Replay: Pico Iyer and Michael Shapiro share Five Things They've Learned about the Art of the Interview
Check out the first five minutes of their recent class.
“Drawing on decades of experience conducting interviews onstage, for periodicals, and at home, this class is at heart about refining and deepening the art of conversation. How do we choose questions, structure them and at times remain silent so as to draw the most out of celebrities, strangers, even family members?”
– Pico Iyer and Michael Shapiro, Five Things We've Learned about the Art of the Interview
Pico Iyer is the critically acclaimed writer of 16 books, translated into 23 languages, on subjects ranging from the Dalai Lama to globalism, from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism. Michael Shapiro is a journalist and author of two interview collections: A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration and the recently published The Creative Spark. Here’s the first five minutes of their 90-minute class in which they share the Five Things They’ve Learned from experience about the Art of the Interview.
Five Things We’ve Learned about the Art of the Interview asks and answers practical questions every interviewer needs to prepare as well as recommendations for things to consider during your conversation: How, for example, do we put a new acquaintance at ease? How can we prepare extensively in advance and then allow a chat to go exhilaratingly off-script? How might one do richest justice to a job interview, on either side of the table?
If you want to discover practical tips you can employ right away from two of the best interviewers around, this class is for you.
Pico Iyer is the host of the “Speaking with Pico” series in Santa Barbara, regularly conducts interviews for the City Arts and Lectures series in San Francisco and, over 25 years, has conducted intimate onstage conversations with everyone from Philip Glass to Zadie Smith and from Martin Scorsese to Ireland’s President Mary Robinson. His four talks for TED have received more than 10 million views so far.
Michael has recently written for National Geographic about Nepal’s remote regions and about legendary Welsh writer Jan Morris. His travel and arts features have appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the in-flight magazine American Way. For seven years he wrote a column on gambling for the San Francisco Chronicle.
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