How Deep Is That River?

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“I wouldn’t be able to keep doing my job,” says Fresh Air host Terry Gross, sitting in her book-lined office at Philadelphia’s WHYY radio station, “if I wasn’t still so curious about people.” That curiosity — the kind that can sustain a lifetime spent conducting revealing, penetrating interviews with artists and newsmakers — is even on display in the brief moments before our interview begins: Gross, a small woman in glasses and a leather jacket, asks a passing co-worker about her weekend plans, a visiting former intern about her current gig, and me about my trip from New York to Philly, my editing process, my career, the neighborhood where I live, what I thought about Lady Bird. And when I turn my recorder on, the 66-year-old — the country’s unofficial poet laureate of the interview — leans forward to listen even more closely. “If you’re willing,” says the NPR mainstay, “you can get an interview to a pretty real emotional place.” Or at least, she adds with a smile, “a place that isn’t boring.”

Read the interview.