Interview Post Variations and The Role of Travel Bloggers on Dwellable

I try to see interviewing as performance art, and just take it as it comes.  Liz Phair

The simple joy and logic of posting interviews on a blog needs little explanation. Or WriterViews as they should be called–at least within the literary blogging community, since more often than not, interviews are completed via email exchange. Whether you point one question at an entire group of humanity around an uncommonly common experience (like Dr. Raymond A. Moody, Jr. in his near-death exploration Life After Life ) or you deliver a series of questions for a sumptuous in-depth hour (Bill Moyers, Charlie Rose, Oprah, Barbara Walters), let’s consider some variations for innovation’s sake. “Innovation-high”–for this poet at least–ranks a close second to highs from caffeine, chocolate, exercise, or winning obscure poetry or blogging awards. The more smart, creative fun you can muster, the more everyone gains from the exchange, so go for the jugular.

As does fiction editor Meg Tuite at Connotation Press (the raciest of my examples, so skip the link if  you haven’t had your morning coffee or evening scoop of Haagen-Dazs) in her interview with fiction writer Gregory Sherl. She starts out discussing her reaction to her interviewee’s writings: “Gregory Sherl inspired and blew me away the first time I read his work and I have never been disappointed…” and then ramps it up a notch, “…I have never been disappointed, only obliterated, in a good way.” She’s warming up here: “obliterated, in a good way” is a beautiful way to describe how she’s affected. Unusal, raw. Tuite goes on to say, “Sherl’s [work/heart] is equipped with all the valves, ventricles and atriums.”

I suspect the fact that novelist Tuite brought her unabashed wordsmith self to the interviewing table as she crafted lead-ins to her questions brought her to this next exciting juncture, where after asking Sherl to “elaborate on any of the three pieces” he sent the press, she decided the interview “had to move in its own orbit.” Thus begins their circling of one another: she throws Sherl a line or two and he riffs right back with melodious lines of his own. Brilliant. The interview just became art.

In this next variation (admittedly tamer), yours truly was invited to write a guest post for Lisa Rivero based on her question, what exactly is a poetry editor? Because I’d only been on board at The Fertile Source for six months, I relayed an anecdote about why it matters to make poetry accessible to exhausted mothers and closed by drawing on the expertise of several veteran poetry editors. I kept it simple with two questions: What do you find the most challenging about being a poetry editor and what do you find the most rewarding? The answers from editors Christine Klocek-Lim (Autumn Sky) and Marjorie Tesser (The Mom Egg)  live here at  The Fertile Source.

Here’s another slight variation on the “self-interview.” To borrow from our near-death expert again, in Life after Life  Dr.Moody strengthens his case in chapter 4, Questions, where he lists the most frequently posed objections he encountered from people during his research, starting with, “Are you just making all this up?” And then he gives his rebuttal. Consider the power then, of playing devil’s advocate, grilling yourself, and outsmarting the resistance.

Or share the interview burden and simultaneously widen your scope: work in a group. On the heels of A Room of Her Own Foundation’s 2011 Summer Retreat, four of us used our blogging skills to extend insights and inspiration from retreat attendees to other women who may not have been able to attend. We drafted up a core set of questions specific to the retreat (highs, inspirations, connections and book titles attendees wished to share).

But as we later worked alone with our individual authors, we researched backgrounds and crafted additional unique questions based on each writer’s work and life. While we collected the interviews on a main blog platform on Posterous titled AROHO Speaks: Writer to Writer, we also cross-posted the interviews on our own blogs which helped broaden the reader base for the interviewees (and inadvertently, brought new readers to our sites).

Or, as was the case for this last example, take the opportunity to interview a reader who finds your blog and engages. In early January, I wrote a post titled, Crossing the Blue Bridge: Navigating by Mermaid. The post focuses on remaining spiritually connected despite shifting location and the sorrow of leaving friends behind by paying attention to repeated symbols—in this case, mermaids, from a small physical mermaid found in our new rental house to the ethereal songs of the mermaids/singers of the vocal group Kitka to a tiny bar of mermaid soap made in Cazadero, California.

