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“That’s How Civilians Think”: A Failed Carpool Karaoke Interview with Daniel Alarcón | Porter House Review

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We gave our level best, joking about Ronaldo/Messi and how Daniel wishes he could sing like Freddie Mercury, but beyond the laughs sprouted something else. Vulnerability? Riding in someone else’s car is funky like that—a microscopic glimpse into a life—and I feel stupid wishing we could still be James Corden and Adele after he snuck his bag around the snow shovel in my trunk that I haven’t needed since Wisconsin. Thankfully, our conversational odyssey—from his fiction to his young sons and the role of optimism in the world—proved we’re just not YouTube material. A writer, to Daniel, is an observer, a kind of historian of the human soul. Our work is important—in some ways sacred. So here’s some advice for a polite craft interview with a genius author: try a mahogany conference table. A clicky pen. Tell an undergraduate worker to fetch you coffee, establishing that you, too, have authority. But if you want something more, something human in a way only writers know, then leave your camera

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