How I learned to stop worrying and love Zoom, live theatre, and talking on the telephone; and what they all taught me about in-person interviews. (Remember those?)

By: Casey Dooley

Six months into the pandemic and several weeks into the semester, I (like many people) was Zoomed out. Uncomfortable on camera and unable to find a way to make meaningful eye contact in meetings, I was discouraged by the idea of not being able to conduct my upcoming interviews in person. How could two strangers build rapport over a screen if decades-long friendships couldn’t use one to sustain a weekly craft night?

As luck would have it, I’d soon learn to see Zoom in a whole new light, one that would come to illuminate the ways in which old-fashioned phone calls might teach us a few tricks about interviewing people in person. (I know. I was surprised, too.)

On a Friday night in late September, I settled in to watch Dr. Nikki Yeboah’s The (M)others from my kitchen table, a.k.a. Zoom HQ. Within minutes of the digital curtain rising, I was laughing. I was crying. I was laughing and crying at the same time. Ordinarily not a theatre buff, my opinion of theatre and of Zoom had been transformed. Suddenly, something endemic of the pandemic was beautiful: Over the internet, actors in different homes were interacting with one another. They were even interacting with the audience, spread out around the world. A play purpose-written for a big stage had been reconceived for a small screen and an audience visible only via comments—all to incredible effect.

In sharing the multi-dimensional oral histories of four women brought together through unconscionable acts of police violence, The (M)others activated emotions that ran the gamut from rage to reverence. If a play written for live theatre could be pivoted to go on virtual tour (moving so many to action in the process!) maybe there was more to Zoom than met the eye. I decided to give the program’s potential another look, knowing that I had a handful of interviews on my docket.

Fast-forward a few weeks. In true 2020 fashion, it turned out that my back-up plan needed a back-up plan: For a variety of reasons, most of my semester was spent conducting interviews not over Zoom as I had anticipated, but via the telephone. Usually a tool for making ConEd calls and chatting with my mom, the phone seemed a poor match to my oral history endeavors. Iffy audio? No visuals or nonverbal cues? Never mind not knowing where to look while on a webcam—interviewing over the telephone meant no eye contact at all. 

I soldiered on through the semester, mourning the missed opportunities while embracing the chance to hear stories from narrators near and far. Midway through making the most of a mixed bag, I attended a workshop with Dr. Michelle Esther O’Brien of the NYC Trans Oral History Project. It was here that I learned how the NYC TOHP actively chooses to take unique approaches in collecting, preserving, and sharing trans oral histories. Through the use of techniques that rethink traditional oral history methodology, the NYC TOHP empowers its contributors to make bold moves in the name of documenting transgender resistance and resilience in New York City. For example, interviews are conducted by volunteers with little training, they’re all in the public domain through Creative Commons, and some narrators have been compensated for their participation.  

It clicked: Some things are a choice. Just as I’d learned to embrace Zoom by experiencing The (M)others, the NYC TOHP’s approach gave me permission to step away from the in-person interview style guide (so to speak) and explore the unconventional options posed to me while conducting oral history conversations over the telephone. Was I breaking rules or remaking them? What could I take away from these over-the-wire encounters? As it turns out, when you decide to forget what you thought you knew, you might just discover micro-moments where magic can be made:

• While interviewing in person, best practices have taught me to give as much priority to what’s seen as what’s said. Over the telephone, nonverbal communication takes a back seat and always-important silences are amplified. No longer able to longer rely on visual cues to know whether a narrator was pausing to search their memory or had completed a thought, deep listening came to the fore in a whole new way. Not only was I keeping an ear out for what was explicit and what was implied, I was tuned in to every silence as its own sort of miniature symphony. From far away, was that an intake of breath or a subtle sigh? A snicker or a sneeze?

• Furthermore, over-the-phone interviews shined a fresh light on the importance of creating rapport. How do you make someone comfortable if they can’t see you? Not being able to meet face-to-face meant I sometimes needed to connect with individual narrators a number of times before to the interview. Without the opportunity to start off with a smile, I found that I gained some valuable on-the-ground experience in relationship building that’s rooted in orality from the very first “hello.”

• Speaking of what’s unseen: Over the telephone I quickly recognized that I’d have to ask people to describe things because they couldn’t’t show me the view from their window, the photo in their hand, or the flower pressed in a book on the shelf behind them. Not every phone is equipped with FaceTime for a quick camera flip, and consequently I found my love for sensory questions grew exponentially, since they always seemed to bring even more stories to the surface. What color is the sky outside? (“Like peaches, but not the kind from the grocery store.” What other peaches are there?) How high was the snow in the picture? (“Hmm—higher than my hip, but I was wearing heels.” Why were you wearing high heels in a snowstorm?) What did the tree smell like when it was in bloom? (“I lost my sense of smell about ten years ago, so I don’t know.” How did that happen?)

• As it turned out, our training around audio quality was no joke — I immediately found that the recordings I could make over the phone paled in comparison to those I’d made in person or over Zoom. I became acutely aware of how an interview might sound to someone else, sometimes because I was having a tough time hearing in the moment myself. While these circumstances made me long for an in-person setup, they also encouraged me to advocate for the archives by overcoming any situational shyness and asking folks to adjust their handset or repeat what they’d just said. Beyond encouraging my boldness, the iffy audio served to underscore the importance of rich transcription as well as before-and-after field notes: Was that sound in the background an “off-mic” third party sharing a recollection? Did the call drop at any point, and if so, what happened off-tape once the callers were reconnected? Curious historians of the future might want to know.

Honed over the phone, these awarenesses won’t be any less valuable when the world gets back to in-person interviews, or if Zoom comes a-calling—and that’s a big part of their beauty. What’s more, I might even miss some aspects of telephone interviews, which often felt especially intimate on account of the opportunities they presented to focus on the aural in the absence of the visual. In making new choices, I came to new understandings. 

In the end, while reflecting on the arc of the last several months I now see that within unplanned pivot-points there are opportunities, and that even in established guidelines there’s room to forge an alternate path. As it turns out, beautiful things are just as likely to be born out of necessity (the mother of invention, after all) as they are to be made by design.

https://www.themothersplay.com/

https://www.nyctransoralhistory.org/

Casey is a recovering retail copywriter/conversation designer and an aspiring oral historian with a lifelong habit of talking to strangers. She wishes more people would ask more questions, and that twice as many people would make time to listen to the answers.