Tips For Interviewing Shy People (Especially Nuns)

A quick note to listeners, sexual abuse, physical abuse, and suicide are discussed in this episode. This is How Sound, the backstory to great audio storytelling. It's from PRX and Transyl. I'm Rob Rosenthal, I'm the producer and host of How Sound. In a few weeks, How Sound will have some news. Big news. No deeds for you just yet. But keep your ears to the ground. All will be revealed. A common issue interviewer's face is the shy interviewee, the person who's reticent and restrained, they're guarded. And so the question becomes, how do you help people like that to open up? To complicate matters, what if there are several nuns actually, nuns who worked in Mother Teresa's order, the missionaries of charity, the MCs for short. Silence and self-restraint are central values of the MCs, so how do you build trust and create a safe space for open conversation with a former MC? Well, that's the exact challenge Erica Lance and her sister, Aileen Lance Lesser faced. They produced The Turning, The Sisters Who Left, the series for Rococo Punch. The turning features stories of life in the order and out after sisters renounce their vows. Erica and Aileen Dove in deep, asking questions about faith and community and starting families after life in the MCs. I definitely think they were hesitant. Here's Aileen. These were women who are part of a very closed-off group that had a standard that you're supposed to be quiet about things you're not supposed to share basically the secrets of this world with the outside world. Erica? So they were instructed when they were in the group writing letters home that they weren't supposed to speak negatively about the group or even about difficulties or hardships, but just to talk about their faith and God and about prayer. And sometimes some of them we spoke to, you know, hadn't even shared some of this stuff with their families or their spouses or they really didn't talk about it regularly. Mother Teresa has become a charged topic because people either in general seem to really love her as a saint or see her as someone who was like maliciously taking advantage of others. And so a lot of sisters have more complicated feelings than those two options and they worry that they're going to be put into one of those two categories and have it be simplified in some way. And then they were also maybe anxious about how it would come across or whether they would offend the very group that had made them partially into who they were now. For full disclosure, I worked for Rococo Punch as story editor on the turning. Other than stories my students have produced over the years, I don't typically feature projects I'm connected to on how sound, but I feel Erica and Aylens approach to interviewing needs to be shared. They're really good at it. Let's listen to the opening scene of the turning. It features Mary Johnson. She's the main character. Mary worked directly with Mother Teresa from the 1970s on through the 1990s. I wonder if you could tell me that story about the time that a sister had to go to the hospital and you thought this is going to be my chance. So one of the sisters she had been in the hospital recently and she needed to go back and have a checkup. It felt like this opportunity fell from heaven into my lap and I would escape. Why didn't you just walk out, just tell someone I'm leaving and just walk out the door? We always went out two by two. We were never allowed just to walk out and do something. So I wouldn't have been able to go, you know, more than five or six places before somebody ran up to me and said, "Where are you going?" But I knew because I had been in that hospital and was familiar with it that there was a room where there was a collection of clothes that the patients had left behind. So I knew where that was. I could find myself some clothes there, some normal clothes. I thought, "I'll drive in with this sister who's ill and then when we get there, I would just leave, I would leave her there and I would have at least a few hours before anybody figured out what I'd done." So I took some phone tokens and I got in the car and there in that car on the way to the hospital, I was perspiring. My hands were clammy. My heart was racing. It was so hot and as we left the city and we drove towards the sea shore, there was a breeze and it started just to feel really nice and there were palm trees and there was the sky. You could see the water off in the distance. It was like a breath of freedom. It was like a way to breathe again. I just wanted more and more of that air, that freedom, that life, that light. I thought, "This is my chance. I just have to take it." Okay, sisters, we're going to talk about sisters. Sisters interviewing sisters. You're thinking of that as a working title, what do you think? Love it, adore it. We only interview sisters. That's exclusively what we do. It's a thing. Erica is a longtime reporter and podcast producer. She's worked at Snap Judgment. She produced the Kind World podcast for WBUR and she's filed stories for NPR. She was the lead reporter and host of the turning. Alyn is a documentary filmmaker. Perhaps more importantly for the turning, Alyn has a PhD in clinical psychology. We also conducted interviews for the show and she sat in on some of Erica's interviews. In terms of building a connection with interviewees in the turning, Erica says she often had several conversations with sisters prior to interviews. She would tell the sisters she understands life in the order was complicated and that she wanted to explore those complications. In other words, she