone. I called her up and asked her to share really personal information about herself and although she was very good in sharing such information with me, I'm still not too sure if she knew what she was getting herself into! My game plan when interviewing was to not try and bias her story. I thought a good way to do this was by not agreeing or disagreeing with anything she said. This did not work out as well as I thought it would. I was pretty mute through our entire first interview and in a way I feel like it made me look uninterested. Although, I still feel she did a great job of telling me information on her life because I barely needed to ask many questions and she answered the entire list of short questions with out prompting. In my second interview I was not as worried about biases, the interview became more of a conversation and I thought it flowed better overall. Also, another thing I never thought about in the interview process is how hectic scheduling conflicts can be. I joined the class a few weeks late and have felt a few weeks late the entire semester. Both Sarah and I work and go to school while having a family life and it makes scheduling become insane. This is something the Self Narrative books haven't talked about much, but what I feel is an important aspect of the process. In reflecting on narratives, I really enjoyed seeing speech patterns in both Sarah and myself. For instance I never realized I said "right" so much! I also found it very interesting that I learned so much more about Sarah when I was transcribing her words. I would find thing's that I hadn't caught when we were talking during this process. What I will take away from this class is questioning why people choose the words and stories to tell about their lives or in everyday conversations and Lee Ray's question of what does that fib really mean? |