Gillian Demetriou
My name is Gillian Demetriou and I am currently a senior history major at Monmouth University with minors in English and public history. Professor Ziobro recruited me to conduct oral history interviews for Paradoxical Paradise while I was taking her Oral History class as an independent study during the Fall 2020 semester. My main job on the project this past Spring 2021 semester consisted of helping to locate potential narrators, researching relevant questions for them, and then conducting the recorded oral histories with them.
How does the process start? Usually either Professor Ziobro or I reach out to an individual we think might be a good fit, and explain the goal of the project and ask them if they would like to be interviewed. It is really important that they understand that these interviews will be made publicly accessible. Once they agree, we usually schedule the interview then I start doing research and writing up questions to ask the narrator, which I usually send to them prior to the interview. The actual interview takes anywhere from half an hour to an hour or even two, depending on how much the narrator feels like talking.
So far, I personally have interviewed five people: Councilwoman Eileen Chapman; Director of the Monmouth County Boys and Girls Club Doug Eagles; Director of the Asbury Park Chamber of Commerce Sylvia Sylvia; Co-founder of the Asbury Park Dinner Table Julie Andreola; and Dr. Pat Conolly, a chiropractor who practices in Asbury Park. These first interviews touched on people’s experiences in Asbury Park generally, but were especially focused on how COVID-19 is impacting the community.
I really enjoy conducting these interviews and listening to everyone’s individual experience within Asbury Park, the COVID pandemic, and how they feel they have impacted their community. One of the things that really stuck out to me was in my interview with Mr. Eagles. He discussed how the Boy and Girls Club was preparing themselves to tackle the mental impact of the pandemic: “we’re focused on really trying to pivot and adjust to meeting kind of the mental health fallout from COVID. Everyone, right, has been a little bit more isolated, and the communities that we serve had experienced different levels of trauma, even before COVID, and with COVID that has kind of exacerbated the levels of trauma that a lot of the kids that we work with endure. And so, we have worked over the past three to four months to build the capacity of our staff to address, through a trauma informed lens, the different mental health issues that some of our club members are dealing with.”
Hearing about initiatives like these that have made me want to continue working on this project throughout the summer. I have learned so much about all these different people and the community of Asbury Park. My favorite thing is when we get to the end of the interview and I shut the recording off and whoever I’m talking to asks me if that was okay, did they answer the questions well, did they tell me what I wanted to hear. I always tell them that this is an opportunity for them to tell their own story from their own perspective and I am simply there to listen, ask them questions, and document their experience. It has been so inspiring to me during this difficult time to hear the extraordinary things these people are doing to uplift their community and I’m looking forward to reaching out to more people.
Gillian Demetriou is an undergraduate student at Monmouth University