Shapiro Center Speakers Explore the Art of the Interview
Students, faculty, and community members gathered for the first installment of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism’s 2025-26 speaker series, “Tell Me More: The Art of the Interview,” on Sept. 30.
The series, curated and hosted by Merve Emre, Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Literature and Criticism and director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism, opened with a conversation between Emre and journalist Chana Joffe-Walt, a reporter and producer for This American Life. Best known for her narrative-driven journalism focusing on a wide array of systemic issues, Joffe-Walt joined Emre to discuss the craft of interviewing, especially in the context of her recent Peabody Award-winning project, Yousef, Youmna, Banias, and Majd: Four Lives in Gaza.
The hour-long conversation with Joffe-Walt offered a behind-the-scenes look at the practical, ethical, and emotional challenges of journalism amidst widespread destruction in the region, while also highlighting the interview as a tool for connection and for amplifying personal stories within larger crises.
“I have always been really interested in other people,” Joffe-Walt said, reflecting on her career path towards audio journalism. “I’ve always been watching other people, wondering who they are, what they’re thinking about, what their lives are like—and so that part [of interviewing] feels very natural.”
During the event, Joffe-Walt played unedited clips from one of her earliest interviews with Yousef, a humanitarian aid worker for the Norwegian Refugee Council in Gaza. In these conversations, Yousef discussed his efforts to persuade his pregnant sister Aseel and their family to relocate to Rafah in December 2023. She guided the audience through how she gradually identified what would become the emotional center of the story that would become “Yousef’s Week”—exploring his determination to build a bathroom so his sister would feel more comfortable relocating to the tent camp he had prepared.
“In the first few minutes we’re talking, I think of it as just searching and trying to learn about this person,” Joffe-Walt said of her interview process. “As I’m interviewing somebody and I have an idea of the structure of the story and what it’s likely going to move toward, I’m trying to direct the conversation in that direction.”
A notable exception to her usual approach, Joffe-Walt explained, was her series of calls with eight-year-old Banias. Featured in the This American Life episode The Narrator, their conversations diverged from typical interview structure—partly because, as Joffe-Walt noted, children are hard to guide, but also because Banias was creating a world of her own.
“She was living in the world that she wanted to live in—and she was letting me into that world,” Joffe-Walt said. “It doesn’t feel like she was trying to create a pretend thing for me that wasn’t real to what she was experiencing. She actually was like, ‘What I want to do is talk about the bugs. I know you just read there was a bombing right next to my house, and yes, there was, but I don’t want to talk about that, I want to talk about the bugs’ ... She was just editing out all the parts she didn’t want to think about.”
Joffe-Walt’s conversation with Emre underscored the series’ central question: What does it mean to listen—and to conduct a conversation—with care, and how does that shape the way we represent others?
Shapiro Center Series
In the past, the Shapiro Center’s speaker series has focused on the distinct literary arts of criticism, editing, and translation. For its third year, Emre aimed to get “a little meta.”
“Professional interviewer is in many ways a less defined position than professional critic or professional editor or professional translator,” Emre said. “We figured we could bring a really wide range of people... Each interviewer will likely offer a different approach to asking questions and listening for answers.”
For Emre, the focus on the interview highlights how knowledge is produced not just through solitary reflection, but through dialogue. This lineup of speakers offers a variety of perspectives on ways to conduct an interview. Emre started with Joffe-Walt as a more traditional interviewer at a recognizable institution to ground the future conversations, she said. Also included in the series are veteran journalists like NPR’s Terry Gross, The New Yorker’s Sarah Stillman and Isaac Chotiner, and Anna Sillman of Business Insider. Emre paired the more conventional style of interviewers with some less typical options—like novelist Sheila Heti, Orna Guralnick of Showtime’s Couples Therapy, and philosopher Agnes Callard. Heti is the next speaker in the series and will appear at Wesleyan on Oct. 28.
The series of conversations will continue to be recorded and published as episodes of Emre’s podcast, The Critic and Her Publics, which is produced in partnership with LitHub, The New York Review of Books, and The Hawthornden Foundation.
