Bordone: Yeah, my story is relatively similar in that Frank talked to me about the idea and I think the way Michael and I started talking is that we spoke with each other about the idea. But I think along the whole way Frank was less certain whether he himself actually wanted to be involved, given the many demands on his time and other professional commitments. So I think over time the idea for the book really became…well Frank would serve as our senior advisor and mentor and consultant but that really Michael and I would try to put it together. Frank kindly...he had been in touch with Jossey-Bass, the publisher of the book… put us in touch with their acquisitions editor. The book then really became a negotiation of sorts between Michael and me. We spent many hours brainstorming how to put it together. We thought that there was a way that we wanted it to be organized that would make it a really fun and attractive and worthwhile project, instead of doing it in ways that would just make it a lot of work and not very useful. So I think our task then became putting together an organizing framework that we felt good about and then selling it to the publisher and seeing whether they would in fact bite, which it turns out they did.

NIACR: Ok. Did you have a target audience in mind when you came up with the idea for the book?

Moffitt: We had a couple of different audiences in mind when we wrote the book. The primary audience that we had in mind were people in the field. That is, that this book’s primary audience was not scholars and it was not students. Our primary audience, as we went through this, was thinking about practitioners; not necessarily practitioners of dispute resolution, although they are certainly a conspicuous target, but busy people out there who have disputes in their lives. As we were going through it, we were making the assumption that each reader of the text would be someone who was very intelligent but also very busy and not necessarily well versed in ten different disciplinary perspectives on dispute resolution. So one of the challenges that we had was trying to get disciplines that are used to talking to themselves, to speak in a voice that would make sense to people who don’t spend their lives within that discipline. And so as we were doing the book, practitioners guided most of our decisions and it wasn’t, at least for me, until late in project that I discovered that scholars were taking a great interest in knowing what other scholars from other disciplines were writing, and that students were liking the final product. In fact, now I’m even using the book as a textbook in one of my classes. But neither of those was the explicit purpose at the outset. It just happened to come together in a way that seemed to work for those audiences.

NIACR: Have either of you published, either together or separate, a book before this one?

Bordone: No, I think this is our first for both of us.

Moffitt: Well, I published, along with two colleagues, a very small book through the World Health Organization. It must have been about six years ago, seven years ago. It focused on developing countries’ negotiations over increasing health sector funding. It was a very specialized book about negotiation strategies for these developing countries. But it certainly wasn’t anything like the production that went into this book.

NIACR: So how long did it take to complete the book?

Bordone: That’s a good question. We were on a pretty fast-track schedule, which I think actually was good, although there were some sleepless nights for us. But would you say from start to finish, Michael, that it was about two years? That includes, the time spent really talking about it and coming up with a sort of framework and table of contents and recruiting various authors to actually seeing the book arrive on our desk. But clearly there are parts of those two years where we spent lots of every single day on it, and then there were parts where we did virtually nothing because authors were writing their chapters for us, or the publisher was doing the publisher’s round of editing; but about two years I would say.

Moffitt: That’s right.

NIACR: What would you say was the hardest part of doing the book?

Moffitt: Oh, I have my vote. Do you have a vote Bob?

Bordone: [laughs] I don’t know. I want to hear your vote.

Moffitt: My vote is… and I already alluded to it earlier… I think the hardest part was getting these incredibly smart, very experienced, sophisticated scholars to write very smart, intelligent, sophisticated pieces in ways that would make sense to people not from their discipline. That means getting a philosopher to write in terms that non-philosophy people can understand; getting lawyers to write in ways that non-lawyers could understand; getting economists and psychiatrists and so on and so forth, to write with a voice that is not perfectly consistent across the handbook. But really, you can pick up any chapter in the book and our goal at least was to make it approachable even without any prior background in the discipline. I found that really interesting, but really hard.

Bordone: I would say, from my perspective the hardest part was figuring out what needed to be in and what we didn’t have room for, because we wanted this to be a book that would be interdisciplinary in nature, and would be relatively comprehensive, and we also did want the name of it to actually reflect the reality of it. That is to say a handbook. We wanted it to be something that you could actually carry around with you, and not something you would find in a weight room. And that, I think, was hard for both of us, to sort of figure out where to draw the line. And I think it’s a challenge for the field generally, because it is such a wide and interdisciplinary field. So some of the calls we made I am quite pleased with. Yet there was sense that even right up to the very end, where we would say, "So how big is this book really?" "What will it actually look like?" And for me, I think the harder part is always leaving things out. But that was an important aspect and really part of our jobs as editors.

NIACR: What would you say was the best, or most rewarding part of doing the book?

Bordone: For me… Michael sort of alluded to this…. but as we spent more and more time on the book we realized that it could work well as a textbook for students, and I would love to see it used as a textbook for more and more classes in the field. I think to see it being used almost as a primary introduction for those interested in dispute resolution would be very rewarding. I think the secondary part is the target audience saying, "Yeah, this is actually a book that consolidates very sophisticated research and thinking on the field and makes it useful and applicable to me as a practitioner." That to me is sort of the highest praise.

Moffitt: For me, the most rewarding part of the experience of putting it together has been the conversations with the contributors; most importantly with Bob. I mean I’ve spent untold hundreds of hours on the phone with Bob, but also with other of the individual contributors. I have just deeply, personally valued the opportunity, the sort of excuse, to spend time talking to these people who aren’t necessarily exactly in my part of the field, and I’ve learned a ton from that… to be able to spend time with people who have a different perspective, and I wish there were more and better opportunities for that sort of fertilization.

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