An excerpt from Krystal Languell’s Introduction to Archive Theft: Paris Review Re-Interviews which records interviews with LaTasha Diggs, R. Erica Doyle & Khadijah Queen, and includes an afterward by Carmen Gimenez Smith.
In 2011, I began interviewing women poets, using sets of questions borrowed from the Paris Review online archive of interviews… I read an interview with William Faulkner from 1956 (by Jean Stein), in which he’s asked in-depth about working in Hollywood and about specific characters from his novels. It was quite different from the contemporary interviews I was also reading—those conducted online, the two parties never meeting face-to-face, using email or GChat to really kick the exchange into an artificially frantic pace. The Internet interview, it struck me, was nothing like a conversation…
Wresting these questions from their original context and recycling them for my own purpose is an exercise in feminist intervention; my goal is specifically to promote the work of women poets I believe in. The purpose of an archive, in my view, is to make material available for writers and scholars to use in creating original work. Happily, I’ve been able to make many discoveries in the process of engaging with the Paris Review interview archives. I learned that LaTasha Diggs has a brother, R. Erica Doyle took a ballet class, Khadijah Queen dropped out of art school. Without the constraint of the interview form I created, I never would have known to ask.