My appreciation goes out to Melissa Lemay, who turned the tables and interviewed ME about doing interviews, American Sentences, the Poetry Postcard Fest and Allen Ginsberg, among other topics. That people are intimidated by ME because I’ve conducted so many interviews flatters my ego but also makes me want to put them at ease. An excerpt:

ML: …What led you to the desire to conduct interviews? How did that begin?

PEN: That’s interesting. When I moved to Seattle in 1988, I had done a couple of interviews before then, and then in Seattle had the opportunity to interview Tim Weisberg, who put out a record in 1978, with Dan Fogelberg, “Twin Sons of Different Mothers.” We had a live chat on the radio, it was a phone interview, and a listener called in afterwards and said it was like eavesdropping on a conversation between friends, and that was validating for me. Then, that radio station got sold, but I stayed employed there, and became the News and Community Affairs Director. They wanted me to do seven newscasts during morning drive, and also be in charge of their public affairs programming, which meant an hour radio program each week with local people and people speaking about issues of interest to the community. I said, “Well, I won’t be able to get one this week.” The boss said, “Well, all right. We’ll run a rerun this week, but otherwise, next week I want a whole new show.” And so, I started producing an hour show every week. After a while you can do some reruns, but I had a pretty consistent interview practice, and really developed an interest in addressing issues of importance to the community through the lens of whole systems approaches. The first place I saw that, very clearly as a distinction, was through medicine. Rather than, “Oh. You’ve got a headache. Take an aspirin. It goes away,” rather than treating symptoms, find out what the root cause of the headache is. Is it dehydration? Is it food allergies? Is it stress? Any number of things, but you should treat the issue at the root. (Usually dehydration, in my experience.)

So then, I realized that you could apply whole systems to every other issue, because this culture that we live in, the society tends to want to fix symptoms, rather than affect the root cause. Society wants to call it a homeless crisis when Seattle’s one of the most expensive places to buy a house in the world, so maybe it’s not a homeless problem. Maybe it’s a housing issue, for example. In fact, there’s a social housing initiative on the ballot this Tuesday that the public came up with, and the conservative city council delayed it from the November ballot, when there were a lot of people voting in the presidential election, until February 11th, and then the city council also put their alternative to it on the ballot to try and make sure that it doesn’t pass. So, there are lot of things going on and if you can see to the root cause of them, I think it alleviates a lot of suffering. Then, one other thing, I’m going to reach back for this book over here, I interviewed this woman, Rhea Miller, and her name came up by mistake in a call last Thursday. I brought her name up by mistake and said, “She wrote Cloudhand, Clenched Fist.” Someone on the call said, “Yes, she did.” I said, “How did I remember that? I interviewed her 29 years ago, Rhea Miller.” As I’m reading my interview notes that I left in the book since 1996, I have the sheet of paper with my introduction to her. It has the questions and the date and time and place of the interview. 3:00 PM, at KZOK-FM on Queen Anne. She talked about her book about the paradigm shift, and it was so beautiful. She wrote this paragraph:

“…As one of my history teachers once stated, the more unstable a culture or institution, the more conservative it becomes, in an age where people are holding on for dear life, where people are filled with a fear of impending destruction of all that is familiar and dear to them. Whether they’re from war, poverty, or environmental disaster, it is no surprise to see so much resistance, so many clenched fists. People clench ever more tightly to old, familiar ways and fight what they do not understand. This is demonstrated vividly in the current revival of worldwide militant religious fundamentalism… As people struggle fiercely with feelings of powerlessness against change, and search valiantly for solid ground, violence becomes exponential.”

She’s writing this in 1996, and what has happened since then? It’s only that much more true. So, I was able to put myself in a position to interview some really intelligent people and learn from it…

See the whole interview here: https://collaborature.blogspot.com/2025/05/interviewing-interviewer-pen.html

Thanks Melissa!