I received an email from Dwellable (a travel site aiming to offer honest appraisals of potential accommodations for travelers) asking if I wanted to add a link to their page about the city of Cazadero and place a Dwellable button at the end of my post. As a blogging instructor and as a typically wary blogger in general, I wanted to know whether such a link proved as an endorsement or was in fact simply link love. My email exchanges with Jane, Dwellable’s Online Community Manager, culminated in this mini-interview I’ll share with you here:

Who came up with the idea of pulling in bloggers at large for your Leaderboard on Dwellable? Or where you have seen it working before (I think it is a cool model)?

The main concept behind Dwellable is to create a better, unbiased user experience for travelers. We know that good user experiences are social experiences, so we wanted to involve travel bloggers–the most enthusiastic community of storytellers and reviewers on the web. From the beginning, we made it a priority to engage travel bloggers by directing our site visitors to check out other people’s experiences in the destinations they are considering traveling to. The idea of having bloggers include a “Dwellback” button in their travel blog posts and in exchange linking back to their blog from Dwellable is modeled after the Spoonback system on Urbanspoon, which was co-founded by one of the co-founders of Dwellable, Adam Doppelt.

What do you see as Dwellable’s role on the Internet and what role do you see bloggers playing in the site’s development? Are you assigning bloggers to travel, finding existing blogposts, some combination of both? Any desire to talk about blogger motivation and participation (I saw your recent travel post contest, for example)?

At Dwellable, we look for blog posts that people have written about their travel and vacation experiences. We feature blog posts that have already been written because we value the authenticity inherent in non-sponsored writing and reviews. Because Dwellable is a vacation rental search engine, the travel blogger community is an essential component of Dwellable’s success. I understand bloggers’ motivation to feature their posts on Dwellable to be multifaceted. One of the main things bloggers get excited about is the exposure that their blog gets because we direct our visitors back to their site. Another motivating factor is our Leaderboard, where we rank bloggers based on the number of blog posts that they have featured. They also like to include the Dwellback button on their post as a little sign that tells people that their blog has been recognized and lauded by another web entity. Plus each featured blogger gets their own profile page, which is a cool way to see all of your travel blog posts organized.

Not too long ago we held a contest to see who could get the most Dwellbacks in one week, and we were overwhelmed with bloggers’ enthusiasm to participate. The winner wound up featuring nearly 50 posts about his travel experiences, and his prize was an interview about him and his blog, featured on our blog, Dwellable Trends (if you’re interested to know, the winner was Ed Paff, Jr., who is currently the #1 blogger on our leaderboard).

Is there anything that  you’d like to share about your personal relationship to blogging and how it has changed or evolved since you started blogging?

Since beginning my work at Dwellable, I gained a new understanding of what motivates people to blog. Storytelling is one of our favorite rituals as humans and when people blog, that’s exactly what they’re doing–sharing their stories. When I find people’s blogs and contact them, it lets them know that someone is listening to them and wants to share their stories with another community.

Is there anything about Dwellable’s team and approach that makes it unique and fun?

Dwellable is a bootstrapped startup in Seattle–in fact, the company was nominated as “Bootstrapper of the Year” in Seattle’s 2.0 Startup Awards. The business is all about using the best technology and design to make the vacation planning experience better, from high resolution photos to top-in-class mobile apps (on iOS and Android). It’s exciting to help build something from the ground up, especially because the founders (Brenda Spoonemore, Nathan Kriege and Adam Doppelt) are such a brilliant team.

Thank you Jane!

I would love any comments back regarding other permutations on interviews you’ve seen or conducted yourself. Share the link with us.

Additional notes:

A Room of Her Own Foundation is accepting applications for their 2013 Summer Retreat at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico for women writers.

Review of Meg Tuite’s Novel Domestic Apparition by Anna March, posted at Pank, September 2011