wasn't interested in a one-size-fits-all portrait. She also underscored how much she valued their perspective. Then, during the interviews which were often recorded over video chat, she used a lot of nonverbal communication. What's helpful is I think both Alyn and I have very emotive faces and very active eyebrows. We can communicate a lot with our body language and in person, definitely with body language, just having an open stance, leaning in, really facing them. That's something I love about interviewing in person is if you're holding the mic to them. You are naturally getting very close to them and I just try to have a very open, I'm ready to receive what you want to say, stance. Also just a lot of reflecting back of what you're hearing as they talk. This is something I've always tried to do, but actually once I started working with Alyn, she kind of blew my mind with the way she would reflect back to people. Alyn, I wonder if you want to talk about that and how you explained it to me. I think the most difficult thing for people who struggle to open up is just feeling like they're heard and people are more likely to open up when you feel or seem interested in what they're saying. Maybe that's kind of obvious, that's just being human, but I think that you can be very intentional about how you're approaching what they're saying and A, really giving them the space to talk and just say what they want to get off their chest, but then B, to reflect back what they're saying without adding to it or without saying a but or even sometimes without asking a further question. Sometimes just restating what they described in a shorter way to show that you're with them, that you're listening can be extremely powerful and then they can almost react to themselves. Sometimes I think when they react to themselves, that's actually where you get more of that emotionally valanced stuff where they're like, oh yeah, I didn't think about it that way. It's still even be surprised by what they said. And I think that also a piece of that can also be validation. So beyond just reflecting, also saying, I can understand feeling like that. Wow. And having that intonation in your voice, that energy and that showing that you really care about what you're saying and you can imagine how they would feel. Not that you have to agree with what they're saying, but you can understand that emotion giving the space for that deep, true validation makes people feel heard and like they can be real with you. Ailen, are you naming specific emotions? So yeah, that's, I mean, that's huge and that's in my previous therapy training. They're always taught to name specific emotions, use emotion words and that allows them the person to either correct you, like, no, I wasn't feeling worried. I was feeling angry. Or for them to agree with you. And it gives, I think the person permission to use emotion language. It encourages it. And while obviously therapy is a different beast and a different goal and has a different set of ethics and priorities, I think that that same principle can be applied in interviews that when you start saying sad, worried, anxious, angry, scared, upset, and even the more specific you can get, so feeling regret versus just feeling bad, I think can help elicit more of that emotional content out of people and also for them to use emotional language. I think sometimes producers joke, maybe we shouldn't, but sometimes we joke and say that our work is sometimes like radio therapy. Totally. Yeah, it seems like that sometimes because we're digging around so much in people's character and their emotions and motivation. Yeah, it can almost seem like therapy sometimes. I'm wondering what you think, Alain, about this question, how does it feel in your body? What do you think of that question as a question to ask somebody? That's a great question to ask somebody asking, what does that emotion feel like for you? And even if you're, you know, interviewing about something that happened in the past, asking, what did you feel in that moment? Emotionally, what did you feel that moment physically? Where did you feel that emotion in your body? And you described that sensation to me, getting people back there and really describing in specific terms, what that actually felt like, I think allows the content to just be more potent and powerful. And I don't know, just more compelling. In the evening, you'd hear these noises and they would always be coming from the bathroom, just like this kind of thud, thud, thud and it would go on for a while. And it didn't have a kind of a fleshy components to it, but I had so many other things to think about. It didn't make a big effect on me until I understood what was actually happening. So I was washing the sheets one day and one of my fellow postulants, Sister Alberta, came in and she says, so, Sister Mary, what do you think of the discipline? And I say, well, discipline is hard following the timetable, keeping quiet when you're reprimanded. It just requires a lot of discipline, but it's okay. God has called us here and she looks at me and she says, no, no, no, I don't mean the timetable. What do you think of the discipline? We all have the discipline. We have a little sheath of knotted cords that we beat ourselves with every evening. When Sister Alberta told me this is my stomach contracted and I couldn't talk. It was hard to breathe. She says, but don't you hear that noise the professors make when they go in the bathroom at night? We're taking the discipline. We're making up for our sins. I didn't really know how to take it in at first. This is something I