The Post Pub

The Great Interview Experiment: The Interviews

In my last post, I mentioned The Great Interview Experiment -- a meme started by L.A.-based personal blogger Neil Kramer.  According to the rules of the experiment, each blogger to sign up for the interviews will be interviewed by the person before her in the Comments of Neil's blog, and will in turn interview the person below her.  The interviews are then posted on the participants' blogs, thereby exposing each blogger's readers to a new writer.

It sounds more confusing than it is. The best way to understand it is to see it in action. Below, reprinted from My Back Pages, are two such interviews: me being interviewed by a fellow blogger, Janie, followed by me interviewing a 3rd blogger, who goes by the pseudonym of Fatboyfat.

The interviews, reprinted:

The Great Interview Experiment

Reprinted from my personal blog, My Back Pages:

For those not in the know, Neil Kramer, the west coast's most prolific personal blogger (Good GOD, man! Give my feed reader a rest!), has deployed a brilliant meme: The Great Interview Experiment, wherein every blogger that leaves a comment under this post gets interviewed by the blogger above her, and must in turn interview the blogger below her.

Never underestimate vanity as a motivator. He's up to over 200 interviews by now.

I decided that I'm opening The Post Pub up to cover more than just authors who blog, a subject which is limiting, and frankly, a little dull.  In an era where bloggers are as influential as journalists and books are being released on the Kindle, we're all digital content creators. The new tagline is going to be something like "A place for content creators to discuss craft." 

Under that new, much more inspiring headline, how could I resist participating in Neil's latest content frenzy?  Studying memes, and how they spread, is of particular interest to me. And this one's a doozy. I see no end to it in sight.

Here's my lineup:

Janie of Gallups Family has interviewed me about My Back Pages, and will post the results soon.  And the brilliantly funny Fatboyfat of Make Lard History is the subject of my interrogation.  Look to that to go up here, and on The Post Pub, sometime in the next few days.

If you need an ego boost or some practice responding to the blogarazzi, Neil's is the place to be in the next few weeks.  If you're a business person and you have a personal brand to shill, this is also a great opportunity to expose your human side to a wide array of personal bloggers.  Just beware, Neil's put the kibosh on blogs that exist solely to sell something.  The guidelines there are as follows:

If you are one of these bloggers, please do the entire community a service and intersperse some fun stuff in between selling those humidifiers!  A blog should be interesting!

I couldn't agree more.

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If you're a content creator who's an active member of an online sphere of influence (e.g. scribosphere, psychosphere, librarian bloggers), let me know by dropping a comment below.  I'm headed into full-on interview mode myself pretty soon and would love to hear from you.

Books Meme: Total, Last, Meaningful

This book-related meme has been going around for years. (See also: here, here & here.) What are your answers?  The Post Pub tags all readers that stop by. Leave a link to your response in the comments.

Here's the latest iteration of the meme, with the Pub Editor's responses:

Total number of books I own

At least 400, probably more in storage, if you count college textbooks sitting in milk crates in an attic.

Last book I read

Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich

Last book I bought

The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Five books that have meaning to me:

1. The World According to Garp, by John Irving - because it's set in New England, where I'm from, and I've loved it since I was 17
2. Working Men, by Michael Dorris - because I adore his writing; and because I met him and his wife Louise Erdrich at a special invite-only tea for young writers when I was a freshman at Dartmouth
3. Bastard Out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison - because it's the first book whose ending left me gasping with sympathy for the characters and for the author
4. Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy - because it's the second book whose ending left me gasping
5. The Father, by Sharon Olds - just because