Today we had our first round of interviews.

The first speaker was Sergey Grechinshkin, who grew up in the USSR and published a part memoir, part social history about them. His book was controversial because of its views once it was translated as many today are still heavily influenced by the saying and propaganda of the communist party. He also mentioned that many of his family members looked down on his for writing so personally about their lives and for sharing private details of their family.

His inspiration for writing, in general, grew from having a fascination for how words can alter reality. Stemming from the propaganda he was forced to learn growing up, he saw them as power and enjoyed using that to enjoy writing.

His process included starting off by remembering and recalling any facts, as it was important to get the details right. As well as this, he would piece things together and try to compose some form of story from it, but a majority of the time was spent editing.

What surprised me most was how much he normalised some of the things he experienced as he grew up. Even within his book he treated early marriage and divorce as very normal and not having things such as proper toothpaste as a standard, which made it almost comedic. I couldn’t imagine a life without liquid toothpaste because that’s what is normal to me.

His ability to also discuss events which may have been quite traumatic with ease also confused me because I was unsure whether to believe that he had come to peace with the harsh realities of his childhood and was now able to reflect upon it with ease or that maybe, by writing this book he had somehow avoided a lot of the raw emotions by altering details to make it reflect his reality less so when he had to talk about his book, he wasn’t talking directly about himself. But I am definitely getting ahead of myself.

It really seemed as if his past had, had no effect on today and besides his strong Russian accent, you would have no idea.

Then a school counsellor, Katie, came to discuss her experience working with survivors of sexual violence. She worked for charities such as Aware and DaySpring, where she counselled people and provided them with an outlet to talk about their trauma. She also helped give them options in terms of going to court or dealing with the abuser. She had a range of clients meaning she heard all sorts of stories, which sometimes were even too much for her! This is why she has a counsellor too, to help her be fit enough to help. This is also why she would take breaks from her assault counselling job, to give herself some time to recharge.

The biggest part for her would be getting to hear all these stories and getting to help people and most importantly, earning their trust because talking to a complete stranger about something so traumatic can be one of the hardest things ever to do, so she always admired their bravery for it.

Within the room, I could sense a feeling of tense among us as we weren’t used to talking about such a serious topic so casually and whenever asking a question, having to make sure we weren’t crossing any boundaries. There was a question asked about how she felt about men feeling almost scared these days of getting falsely accused and it took my breath away because I couldn’t believe that someone of my age would even consider that to be an issue. But many of my opinions were very similar to her so I found her easy to understand and relate too and really enjoyed listening to her advice. I didn’t expect her to give example stories of patience because of a confidentiality agreement, but they definitely helped me understand how serious what she did was.

To summarise the use of interview skills, I discovered that follow questions are very helpful and that it is very important to stay on topic as much as possible. No topic jumping.