really never imagined. Never imagined. And it was on an entirely different level from Folgernappkin in three like the Trinity or don't talk after night prayer. This was something way different. When we sit down for an interview, the interviews we did for the turning, we're talking about some really personal things, really dark things. We talked about emotional abuse, sexual abuse, feelings suicidal, feeling depressed, and also happy things. But we really are ready to go there with whoever's talking and linger in whatever they're feeling and just be there with them. And when you feel someone is really opening up, there's this feeling that it's like a sacred moment. It feels like magic or it feels like something holy. It's probably some of the like holiest moments I have ever is in interviews when I feel like people are just being raw and just willing to be like human to human person to person talking sometimes talking about things they just don't typically talk about. And so you know when you're really in that space and you're entering that holy moment with them, you can't help but feel the emotion with them and reflect it back to them. I mean it's it's like a rare privilege to be able to do that. Something that Eric has really good at is being super authentic. And that's easier said than done for all of us. But I think that when she's talking about having a holy moment, I think in that moment, everything else falls away in life. Like you're just in that moment together with that person. And that's where the authenticity and genuineness lies. Like feeling things and expressing things, even emotions you're having as an interviewer and translating that physically and verbally. That's something that just has to come out in a real way. You can't fake a reaction. I mean sometimes actually maybe you can fake a little bit. But I mean the good reactions to stuff where people really open up I think comes from a real place. Can you think of an example when you had a holy moment? Yeah, I think there were a lot of moments like that with this series. Sometimes they just kind of happen upon you and you don't expect them when we were interviewing Sue and Joan. We did not know what was coming with Joan's story. I'm Sue Weber. Do you want like that little brief bio blah blah or just interview session? I don't have to do the whole bio. Okay. So I'm Sue Weber. And who are you? I'm Joan Worcester. And how do you two know each other? We're sisters. So let me clarify. Joan and Sue are former sisters with the missionaries of charity. But they're also sisters like actual real life sisters. And we're the same age for 13 days. Joan and Sue live in Pennsylvania. They huddle over. So we showed up for our first interview with them, both of them, both of us. And I think it was kind of fun. Like it actually started out a little bit giggly. And we tried to kind of like mirror some of their relationship and our own in front of them. And I felt like they could just feel like they could be real with us. I'm far more stubborn than you are. Wouldn't you say? How do you're pretty stubborn? We're all stubborn. It's a family trait. In a positive way. I don't take a lot of things personally at all. I'm more sensitive. Yeah. She's much more sensitive. Very. You're super protective too. I am. For people who get hurt. I seek for justice a lot. That's a commonality. And I think that has to do with the convent. But I've come to seek justice and truth in everything that I do and say. And then immediately after that, Joan, I believe, went straight into an individual interview with us where she really opened up and talked about when she seriously considered suicide exactly what happened as well as ongoing emotional abuse she experienced while in the community as well as talking about what she described as a bad marriage she was in. So we got to, I think, a really powerful place by just being open and just being ourselves. One thing I'll add about Joan opening up is like once she started, she just like talked and talked and talked and it's like she had to get something out and we didn't know what it was, but she was like just going. It was like her story was erupting from her. Yeah. And sometimes you do kind of just like when when someone's just going and going, like letting them go and not knowing where they're headed, it's because they are headed somewhere you just don't know it yet. And letting them do that leads you to things that you mean you don't know about you don't know to ask because you don't know. Joan had to make a new life. When she left the MCs, Joan did the only thing she could do with no money and no practical work experience and really no sense of what was possible. She went home to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but her mistress's words followed her. She says they were like tapes. These memories of every terrible thing her mistress said playing over and over. Jesus knows you're a fake in a phony. Your stupid serves you right. Joan still felt called to be a nun. She went to church, but now she felt like an imposter. And then people would come to me and say, you're so holy. I would leave that church and go to another church so that no one would know me. And so I could not be noticed and that's the worst thing that to this day I don't want to be noticed. There is another tape that played in her head. The words of one of her confessors. That's a priest you confess your sins to or who serves as a spiritual guide. Father Donald McGuire was a Jesuit priest. He was convicted of sexually-using boys and eventually sentenced in 2009 to 25 years in prison. But before that he