Ryan is very nice to have done this. It’s similar to an AMA on Reddit, but it would only work for people who spend a lot of time here, or would volunteer to spend a period of time answering. I know Emily Short and Andrew Plotkin are very busy people. Emily does have her own blog and mailbag responses that she publishes on her own schedule.
What might work better for more elusive IF luminaries is if someone could serve as a liaison for a pre-agreed upon Q&A offline. Questions could be gathered beforehand in a thread, then edited so it’s not the same 20 questions about “what’s your favorite color?” the person has to respond to, and then published as an article in the Essays category.
So who volunteers to be the intrepid Barbara Walters of intfiction? 