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Building this Oral History was a whole new experience for me in many ways. First, this was my first time interviewing a person. This project made me have a feeling of responsibility, by taking the appointments, by trying to ask to right and precise questions during the interviews. The guidelines were extremely helpful because they gave me many ideas of questions. In the interviews, I always came with a few prepared questions. But they only covered a part of the interviews since my other questions depended on the answers. This way, during the interviews, there was not that awkward situation of me asking questions and she answering… There was often a real dialogue but I always had to be careful not to argue too much with her ideas, thus I had to learn to control myself, even when I strongly disagreed with a few points. What was interesting to notice also, is the difference between the first and second interview: I learnt many more personal things about Linda which really made the Oral History original. So this whole interview process was very challenging and new for me. I now realize that making an interview is not as simple as it may seem on television… I did not e mail my questions to Linda because I did not want her to spend time thinking about the questions, I wanted spontaneous responses.
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