was often assigned as a confessor for MC sisters, including Sue and Joan. Years before he was sentenced, Donald McGuire told Joan something that would haunt her. And he said to us, "If you make it to the novitiate and you leave, you'll have handicapped children, you'll get divorced and bad things will happen to you because God wants you here." This stuck with Joan because she had made it to the novitiate and left. Once she did she felt like Father McGuire's warning started to come true. I went home in January. Now mind you for the last two years. No love, no nothing. I met this man. He said he loved me, went to church with me, the whole nine yards. Eventually they got married. I had this huge wedding. Nons were singing in my wedding. I mean it was huge. But Joan wasn't happy for long. She says the relationship ended horribly after three months. Okay so now here I am an ex-nun and a man leaves me and he said to us, "If you leave, you'll get divorced, you'll have handicapped children and bad things will happen to you." So I thought, "Okay I can't be a nun. I can't be married." So I went up to this place we had called Peckley Pinnacle. She hiked through the woods up to an overlook on a tall hill near home. She could see water and trees stretched out below. This place was special to Joan. She used to talk to God here. It was where she felt her call to religious life. This time was different. I was gonna jump right kill myself because God must hate me. So when I went up there I went to jump and a snake slithered up in front of me. I hate snakes. So I was scared to death so I ran back to my car and got in my car and then went back home. I want to talk about the idea of speaking with someone who is seems emotionally guarded and then you actually bring that up to them. Erica, I'm thinking about some of your interviews with Mary, the main character in the turning, where she never really cries. In fact, she often laughed at serious moments. Can you talk a little bit about her emotional state in those interviews and the moment when you said to her, "Hey I want to, in so many words, I want to talk to you about how you're responding to me emotionally." Yeah, it was really interesting because I interviewed Mary more than I've interviewed anyone in my life. I recorded 14 interviews with her and of course we talked many times outside of the recorded interviews as well. We're used to making stories about very emotional topics, personal stories, that kind of thing. It is very normal for people to cry or get emotional during an interview. It's not like I look for that but it just happens regularly. Here 14 interviews are passing. She intellectualized a lot of what she was talking about in this incredible way that was so mind-opening and amazing. She's a writer and so she analyzes everything and thinks about it deeply. The interviews were hugely rich but I did notice that she would talk about something very serious and then be laughing about it or smiling. For example, at one point she was talking about how after she left the missionaries of charity, at one point she asked her boyfriend and now who's now her husband to beat her because she just felt so much guilt for leaving and she was used to beating herself with the rope, the discipline, the nuns do but she didn't have that outlet anymore and so she just cried out to him one time, beat me, beat me. Mary's telling me this story and she's laughing during it. I finally, at one point, posed this to her and it was great because we could talk about why that was the case and I put to her is it possibly because as an MC, as an MC sister, you're trained to smile and be cheerful through everything and she instantly told a story about that that we ended up using in the series and then she also just explained like this happened a long time ago and I was a different person back then. So I think we kind of found that both were true like part of the reason is it just isn't her life now and that's okay and like maybe that's a good thing that she doesn't feel everything all the time like she can look at it from a distance and that's a lot of what she was doing even though it did affect her. And so saying to someone in so many words, you're not really being very emotional, that worked. Yeah. Like just sort of just holding the mirror up to them to see what they had to say. Yeah, absolutely. Ellen, do you have any thoughts to add to that? I feel like it is almost a form of mindfulness in that it's like being able to step outside of the situation and look at it while you're in it at the same time and I remember when I was being trained in therapy, this incredible therapist, my supervisor was telling me like a really good therapist is constantly having two things happen in their brain at once. One is what's happening in the moment, moment to moment, being in it, speaking, you know, making a plan in the moment and the other part of yourself is sitting outside noticing what's happening, noticing what's happening emotionally, what that person needs in that moment and also your reaction to it. And I think that's what allowed Erica to come forward and say like, hey, I'm noticing this happening. Can we just talk about it? And I think you can apply that principle in different ways, whether it be explicitly asking about it or whether it be adjusting what you're doing to give that person what they need in that moment. Once dinner was over, grand silence began like every evening, no talking allowed until breakfast the next day. But that night something unusual happened without anyone saying a word. One of the sisters began to pull each of us new novices