Issue 14: A Tale of Two Podcasters
Welcome back to my newsletter where I share short, poorly edited notes about stuff I find interesting.
When I was 13, I wrote an essay arguing that Winnipeg was better than Edmonton. I had moved from one city to the other the year before, and I was still processing what had been a pretty stressful transition (it involved getting my first period the night before we set off on a 12-hour drive across the prairies among a host of other indignities). But I wasn’t self aware enough to express all this, so instead I channelled my frustration into a blistering compare and contrast essay using such salient metrics as size and population density to prove my feelings about my new home had a basis in hard facts.
That essay came to mind last week listening to episode 850 of the podcast CANADALAND where Jesse Brown drags legendary podcaster Marc Maron deep into his feelings about certain Canadian cities. You see, Maron is thinking about moving to Canada. His reasons have to do with the rise of fascism and the horrific effects of climate change, neither of which Canada is immune to but we do it all with fewer guns, I guess. Many left-leaning Americans have threatened to do this very thing, but Maron has actually applied for permanent residency.
The episode preamble promised that the conversation would get around to Maron’s incredible legacy as a podcaster, but that ended up falling along the wayside in Brown’s efforts to prove 1) that Canada is just as bad as the US and 2) Vancouver is the worst and Maron should move to Toronto instead where they can maybe become BFFs forever.
There has been, as one expects, blowback. Most of it has focused on a throwaway comment Brown made about Vancouver never inspiring any great songs or novels. My fellow Vancouverites took to twitter and penned editorials to argue for the quality of our city’s culture. Brown responded on Twitter with a big Toronto smirk, comfortable in his position as arbiter of what makes great CanCon.
Fewer folks seemed bothered by Brown’s bizarre insistence that Vancouver has a lock on gentrification, real estate speculation, poverty, political scandal or bad weather. He may be right about our tendency to wear a lot of athleisure and hiking gear, but come on. It’s comfortable. Even fewer mentioned how this weird need to prove to Americans that Canadian problems matter leads to treating our country’s very real social problems like weak attack cards in a grim game of Magic the Gathering.
Honestly, these comparisons don’t really matter in the scheme of things. As one clever friend pointed out, “Every place is awful in their own way” (an Edmontonian sentiment if ever I heard one). And these games we play to try to prove otherwise just make everyone look foolish.
What really gave me a full body cringe in the episode was the tone Brown created in setting out to educate Maron about his plans.
Maron’s show WTF has been running since 2009, making it the granddaddy of the interview podcast. He’s interviewed everybody and has a very specific style that I love. Maron has strong opinions and he’s not against bringing them into the interview, but he’s also good at giving his subjects space to respond and to move the conversation where they need to go. He makes them feel heard and comfortable when he needs to and pushes them when he needs to. While he sometimes wanders off on a tangent now and then, he always brings it deftly back to his guest. It’s the sort of thing you learn to do over decades of practice.
His conversation with Brown was about as far from that style as you can get. Brown’s desire to explain things to his guest took over. You could hear Maron back peddling, trying to make sense of the conversational trap he’d found himself in, but it kind of didn’t matter. This wasn’t about making Maron admit he had Canada all wrong. This was Brown showing off. And that, in the end, was what made it a painful conversation to listen to.
One thing I’ve learned from interviewing hundreds of people (and working with hundreds of students) is that when you enter a conversation with a desire to prove something about yourself, you’re unlikely to get much out of it other than what you brought in. A good interview, in particular, requires a fair amount of humility and self awareness, the ability to question your own assumptions as well as the subject’s.
I’m reminded of the stinging words of Vivian Gornick in The Situation and the Story that can apply to interviewing as well as writing: “When writers remain ignorant of who they are at the moment of writing–that is, when they are pulled around in the essay by motives they can neither identify accurately nor struggle to resolve–the work, more often than not, will prove false or severely limited.”
And I get it—I made this mistake in that essay I wrote in grade 8 and I’ve made it countless times since. It’s a lovely thing to do most of my work for print publications instead of radio, so the weird choices in my interviews never leave my computer’s transcription files. I would probably feel a bit overwhelmed at the prospect of chatting with Maron too.
But I think it’s worth remembering. When we enter a conversation, as Brown did, without an awareness of our own goals and a willingness to implicate ourselves, we wind up exposing ourselves in ways we didn’t intend to.
Thanks again for reading. You can probably find me on Twitter if you’d like to share your thoughts about what makes a good interview (although I’m trying to cut down on my time there, to be honest). If you'd like to read more or subscribe, you can do so here.
~Erika