Alessandro Portelli in Living Voices: The Oral History Interview as Dialogue and Experience, discusses this idea of “narrative space.” He believes that “some of these spaces are generated by our very presence and by our explicit and implicit questions,” and, “some are generated by the narrators’ own subjectivity and self-image creation.”[2] The narrative space that is opened up in an interview is completely unique ‒ it is specific to the people involved in the conversation and the time and place of the interview. Most oral historians are in the practice of providing context about the social and political worlds an interview might take place in, however fewer provide context that focuses on the physical location of the interview site.

Tim Cole and Henry Greenspan, who both work with stories of Holocaust survivors, are leading voices on the idea of analyzing space within the interview. Greenspan has a psychotherapy background that has influenced the way he understands the elements at play within the recounting of a story. He allows narrators to “set the stage” for their interviews, which for him goes beyond just selecting the location. Narrators are allowed to decide “what room in their home, [] what was on the walls or coffee table, [] who else was around, [] whether the door was open, and more.”[3] Cole discusses how oral historians have focused more heavily on space when creating a product that an audience can engage with. However, he urges oral historians to think about how “the centrality of place and space both in the process of retelling and the product of that retelling,” are significant when examined together as they may provide information about the ways in which narrators situate themselves in the past and present.[4]

Oral historians often consider the interview site beforehand, asking the narrator to choose a site they feel comfortable in, somewhere that is safe and easily accessible for them, and most often, relatively quiet for us. However, the choice of an interview space becomes more important when we consider the large impact it has on the conversation. Our bodies are simultaneously experiencing the space, experiencing each other, and aiding us in our communication. As interviewers, this embodied experience can help us listen better, or it could distract us and lead us to misunderstanding, but either way it plays a role in shaping the interview ‒ a role that is often left out of our final products.

Friedman has warned us to not ignore our own embodied experience or that of the narrator because it can provide us with a wealth of information that would be otherwise lost. He uses the idea of quasi-time to illustrate how the embodied moment of the interview is so completely intertwined with the stories being communicated. He says that,

“Because intentionality is specifically linked to the past, will is linked to the present, and desires and purposes are linked to the future and, especially, the quasi-past, -present, and -future in oral history narratives, time consciousness is integrated with embodied communication in the interview event as a single concept… I argue that embodied communication, by providing access to intentions, will, desires, and purposes, is basic to the generation of time consciousness in the oral history interview.” [5]

If a future listener is unable to access the information provided by the embodied communication, they will be unable to fully understand the exchange between the interviewer and narrator. While embodied communication includes many factors, here we will be focusing on the ways in which the interview space affects what is said and how it is heard. Through this we can better translate the interview experience when preserving oral histories.

This translating was important to me while doing the Midwest Queer Spaces Oral History Project because, as mentioned above, new queer spaces were being created in the interview and intergenerational transference of knowledge was taking place. Alexis Pauline Gumbs felt the uniqueness of the queer interview space when she was travelling across the country to interview queer Black elders. She says, “At some point we realized that the immortality of media, the portability of digital files was fetishized over our actual bodies in space together in time.”[6] Our queer bodies were in this space together in time and that actual experience could never be completely recreated or translated. However, failing to attempt to document the embodied experience of the interview would end up hindering anyone who was looking to understand or make meaning of these interactions in the future.

“At some point we realized that the immortality of media, the portability of digital files was fetishized over our actual bodies in space together in time.” - Alexis Pauline Gumbs

All of these spaces were having an impact on my body and my listening as well as the bodies of the narrators. For the most part I believe the narrators felt comfortable and safe, except for the fact that two of the interviews took place during a pandemic and there was a valid fear that our bodies interacting in this space together could be putting our health at risk. This fear and other more passive elements of the space like the temperature, the seating, or the brightness were affecting our embodied interactions, even if they are more difficult to specifically pin down. Many of our bodily reactions take place without us consciously controlling them. Some fields, especially those that are art related, have used the fact that we only have partial control over our bodies to uniquely engage the bodies of their audiences in unexpected ways.[7]  How could oral historians acknowledge this aspect of embodied interactions within interviews and use it to more accurately represent these spaces?

It was the middle of winter when I interviewed JR and Winkie. JR’s bar is poorly insulated and since I was interviewing him during the day while the bar was empty, the heat was set very low. I remember that both of us kept our winter jackets on for the interviews and you can often hear the crinkling of JR’s down coat on the recording. JR is an extremely private person, so despite having been friends with him for years I have no idea where he lives. He would not have felt comfortable telling me about his life in his home, and I’m not sure I would have been very comfortable either. The bar is his territory but is a place I also feel familiar and comfortable in. This allowed us to talk just like we would if he had been behind the bar serving me a drink and sharing a funny anecdote.

Being in Winkie’s apartment was a very different experience in many ways, starting with the temperature. She had a furnace that was regulating the temperature, plus a space heater that would kick on every ten minutes or so and you could feel when the temperature had changed. At one point when we paused the tape to get some water, Winkie asked if I was too warm and went to turn down the thermostat. I had also been to Winkie’s apartment many times as a friend, but the familiarity we both had with interacting in this space created some challenges for this interview. There were times that I had to remind Winkie that the conversation was being recorded and afterward there were many things that we decided to edit out from the audio because of their personal content.

