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This comes up about every six months: the "interview a professional working in your chosen field" assignment seems to be summer/fall.
If you're a creator with any sort of audience, and any means of public access, the requests start coming in.
Many of the students who've been told to get an interview are desperate. Some view this as their big chance to interact with an artist they admire. Others are incredibly manipulative.
"If you don't do this, I'll flunk." "You did this for my sister last year." "My GPA depends on your answer."
I have multiple public channels to reach me, for the sake of my readers. That doesn't mean I have time to do twenty people's homework.
I have been called a bitch, a cunt, and a selfish pig for declining, politely, after someone has told me that answering their fifty-question interview by tomorrow is the only way they'll pass.
And it's hard not to view every request as a cluster of potential lost sales. If I refuse, will they hate me? Tell their friends?
Authors can't afford to throw readers away willy-nilly.
(If you want to stop reading me because I'm a west coast liberal queer, we were never going to work out.)
So every six months, these assignments go out, and every six months, a couple of us ask politely and in public for it to stop.
Please, teachers, stop. Or tell your students that freelance authors have a rack rate of eight cents a word, and they should budget accordingly.
People are reaching hard for a solution here, when there's a really easy one available: don't tell students to shotgun email freelancers. Make a list of people who've consented, and update it yearly.
If that sounds like a lot of work, how do you think we feel? You're getting paid to teach, presumably. We're not getting paid to be harassed.
