Weekend Assignment: Discovering Memories through Interviews

Your assignment this week will involve interviewing someone about some deeper relationship involving food and memory. What sort of topic might you consider interviewing someone about? Maybe you would consider interviewing a parent or grandparent about their memories of something that their grandmother used to make. Perhaps you might ask a fellow Loyola student to describe a special holiday tradition celebrated by their family that involves food. The topic does not need to be about New Orleans, but it must involve you asking an interview subject to tell you about a memory they keep that involves food.

Assignment specifics: Record using some sort of recording device (iPhone, digital recorder, etc.) a 10 to 15-minute interview. Transcribe the interview by typing up an exact copy of what your interview subject says. (It takes about an hour to transcribe a ten minute interview.) If you do not have a phone that is capable of recording audio, you can check out an audio recorder from Media Services.

Take a photograph of the person you interview, and post it to the top of your entry. 

Then, using this transcript, you will assemble a blog post using ONLY what your interview subject says to tell a story of this memory.

This is a challenging assignment!

Think about the sorts of questions that you ask so that you ask them in a manner that encourages your interview subject to supply detailed answers. 

Ask questions that invite detailed description. For instance: "describe the scene at the dinner table." If someone mentions a person, ask "Tell me about the time that you two became friends."

IN addition to your blog post, I want you to hand in a copy of your interview's transcript.