There are several books that I found to be especially useful when I began in earnest to become a freelance writer. On of these was John Brady's
The Craft of Interviewing. As any journalist knows, interviewing is integral to obtaining information, and good quotes. Over the course of a lifetime I've been given the opportunity to interview people from all walks of life from artists and writers to doctors and a U.S. congressman. I enjoy the process of coming up with questions that illicit information of interest to readers. I also enjoy learning what makes people tick.
The interview here are more unusual than most that I've done, in part because they have been fabricated. That is, they are fictitious. Two of the three are imaginary interviews that I conducted with 19th century authors, Honore de Balzac and John S. Hall, the blind poet of Ritchie County. The Balzac interview is preposterous because he probably never spoke English and I myself know virtually no French. Add the fact that he's been dead more than 150 years, so it requires a stretch of the imagination. In both cases, my aim is to introduce readers to an interesting person from the past, in an interesting way, by having them talk about themselves in first person.
The third interview here is equally fictitious, but in a different manner. It's an interview with a dirt particle that I undertook in the late 90's in an attempt to explain the importance of air and oil filters. This latter originally appeared in National Oil & Lube News, a magazine serving the fast oil change industry.
My Interview with Influential French Author Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac (1799 – 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815.
Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. What follows is an interview that took place between myself and Mr. Balzac at a salon in the Bohemian sector of Paris in late 1847. It is a work of fiction.
Ennyman: Tell us a little bit about your childhood.
Honoré de Balzac: I was an enthusiastic reader and a rather willful, independent thinker as a child. I had trouble adapting to the rote style of teaching in my school. As a result I was frequently punished by being sent to a place called “the alcove” which was essentially a form of solitary confinement. The good part is that I could read there and I read everything I could get my hands on.
EN: Is it true that when you got out of school you failed in business?
HB: I failed in a lot of things. First I failed as an apprentice in a law office. Then I failed in a few businesses. I tried my hand as a publisher, but failed at that. Failed in the printing trade and also as a politician. Perhaps all my failures in these various endeavors helped give me a deeper understanding of human life through such a diverse set of experiences.
EN: I hear that you have a rather unusual daily regimen as a writer. Can you explain that a little bit?
HB: I’ve found that writing at night is the most fertile time for me. There are fewer distractions. So, usually I go to bed at 6:00 each evening and wake at one in the morning, with my pot of black coffee accompanying me through the night. At eight in the morning I take a little nap for an hour or two, then rise again to continue writing till maybe three or three-thirty.
EN: When do you eat?
HB: I take a couple hours for dining after that, then off to bed.
EN: Sounds like you don’t have much of a social life.
HB: I’ve broken off friendships over a remark like that. No, I had plenty of social experience growing up. I have too many stories to tell and am very conscious that we’re all mortals and only have a short time to accomplish whatever it is we’re setting out to do. Till I’ve said all I intend to say, writing is my life. Maybe because of all that time in the alcove being alone so much just feels normal to me. And I'm really not alone. We have 300 domestic servants. I married into wealth.
READ THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE
Interview with John S. Hall, the Blind Poet of Ritchie County
Saturday morning I was talking with my mom about Great Uncle John S. Hall, the blind poet of Ritchie County. John was the youngest son of the venerable Halls of Highland, West Virginia, born in 1845. His name came up because the day before I had been in Nashville, flying home from a business trip. She asked about the flooding, and then asked if I had seen the hospital there, which I took as a strange question unrelated to anything. She then explained that great uncle John Hall, who had been overcome with fever during the battle of Murfreesboro in the Civil War, was taken to the Nashville hospital where he would spend five months, either in recovery or transition to the grave. It's a remarkable story about a remarkable man.
EN: Is it true you were found in a delirium on the side of the road after the Battle of Murfreesboro? Which side were you fighting for and how did you come to be there?
John S Hall: I'm the youngest of five brothers (we had a sister who went on to marry a McGregor) in the northwest region of the State of Virginia but which is no West Virginia. As you know, this great conflict split families right in two and ours was one so divided. Two of my brothers took sides with the North and two with the South. They were all involved in the political wranglings and my two brothers with Northern sympathies actually led the charge in our state legislature to break West Virginia off from Virginia. My oldest brother Leonard was a member of the Richmond Convention that voted for secession. Simon and William took up arms for the North. The youngest, except for me, was Allen and he fought for the South. After the war, when Allen and William compared notes, they found they'd fought against each other in seven different battles!
