All I Did Was Ask: Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians, and Artists

The best part of producing a daily show is knowing that many listeners come to consider you a regular companion. The worst part is hardly having a minute between one deadline and the next and doing everything in a hurry.

In his memoir Self-Consciousness, John Updike wrote that he was offering his as “a specimen life, representative in its odd uniqueness of all the oddly unique lives in this world.”

You never know how the program fits into someone’s day.

But he did say that he thought the accident had led him to become an actor. In his roles, he could express “frustrations, and sometimes angers, that are simply inappropriate in everyday life.”

Unfortunately, these kinds of questions are often unanswerable. Craft goes only so far in explaining how an artist uses his gift, and the gift itself is often inexplicable.

But they bear little resemblance to the conversations we have in daily life. Unlike an actual conversation, which requires only two people, a Fresh Air interview is a team effort. One of my producers finds and books the guest, a researcher locates the material I need to look at for background, an associate editor cuts the tape, and the executive pr

I also encourage them to take advantage of the fact that the interview is being recorded and will be edited for broadcast. If someone is in the middle of an answer before he realizes what it was he wanted to say, he’s welcome to go back and start again—we’ll edit out the false start.

The interviews on Fresh Air sound conversational, or at least I hope they do.

The interviews presented here were conducted on the run and are by no means “definitive.” But I hope you’ll accept them in the spirit in which they’re offered, as entertaining and thought-provoking conversations with people I believe are worthy of your time.