My Interviewing Career Turns Ten
A retrospective of my first interview with Roxane Gay
A couple of weeks ago,
wrote a tenth-anniversary post for Bad Feminist on her Substack, which sent me flashing back to my first official interview.I had only discovered that I was a writer a few years prior and was quickly making up for lost time by exploring the many forms that could take. I started with essays, then moved on to screenplays, comedy sketches, a web series, a scripted podcast, and a column for xoJane. By this point, I was writing articles for Bustle during its early days.
Now, ten years later, I feel like I’ve always been an interviewer. My dad has a habit of asking strangers all kinds of personal questions, and they’re usually eager to engage. Professionally, he’s a schoolteacher, but he’s a natural interviewer—curiosity is a lifestyle for him. I’m the same; that’s where I get it. But my career as an interviewer for media began with the Bad Feminist book tour.
At the time, I had no idea what I was doing, but I had the requisite hutzpah. I had taken a few essay classes at the Writing Pad with
, who was just starting to write popular profiles for The New York Times Magazine. She was teaching us to be savvy and bold, setting an excellent example for both. I wanted what she was having.Luckily, I’d recently learned the publishing industry lingo of “galley,” which is the same as an advanced review copy (ARC). This term helped me bullshit my way into an interview with Roxane by emailing her publisher’s PR team.
Galley Request: Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist
Hi [Name],
I am a huge fan Roxane Gay's writing and I'd like to do a review of Bad Feminist, so I'm contacting you for a galley.
I'm planning to do a profile for xoJane and a book review for BUST.
My address is:
[Address]
I hope you can fulfill this request. Thanks so much!
Best,
Courtney
That’s it. That was the whole scam. I didn’t really lie—I was planning to do a profile for xoJane and a book review for BUST. I just didn’t have the assignments yet. And I did make good on the profile for xoJane, though it ended up as a Q&A. I wasn’t experienced enough to whip up a proper profile in $50-worth of time; I was broke and needed to be efficient. Besides, Roxane is so articulate—why mess with perfection? I also used another portion of the interview for a feature on Bustle under their Books vertical.
I interviewed Roxane at the JW Marriott Hotel near LA Live. I’m pretty sure I had to walk several blocks because I couldn’t afford to pay for parking. I was nervous, and it was probably obvious that I was green, but Roxane was generous with me—kind, thoughtful, and down to earth. She was bursting into the zeitgeist but still new to her celebrity. Perhaps we both felt like we were trying on new skin.
I'm sure I made plenty of mistakes in that first interview, but one thing I did right was the research. I carefully read the book and a bunch of her other work online. (That’s how I had enough material for two articles.) My galley was marked with about 100 Post-it Notes. I remember Roxane remarking on it and taking a picture. I was flattered that she noticed my preparation.
To this day, I believe if you do enough research, your interview can’t fail. You might not connect with the person in an intimate way, both of you could be having off days, but if you have enough information, and thus, ideas for questions, you will get some worthwhile responses.
Perhaps my biggest blunder, which I realized in retrospect, is that I didn’t clean up the transcript enough—too many ellipses and filler words like “you know.” I was valuing verbatim over verbal cohesion. I should’ve edited and condensed more for clarity. Easy rookie mistake. But maybe I learned that lesson before the final draft because when I went back to look at my documents, it wasn’t as bad as I remembered.
Since then, I’ve interviewed Lily Allen, Kimbra, Valter Longo, and loads of other celebrities, authors, experts, and other interesting people for print and digital publications, as well as radio. Not to mention hundreds of podcast interviews. Interviewing is a huge part of my job today. I love it, and I’ve gotten quite good at it over the past decade.
I hope this little trip down memory lane inspires you to take a career leap. People often call it “fake it till you make it”—a valid strategy, but a bit of a misnomer because everything is made up. Have you read Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens? Literally everything in the world that we take very seriously—like religion, money, government—is all made up.
So don’t wait for anyone to give you permission. It’s okay to slip in through the side door.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
For most writers and other creatives there’s a lot of rejection that predates this level of success that you’re having. How much of that did you deal with and how did it shape you as a writer?
Oh, tons of rejection. My last blog was called “I Have Become Accustomed to Rejection,” and I blogged about all my rejections. I would just sort of sift through them and think about what’s going on and why did this happen. It’s important to be rejected—and I still get rejected, of course. It’s a good reminder that you have room to grow. Sometimes it’s about fit and not knowing the appropriate thing to send to a venue. What it always did for me is it just made me hungrier and made me want it more. So if I would get rejected from this magazine, it became like my life’s mission to get something in that magazine—and then when I achieve it, it feels so good. So, yeah, it’s shaped me very much.
Big thanks to Roxane for being my unwitting guinea pig. Bad Feminist was an influential book for me as a woman and a writer, and I love that it allowed me to pop my interview cherry.
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So… ROLL CALL! 🗣️
Do you have a favorite fake it till you make it moment from your own career?
Let’s connect on social media! I’m @courtneykocak on Twitter/X and Instagram. For more, check out my website courtneykocak.com.