Video: Author Interviews

Transcript of Author Interviews

Hello, I’m Cathryn Molloy. Greetings from my office in James Madison University’s School of Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication.

 

With Erin Trauth of High Point University and Ellie Browning of the University of Pennsylvania, I’m one of the assistant editors of the new Rhetoric of Health and Medicine or RHM Journal.

 

As assistant editors, our primary role is to help with the journal’s publicity efforts, which include, of course, helping authors to attract interested readers to their work and to expand the reach of the journal beyond its pages.

 

In this short video, I’ll talk a bit more about one of many way we’ll promote the journal’s content, which are author interviews.

 

We assistant editors plan to conduct and use author interviews to forecast content that will appear in the journal and to supplement those publications in an easy-to-share format. Author interviews can be used to give others in the disciplines of writing, rhetoric and technical communication and beyond a preview of your work, and they can also be used to share your ideas with other interested stakeholders, such as, for example, patient advocacy groups or those working in the health sciences.

 

Our first author interview is with the wonderful Fred Reynolds. Fred wrote a brilliant piece on mental health rhetoric research titled “A Short History of Mental Health Rhetoric Research (MHRR)” for the inaugural issue of the journal, and he was generous enough to talk with me via Skype for over an hour on not only the content of his essay, but also his approach to crafting the piece. Afterward, the interview was transcribed and edited for clarity, and now it is ready to appear on the journal’s website; readers can expect to see it there in early January.

 

This interview is important because it offers readers a sneak peek of the essay that they can expect to find in the inaugural issue, and it also gives readers insight into Fred’s rhetorical aim, which is to offer those interested in the topic of mental health rhetoric research—especially graduate students and junior scholars—a thorough review of existing scholarship within the rhetoric of health and medicine and to impart a “come join us” message so that others will consider using what is out there already to build compelling, new inquiries into this important area.

 

The model used for Fred’s interview, importantly, is only one of many possibilities. We’d love to produce podcast and video interviews as well as alphabetic text interviews that are transcriptions of longer conversations. It all depends on the author’s preference. In all their iterations, we hope that author interviews offer writers the ability to share their work with wider publics of varying expertise, both to expand the reach of the work being published in the journal and to attract a diverse readership to the journal itself and its website.

 

So, if you’ve been looking for an opportunity to produce a high-quality, peer-reviewed piece of scholarship that will have an impact beyond the pages of a journal, consider the new RHM journal for your work. Along with a highly transparent editorial process via the journal’s co-editors Lisa Meloncon and Blake Scott and their associate editors, you’ll have the benefit of designated assistant editors to help you get the word out on the important work you’re doing.

 

If you have any questions about author interviews, you can reach the RHM assistant editors team at RHMAssistanteditor@gmail.com. Please check out Fred’s interview in early January on the journal’s site at http://journals.upress.ufl.edu/rhm.

 

Thanks very much for  your time and looking forward to working with you!