aside and that she signed to us that we should follow her and we went into a back room. A fire was burning. And so the room was quite hot. The ceremony wasn't over yet. No one spoke. There were four stools in the middle of the room. There were eight of us novices waiting there wondering what on earth was going on. And then the first four got motion to sit on the stools. The professed sisters held scissors. While Mary watched, they removed the novices headpieces. They trained what was left of their hair. Cutting it shorter and shorter and shorter. Down to the scalp. The sisters were saying, hail Mary full of grace and we were answering holy Mary, mother of God pray for us. And I remember one was had tears in her eyes as her hair was falling and others were kind of sitting there with their eyes shut as tight as they could. That was kind of frightening to see it all happen all at once like that. It became very real. And it was Mary's turn to sit on a stool. And cutting started. There's very little hair there. There's another's less and there's less until there was really just nothing as close as you could get with the pair of scissors. After it was done, someone handed Mary a bucket of water. She took it to the bathing room to wash herself. Just as I was finishing my bath, this horrible smell came through the bathing room door. It was just like this acrid, awful, awful smell. And I followed that smell back into the room where our hair had been cut. And I saw there our novice mistress was tossing our ponytails into that fire. And just tossing our hair into the fire. And I could hear again that him that had been sung earlier that day. No turning back. No turning back. I really felt that way. say to the end at the end of an interview to sort of bring closure to it, but let them know it's possible you might have to talk to them again down the road, which might not be something they really want to do. So a couple of things. First of all, we always leave space at the end to ask them, "What do you wish I had asked anything come to mind?" And often we get like great tape in that moment. Sometimes we get nothing. That's totally fine too. One reason I ask that, and I know a lot of people ask that, is I remember one time I was recording a tape sink for an NPR show, and the host was interviewing someone. And after they hung up the phone, the person said, "Oh, they didn't ask any of their inquisitions or something like that." And so I don't want to have anyone get off the phone with us and think that way. So we definitely ask that. I also think when we had interviews that were about more traumatic subjects, we also would like spend a little time just like chit-chatting and like, "So what are you going to do after this? Talk about what they're working. " What they're going to do for fun today and just kind of like exit that space of darkness and intensity and just like transition into normal human conversation. I'll just add that I feel like people are always down to talk again if you set it upright, if you show that interest. If you make them feel like they matter and that you want to know more and you want to understand and you want to learn from them, they're going to be down to talk to you again for the most part. And I think even for former nuns, there's something appealing about that. We all want to be heard. Erica Lance and Alain Lance Lesser, their reporters and producers for the turning, the Sisters Who Left. The Turning Earned Several Awards, a Gracie for Best Entertainment Podcast, it was nominated by the Ambies for Best Reporting and Best Production and Sound Design, and then Alain and Erica both earned a Livingston Award for young journalists under 35 in the category of International Reporting. Erica and Alain are neck deep in tape, making another season of the Turning and I'm sworn to secrecy about the topic. I was working on a project recently and one of the people being interviewed was a great talker. They were engaged, told stories and full, but they weren't very emotional. It was like they were monitoring everything they were saying. So a colleague and I wrote to Erica and Alain and we said, "Help. Given your success with the nuns, got any advice?" Well, the advice they offered sparked the idea for this episode of House Out and it makes for an excellent primer and recap of what we just talked about and a whole lot more. So I collected their notes at the post for this episode of House Out at transom.org. Have a look. This is House Out, the backstory to great audio storytelling. It's produced by PRX and Transom. Genevieve Sponsler, welcome back to the editor's chair. It's great to have you and your red pen marking up my scripts again. Thank you as well to Jay Allison for poking at these scripts too. A track in the studios of WCAI, the public radio station and Woods Hole Massachusetts. I'm Rob Rosenthal. Thank you for listening. Alain, did you know that you had expressive eyebrows? Yeah, it's the thing we talk about in our family. Everyone makes fun of my eyebrows. I can do the eyebrow wave. I can't believe I'm describing that here. Yeah, I mean, that is a thing, but you don't stop me. I'm stopping you, babe. What's the eyebrow wave? We're like, you know, like a wave in a, um, a stadium, an stadium or like an actual wave. Why do I have to think about a football stadium? But like I just go, I can move my eyebrows from one end to the other. Okay. Oh my God. You can. Oh my God. You can. That's amazing. Many hours as a child looking in the mirror. She has basically complete control of like every millimeter of her eyebrows. Wow. From PRX. And transom.org.