You can read about the role my brothers played in the secession of West Virginia in Dr. James C. McGregor's book The Disruption of Virginia. (McMillan 1922)
EN: I'd always heard you ran away from home to join the army when you were fifteen.
JSH: No, I was fifteen when the Civil War broke out. Still a teen when I ran off though. Mom did not want me fighting -- in fact, vehemently opposed it -- so I snuck off at night to join the Teamsters, serving in the Union's Fourth Brigade. It takes a lot of work to supply an army, and I was part of the machinery of war in that way. We were attached to Sherman's army, cutting through Tennessee in the early part of his famous march to the sea. The fighting was bitter because we were on Southern soil at this point, in the heart of Dixie.
EN: What can you tell us about your experience from there?
JSH: They say I was found in a delirium on the side of the road somewhere outside of Murfreesboro. They say I protested when I was to be taken to that hospital in Nashville. You know the reputations hospitals have. For most of us, it's the last stop, the gateway to the grave.
I was there from the end of October till the middle of May. That's a long time to be laid up. For three months of that period my hands were tied behind my back, full of bed sores, and quite beside myself.
For some reason there were doctors who took a special interest in my case, because the other six fellows who came in at the time with this condition had all died in two weeks. So the doctors kept checking in on me.
One day, I heard a doctor describing my circumstances to a visiting physician and I felt a gentle hand touch my forehead. I was still in a semi-conscious frame of mind, so it surprised them when I spoke, "That was a soft hand." Someone replied, "Yes! That was the famous Dr. Mary Walker."
READ THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE
One Day in the Life of a Dirt Particle
When it comes to motor oil and engine maintenance, filters play a significant role. There are all kinds of filters on a passenger car these days, including the fuel filter, air filter, transmission filter, breather element filter and oil filter. Wouldn't it be great if one could write about filters from the unique perspective inside the filter itself?
As luck would have it, while preparing this column I had a rare opportunity to interview a talking dirt particle by the name of Dirtamus Silicapoulis. Not often is one afforded a first person account regarding what actually happens inside an engine. I share with you here portions of our discussion. Mr. Silicapoulis, or "Tiny" (as he prefers to be called), asked that I not reveal his address or phone because of the damage he has done and he doesn't want his past to come back to haunt him.
EN: How much experience have you had destroying car engines?
Tiny Silicapoulis: Well, personally, I have only been involved with vandalizing one car engine. But I come from a very large family, and my kin have been destroying engines for decades.
EN: What do dirt particles do on a typical day?
TS: Mostly you'll just find us hanging out, suspended in air somewhere. Dirt particles are generally a fairly passive lot. We go with the flow, as they say. Wherever the wind blows that's where you'll find us. Believe it or not, there's over 400 tons of dust and grit hovering in a cubic mile of air in a typical city. We're talking, for the most part, about things you really can't see with the naked eye. We're not talking nuts and bolts, birds and small children. You can't see us, but wherever there's air, we're there.
EN: Can you tell us about the day you ended up inside an engine? Tell us, Tiny, how did it happen?
TS: It was your typical hot summer day. I was minding my own biz, basking in the sun, floating along when suddenly, whoosh, I was swept by an air current into an intake manifold. Swallowed alive! Did you know that engines suck in as much as 1200 cubic feet of air to properly burn one gallon of fuel? The internal combustion engine is really nothing more than a big air pump. It inhales a tremendous amount of air.
EN: I didn't know that. But how did you get past the air filter?
TS: Air filters have a challenging job because they must balance two functions that are at odds with each other. Their first function is to stop dirt particles like me. Their second is to allow airflow into the combustion chamber. If they stop too much dirt, they can inadvertently restrict airflow. If they allow unrestricted airflow, they'll be guilty of allowing too much dirt to pass. You can see the problem.
YOU WILL FIND THE REMAINDER OF THIS STORY HERE.
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Meantime, it's a beautiful day here in the Northland. Blue skies. Good vibes. Time to run 'cause we're burning daylight.