While Avery’s study was an extremely quiet and controlled space, John and Bill’s kitchen table was the opposite. On the day I interviewed John and Bill, it was pouring rain. Before arriving at their house, I had decided that I would try to limit everything I touched because we were unsure yet exactly how bad this pandemic would be. When I arrived, I washed my hands immediately, but was then offered a baby to hold which I did not refuse. Their daughter Paisley was a little over a year old at the time of the interview and required her daddies’ attention on a regular basis. They would take turns attending to her and she was often being passed from lap to lap, including to my own, during the interview. In the clips you have heard so far from this interview, it is obvious that Paisley played a large role in shaping the conversation. I sat with John, Bill and Paisley at their kitchen table, in hard wooden chairs but in a very lively and bright environment. Paisley’s cartoons were playing on the TV and her toys littered the floor.

How much these small embodied experiences changed the conversation between myself and these narrators is hard to determine. We can speculate that the warm and familiar environment of Winkie’s apartment led us to feel comfortable discussing more sensitive topics, or that Paisley’s toys scattered around the floor may have steered me away from asking John and Bill about more taboo or personal topics. We could theorize that the physical distance between Avery and I required me to try harder to connect with her in other ways, or that JR may have never taken off his coat because it was a way for him to feel more secure and he didn’t want us to get too comfortable. However, all of these theories are completely subjective and the impact of these specific bodily experiences is difficult to measure. Some conversations would change more than others if situated in a different environment. Nonetheless, these factors did help shape our interactions and should be taken note of.

How much these small embodied experiences changed the conversation between myself and these narrators is hard to determine. There are moments in interviews, however, where it is impossible to ignore the fact that the space is shaping the interview. In these moments, the space enters the conversation with its own story to tell and while the narrator may be interpreting it for the interviewer, as a body currently experiencing that space, we also need to listen to our own embodied experience.

I believe there are two main ways in which the space becomes an active part of the conversation. The first is when a narrator uses the space or an object within it to spark a particular memory or to more effectively make their point. The example below was taken from Avery’s interview.

After realizing that the space of the interview could be used to spark memories, I started allowing the space to also help shape the questions that I asked and the types of interviews I conducted. JR agreed to go on a driving interview with me in which we drove all over town to the queer spaces he remembered. When we would arrive at a location, the space would start to spark memories of stories I would have never heard otherwise. You heard some of these earlier. While I knew that the parks and Wings of Love were queer spaces, I hadn’t known that JR used to teach art classes at Wings of Love, or that the park could also be a place for gay men to meet during the day to have a party or picnic. While we were driving, he also thought of new places that he had not ever mentioned in previous interviews, including the YMCA. When we returned to his bar at the end of the interview, I realized that I had seen a photo of the bar where there were windows in the front, but they were all gone now.

That conversation continued for another ten minutes in which we talked about multiple other times the bar has been robbed and his relationship to the local police force. At this point JR and I had conducted about four hours of interviews and this was one of the only times he actually points out discrimination from the Springfield community. Since Springfield is a small conservative city, it is very likely anyone who ran an openly gay business would be subject to discrimination regularly; however, JR rarely classified his interactions with the community in that way. The history of the building itself provided an important starting point for an even larger conversation of safety and community.

I saw the pool on my way into their house earlier that day, and even though it was raining outside I could imagine John’s grandmother sitting beside the pool on a warm summer day being pampered by a handful of their gay friends. John’s grandma was not the only person that had been taken in and cared for in this house. They also took in Bill’s nephew and later the nephew’s pregnant girlfriend. They later adopted that baby and became a family of three. John and Bill most likely would have told me these stories no matter if we were sitting in their house or not because of the important impact they have had on their lives. However, being in that space helped me as a listener see what this house, and making a life in it together meant to them.

This space also meant something to me as a young queer person from the Midwest. It is rare that queer youth in rural areas are able to find an example of a successful and healthy queer relationship. Enke points out that different spaces allow for certain sexualities to be imaginable, but expanding on that, these kinds of spaces and role models also allow for certain types of relationships and lifestyles to be imaginable. The life John and Bill have built together in this space is unimaginable for many, so the space itself provides tangible validation for queer individuals interested in monogamy and family building.

Lastly, there are times when these two aspects are combined, when the site of memory is also the interview space, and when the space is used by the narrator to further illustrate their meaning. This happened often in my interviews with JR because we were in his bar and many of the stories he told took place there. One in particular stands out as representing both of these ways of using space.

1. Alessandro Portelli, “Living Voices: The Oral History Interview as Dialogue and Experience,” The Oral History Review 0 no. 0, 1.

2. Portelli, “Living Voices,” 5.

3. Henry Greenspan in Movement and memory: an email exchange with Henry Greenspan and Tim Cole, Part 1.

4. Tim Cole in Movement and memory: an email exchange with Henry Greenspan and Tim Cole, Part 1.

5. Friedman, “Oral History, Hermeneutics, and Embodiment,” 298.

6. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Repetition Is Sacred: School of Our Lorde, Mobile Homecoming, and Legacy in Flight,” Feminist Studies 40 no. 1 (2014): 212.

7. Steven Benford, “Forward,” Digital Bodies: Creativity and Technology in the Arts and Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan, London: 2017), viii.