‘I wondered whether the disordering of time, which was the inevitable product of lockdown, has intensified the intimacy and introspection of the interviews.’ Photo: ExtraECC
Conversation piece: Simon Machin on a lockdown interview project
‘Interviewees need the courage to be vulnerable.’
The well-worn adage attributed to the Christian anarchist, Elbert Hubbard, ‘When life gives you lemons, make lemonade’, tartly suggests that even adversity can be turned to something productive. Recently, an experiment in recording the life histories of Christians in the public square, and making them freely available online, has proved that, even during a pandemic, human conversation can thrive in new ways. We called it ExtraECC.
oups, including those who can now work from home. Those of us affected by this change, willingly or not, have added the term ‘hybrid’ to our social vocabulary, wherein a mix of physical and virtual communication is the new norm. And all social and friendship groups, including Quakers, are of course forced to consider the positives and negatives.
Ironically, although it was not intended to coincide with the pandemic, our ExtraECC experiment was one of the few community projects that benefited from lockdown. It was conceived as an antidote to online echo chambers, where social media users see only views with which they already agree. The aim had been to foster wider understanding by concentrating on the lived experience of prominent individuals across a range of religious groups. I had been determined that Quakers should be included within the conversation.
The pandemic intervened early in our process. Most recordings (there are more than twenty in the series) have been conducted online. Without such technology, given the logistical difficulty of coordinating diaries, arranging suitable venues and travelling the long distances, it is probable that many would not have taken place. It is also likely that our transition to this new way of online communicating, at a time when many of us had time on their hands, sped up production. As the coordinator and researcher, it was gratifying that such a high percentage of those contacted accepted our invitation and went on to be featured.
One of the pleasures of this extended ‘Desert Island Discs without the music’ (which is how we described the series in our email invitations) was the work of identifying and then researching a prospective interviewee. Quakers can be a self-effacing group and by their own admission are not always proactive in promotion or recruitment. It seemed sensible to approach someone who was well known within the Society and had a deep knowledge of its history, going back to George Fox, with some insight into the global range of practices (which of course differ quite widely according to continent).
The recent interview with Judi Dench in this magazine (20 May) confirms how interesting the inner life of a known and respected figure can be to fellow members of a group. But our intention was broader: to combine high profile with the ability to explain the dynamics of a faith. We needed someone with the performative gifts to tell their own story attractively, which is not as easy as it might seem. And finally interviewees need the courage to be vulnerable: this is essential to a good interview.
I was therefore delighted that Ben Pink Dandelion, a professor at Woodbrooke, agreed to participate, having gone through a process of discernment. His name was familiar to me from his 2014 Swarthmore Lecture, ‘Open for transformation’, as were his writings on Quakerism. I was intrigued by his telling of a spiritual experience he had on a Greyhound bus in the USA, when he had ‘gone to look for America’ but seemed to have found something quite other. His wry reference to his parents being ‘strict and particular atheists’ promised an interesting spiritual journey and a drily amusing voice.
The interview with Ben took place on 6 July 2020, fairly early on in the recording sequence, and lasted close to one hour and fifty minutes. There has been no standard length to the ExtraECC interviews. Instead, research into each life, which generally has taken me about five days, has produced a series of chronological questions which then became the basis of the conversation. Our inspiration has been the work of podcasters such as Joe Rogan, who has pioneered long-form conversations that find their natural length.
The proliferation of YouTube podcasts has freed these kinds of discussions from the restrictions of terrestrial broadcast scheduling. Our longest interview so far, a conversation of over three hours with the first black director of the Evangelical Alliance, Joel Edwards, has also sadly turned into an online obituary – a life well-lived now available for reflection and consideration by others. In tribute, it was the first interview to be released in the series in January 2022, along with my conversation with our lead interviewer, Jason Clark, and Jason’s of Rowan Williams.
The ExtraECC website carries a quotation from the US novelist, Eudora Welty: ‘The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order… The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.’ As producer of the series, I have sometimes wondered whether the disordering of time, which was the inevitable product of lockdown, has intensified the intimacy and introspection of the interviews. Each was conducted seamlessly in one take, with no subsequent editing. In some of them there is a sense of self-discovery. Several of the contributors have alluded to the pandemic as an opportunity to regroup and gain a new level of intimacy and authenticity in personal relationships.
If it has taken Zoom in a time of Covid to teach this perhaps bittersweet lesson, let us hope that those hard-won benefits are not lost as we emerge again into the sunlight of free association. Now regularly working from home as a consequence, I shall be sure to attend the Horsham lunchtime Meeting more frequently.
The ExtraECC interviews can be found at www.extraecc.com, or on YouTube, or as Spotify or iTunes podcasts.
