A Writer's Essay: Seeking the Extraordinary in the Ordinary

I really like the idea of how you interview for a feature story versus how you interview for a hard news story with a politician or a criminal.  Instead of having a list of questions that is meant to guide the person to say what you want, here you actually ask very open-ended questions like, "Where were you born?" in an effort to have them ramble into something that you could use for your story.  It is so fascinating.  When you interview for "hard" news, you must cut people off after a few sentences because they're going off on a tangent.  With a feature story, you want the tangent.  The tangent is where you find the most interesting stuff.
I was raised with a father who loved to talk about the weather.  When he and my grandma discuss his hometown, he asks about how Earl's cousin's brother was doing with his liver cancer and his daughter who just had a baby.  My grandma gives him every last detail.  Earl's coffin was lined with this odd color of green.  It's all she could think about during the funeral.  The baby has the oddest shaped nose - like it came from somewhere other than the planet Earth.  The Bouchets from across the street let their lamp-post go out and haven't gotten it fixed.  It makes it impossible to see their ugly little dog when you drive up at night.  I want to learn to love these things.  It's in these things that the best feature writing material is found.