prolog

First interview
Recruiting the public
Frontline Interview
The day I met a celebrity
I want to meet you
Interview, the possibility of impossibility
The end is not the end
Interviewer's Study Method
The questionnaire is a guide to conversation
Wherever it is, as long as there are two people
INFJ's Opening Up
Don't be discouraged
Closed and open questions
The ethics of listening
When you turn on your blinkers during an interview
You want me to do the interview again?
Some reflection paper
Interviewing mind
A person who knows that he does not know

Epilogue

Appendix: How to Interview

Mix starlight into your life.
Then your mind will not be troubled by trivial matters.
- Maria Popova, from The Discovery of Truth

Author Eunyu, who has firmly established her own world through various writings such as essays, interviews, and reportages, has joined the series 'The World That Made Me, The World I Made'.
One thing that is 'good to think about' in metaphor is the interview.
It is a choice worthy of him, who has published six interview collections to date, including 『The Heart of Publishing』, 『The Death of an Unknown Child』, and 『The Person Who Draws Large』.
This book is packed with stellar stories about humanity and life, gathered by a man who has long worked as an interviewer conveying the voices of the socially disadvantaged while reflecting on his professional identity and attitude toward life.

In fact, when I came home after an interview, I refrained from making any strenuous movements and walked slowly, for fear that the stories I had stored in my body would get tangled.
An interview is a process of listening to a person's story, conveying it, processing it, and then sending it out into the world again.
I think it's safe to say that this is an expanded and in-depth version of the conversations we normally have.
So, even I, who didn't have any special background or technical qualifications, was able to quietly enter the world of interviews without much difficulty.
Then, gradually, it became something I wanted to do every day of my life, trying to maximize my senses and intellect to do just one interview well. _Page 11

It covers a wide range of experiences, from the first interview to the most recent, but it is not a guide to interview writing.
Just as those who are hurt by the pain inflicted by the world heal their pain through painting, music, and theater—these are called art therapy, music therapy, and theater therapy—『Anyway, Interview』is more like a recovery diary of someone who believes they have undergone a long 20-year period of "interview therapy."
It is a story of growth that discovers a gateway into one's own emotions and life by meeting others, a survival story of a 'professional' who is still making a living with the muscles of relationships built through being rejected, criticized, and disappointed, and a story of a 'person' who wishes to stand in the position of a listener until the end of his life.

I knew the saying, 'Life is suffering,' but I realized it deeply while working as an interviewer.
Everyone encounters difficulties and crises in life.
No, it may be that only those who have encountered difficulties and crises have appeared before me as interviewees.
Is it hardship in the early years or hardship in the later years?
There were no exceptions, only the timing was different depending on when it happened.
Illness, accident, bankruptcy, failure, breakup, etc.
So, if we stop at just understanding the content of what kind of hardship there was, the ‘story’ will not be established.
Pain itself, the event itself, cannot be written.
Polish author Olga Tokarczuk also mentioned this in her Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech.
“Life creates various events, but only when we try to interpret and understand them and give them appropriate meaning do they transform into experiences.”
It's simple logic.
If we ask the question, "Why should readers know about the hardships and sufferings that one person has gone through?", the answer will come.
What we should spread to the world through interviews is not the pain itself, but the interpretations he came to through the pain, that is, the wisdom or enlightenment he gained from the experience.
It is a message that gives a sense of what life is like, an insight into life.
To get that precious thing, you have to ask the right question.
_Main text, pages 101-102

In this way, "Anyway, Interview" delicately demonstrates how interviews and interview writing can expand beyond the simple act of exchanging questions and answers to empathy and communication with others.
The author vividly unfolds what he has learned over the past 20 years, meeting various people, listening to their stories, and willingly becoming a "witness" to their lives, as if he were going through the actual interview process step by step.
As you follow these stories, you will naturally realize that “an interview is not about stealing a person’s story, but rather about another person approaching, listening, and becoming a conduit for that person’s story to flow out into the world.”

He is a man who does not think he knows about people, but knows that he does not know about people, and so he becomes a man who thinks about people.
That what I know is not everything.
The fact that I know very little about anything and have only a partial contact with the world keeps me busy.
Because I chose to try it first rather than judging and drawing a line before even trying.
_Page 192 of the text

Published to coincide with the 2025 Seoul International Book Fair, "Anyway, Interview" is perhaps the book that best fits the fair's theme, "A Corner to Trust."
Meeting others who have lived different lives from me, asking them questions, listening to them, and finding a way within them is because I am with you, you are with me, and we are with each other, and yet it is still a 'corner of trust'.

In the hope that 『Anyway, Interview』 will serve as “a guide for people who do interviews as a profession and for those who feel awkward looking into others’ eyes and always stumble when trying to build relationships,” the author included an appendix titled “How to Interview” at the end of the book, which contains his interview know-how.
It consists of seven steps, including ‘Observe,’ ‘Question,’ and ‘Listen,’ helping anyone to conduct an actual interview and write about it.