November's interview

The interview went amazingly well. I didn't get to bed until 12:20 the night before, and was up to leave at 4 a.m. God was good, though, and that nap felt as if it took 12 hours. It was raining hard driving to New Hampshire. I kept the radio switching between talk radio stations, and breakfasted on a granola bar. With me was the Chicago Manual of Style and a change of clothes. The plan was for L's parents to pick me up at the airport and take me over to the interview. Unused to Southwest, when I boarded the plane they had not assigned me a seat. What to do? Finally I claimed a seat about 3/4 of the way back, an isle, two seats over from a guy watching an Adam Sandler movie on his Dell. I read the style manual for awhile and slept for awhile. God was good to me again: the flight took forever – more sleep for me -- and my ears didn't notice a thing. No trouble at all meeting up with L's parents in Nashville, they put me in their car and drove me out to one of those isolated, Martian office parks. Gigantic squares and rectangles of glass thrust up from the grass at odd-angles. Robotic architecture. Mechanical aesthetics.

We arrived at my appointed publisher’s offices. Well-dressed, happy people coming in and going out of a blue marble lobby decorated in a red Christmas-bells motive. Even the metal trash cans had rims made special for red potpourri. I was dressed in leather shoes, slacks, with a blue shirt, a subdued complimentary tie and a blue sport coat. I carried references and a legal pad in a leather holder with Harvard's veritas crest embossed on it -- a gift from a friend. Taking the golden elevator, I pushed 5.

A receptionist named R. and I struck up a conversation about a pair of golden, Mickey Mouse ears perched on her counter while waiting for my interviewer, Mr. Darcy, to arrive. The entrance to this portion of the company (corporate headquarters is a huge, steel-and-glass building a block further away) was all of glass, though the interior was far too busy. The people, however, seemed human and approachable. Mr. Darcy himself was tall and quite cordial with black hair, blue eyes and a good handshake. He wore a blue shirt and tie. He took me to his office and sat down with his desk between us. His workspace was cluttered with attempts at organization. A large Van Gogh print was framed behind him, and pictures of his daughters made the rest -- he is in his upper 40's with a couple of kids in Middle School. Amid the papers was a Bugs Bunny coffee cup, one of my favorite scenes in which Bugs has been taken to the mad scientist's castle and is giving the monster a pedicure and saying, "You monsters are such interesting people." I decided that I liked this Mr. Darcy.

Now on the way down, I had been stressing about different interview questions. What do I say if he asks me this or that? I started thinking, as I told you, about my Dad's advice: tell stories. I can do that. The part of my mind that blogs and thinks and chats with friends comes up and says, "I'll take care of everything." And, sure enough, it did.

As Mr. Darcy asked me a question, I gave answers, stories. I described, narrated, engaged, cited, and above all informed him about me with every story-power I had. Be three-dimensional, be blood and bones to this man and you'll do a good deal, I thought.

Mr. Darcy steered clear of the stupid, evil questions and stayed on the "who is this guy and why should I hire him" questions. His clustered around the following: (1) can you put up with working on popular, rather than academic, religious books? (2) How do you handle detail; (3) How are your political skills; (4) Why do you want to be an editor? Halfway through the discussion, he started up and grabbed his boss, a member of the Board of Directors named the Storyteller. The Storyteller, a thin, tall man with grey hair and a grey moustache, smiled and shook hands. We talked like men talk at church over coffee. We talked about Texas, about barbecue, about the publisher’s stock, its CEO, the future of the company. Then he left Mr. Darcy and I to continue. We talked for 2.5 hours! I had an opportunity to get all my questions in, too (I’d taken care to come up with some good ones.) He said he was making a decision within the next week. He would want someone to start by mid-December. Afterward, he had to go and I had to take an exam. Beforehand, he loaded me down with four or five books.

The exam was awful - all English exams are. Unlike Math, where there is a clear answer, you never know if you're getting everything with English, and your mind starts second-guessing itself. Still, I knew I had lots of prayer with me, and so I carefully marked each page, going back over them several times. Checking isolated sentences is a totally different thing from editing prose. Prose has a feel, it runs in your hands and you can feel for inconsistencies. Isolated sentences are antiseptic and dead. I let myself out, the entire department was at a meeting, and met back up with my parents-in-law.

With a few hours to spare before my flight, I had a chance to tour L's parent's house: beautiful. A nice cup of coffee in their comfortable living room. We talked about friends in Germany, how their tapestries are showcased better in this house, what they were doing in the front lawn. Auntie Kara met me at the airport, looking not a day's different than she did in college. She looked so youthful I had to keep reminding myself that it was 2005. And, though it had been two years since I have seen her, I tell you not a day had passed. The flight back was macabre. The plane flew through alien and forbiddingly thick clouds of white ectoplasm. I couldn’t get comfortable, and wound up staring out like the dead into the monochromatic sky. L. stayed up to greet me, despite a horrible cough. I pulled in at 12:20 a.m. We talked until 1 a.m. about how things had gone and about our plans. Then we went to bed.