I’ve read oral histories in which all the interviewer’s questions and comments have been removed from the final copy. To me, the whole point of gathering oral history is to strengthen our connections to each other, to link our past to our present. If we remove the interviewer’s presence from the conversations, we miss the opportunity to link current understandings and perspectives to the experiences of those who’ve gone before us.

Still, an unscripted, in-depth conversation between people who’ve never met before is bound to get at least a little disorganized on occasion. Interjections, redirects, and requests for clarification from the interviewer can be tedious to read if they’re written up verbatim.

I didn’t want to bore you, frustrate you, or confuse you. But I wanted to maintain that connection between speaker and listener. I also wanted to highlight the moments where our responses to events that took place in the early days of the 20th century were affected by our late 20th century perspectives. In an attempt to do so, I’ve borrowed and slightly modified a technique often used by fiction writers. I’ve used exposition to introduce the speaker and to set the scene for the early part of her story. I’ve provided an introductory question to get the conversation under way quickly and, where it’s obvious the subject is answering a question, I’ve provided the question.

From there, I remove the most mundane interjections and let the subject speak until she seems to change direction. If something she says elicits a reaction from us–surprise, empathy, humour, puzzlement, etc–I leave our responses in. Maybe you’ll have the same response, maybe you won’t, but many of those exchanges are the moments we went looking for.

Example:

MARYANNE: She was all right, though?
ROSE: She was all right. She was a real healthy, big baby. I was scared of her at first. Right away, right after grandma gave her back to me to nurse, she lifted her head. I thought, what? Babies aren’t supposed to do that!
MARYANNE: She was saying, “I gotta have a look here! It took me so long to get out!”
ROSE: (laughing) That’s right!
MARYANNE: But she must have been a strong baby.
ROSE: She was. She was very strong. She could stand on her feet at a couple of months if I held her up. And she slept and slept and slept. She ate and she slept.