A60
Collective Memory
Excerpt from interview transcript.

Samson Manoah: An author discusses his art.

[…]

Killoway: You said earlier that this work took you six years to complete. Did you feel at times that this was just a bit too ambitious? Did you ever want to give up?

Manoah: I did, several times I just put it in a cupboard and just sort of quit. And there would be so many days at a time that just the worst, most terrible things i’ve ever read were coming out of my own pen. Really awful stuff. I knew there were a couple of good things in there, so I had this longing for people to read the work, but i didn’t want to share the work until it was finished. So it was kind of this perpetual-motioned anxiety that pushed me to finish it.

Killoway: And what were those, as you said, “good things in there” that made you excited about showing other people?

Manoah: Well it felt like I had found a way around fiction, and that was new and it was exciting. You know, everyone knew that the major flaw of fiction was its predictability, but nobody seemed to be breaking out of that. You’d sit there reading this book, say you’re about twenty pages in, and already you’re just sitting there waiting for the “inciting event” to come (if it hasn’t already), and you know that once that came, there would be the inevitable “rising action,” and that would eventually lead to the resolution, and then you’d be done, and you’ve only just picked the thing up. You’re pretty much halfway done by the time you read the back cover. And, really — that’s the thing, too — if you can sum up the first half of an entire 300 page novel in a single paragraph, then you’re wasting a lot of fucking pages. Do you know what I mean? But the strangest part about it was that the person reading the book knew these terms, like “inciting event” and “rise in action” and “resolution,” and all that, and they’d seen enough renditions of it that the knew when they were coming. But they wanted more of it! Most of the time reading these books, I’d get halfway through and just never read them again because I didn’t care anymore, you know? I’d be reading it thinking, “Alright, well let’s rap this up.” Even when there’s a surprise, it still fits into the “surprise point” of the story, you know, like maybe you can’t guess at it what it is, but you’re going home knowing there’ll be a surprise party when you get there. You know? It’s been hundreds of years of this “fill in the blank” type of storytelling. I really believe that readers were just bored of it, but nobody had anything something new for them to read.

Killoway: [laughter] That’s a really great segue for my next question, actually. So in the nationally acclaimed quarterly review “Remerican Writing,” Stilbin Darby used four pages to write about just how ‘not new’ your work is. At one point, he states, quote, “[Manoah’s] doing the same thing as any other author out there, and doing it much worse than most authors out there. […] His poor attempts at humor and frequent comments about the work itself repeatedly broke whatever immersion he may have previously achieved." And the last one: at one point Mr. Darby says, "Manoah hasn’t created a ‘new genre of fiction’ so much as package reconstituted drivel for lazy readers to swallow up wholesale.” How would you respond to critics like Mr. Darby?

Manoah: Fuck you, I think is how I’d respond to critics like Mr. Darby.

Killoway: [laughter]

Manoah: No, I mean in all seriousness, I think it's important to note that, on some level I do agree with Mr. Darby. I didn't create anything ‘new,’ I mean, on some level I honestly don’t think that’s possible. But what I do — the format I use in my books — there wasn't anything like that before it. And now, I mean just look at the market. Before my first book, there weren’t fiction books written like poetry, not really. And there certainly weren’t poetry books with fictional essays that all, you know, fit together in order to tell a narrative story . I mean, don’t get me wrong, there were confusing books, I mean books that seem like they were just intentionally meant to confuse the hell out of anyone unfortunate enough to open them. That genre was just left at “experimental.” I think they were all failed experiments, honestly. You know, with experimental fiction it always felt like there was an active attempt to keep the reader in the dark, but the authors and their fanbase were there to assure you that ‘If you didn’t see it’s meaning, you just weren’t looking closely enough.’ Anyway — what was I saying? — anyway, I think what my work did was to identify these two disparate parts of storytelling, detail and emotion, and separate them, polarize them, so that readers never had to confuse them. I created something intentionally, I’ll say, boring, because I think people were ready to be bored. I surgically removed the “narrative arc” and replaced it with nothing.

Killoway: Going back to something you said earlier, about market share. I mean, the numbers show that you and your work don’t have a heavy sway in readership. Even in this genre that you claim to have invented, the numbers just aren’t there for you. I mean I’m looking at it now, and your name shows up forth in the Top Five List of Freeform Fiction Authors. So when you say (I’ll read it back now), quote, “What I do, the style I published my first book with, there hadn’t been anything like that before it…And now, I mean just look at the market,” do you mean the influence your work has had on other authors in the market?

Manoah: Yes, that’s what I mean.

Killoway: And what might you say to critics who argue that your style isn’t actually new? As Jilly Childish stated, “It’s just a rebranding of Modernism. A remodel.”

Manoah: Yeah, I mean they’re probably right. I don’t know. I think it was Dorbin Strugler who said, “the exact moment you have enough information to define an art movement, that movement is undoubtedly dead,” or something like that. You know it’s like the artwork gets dissolved into its most identifiable traits, then artists just start using those traits and calling it a movement. At that point, it’s over. Does that make sense?

Killoway: Not really. [laughter]

Manoah: I was a fluid writer, so I took a lot of classes on writing, and that’s how they taught us to write. Do you see what I mean? They’re poisoning the source. The curriculum was just there to teach us the formula, and we’d just be filling in blanks. There was literally an exercise we did where we filled in the blanks to make a story. Like “protagonist name” and “inciting event,” and then at the end of it we had inadvertently written a story. That was the lesson. “Just so now you know, just fill in the blanks and you’re done. That’s all there is!”, you know? So I guess when I found my “style” it was my realization that writing is anything you want it to be, as long as you create it wholly and carefully.

Samson: I actually believed that students in upper school would study this book someday,” says Samson Manoah, author of relatively unknown fiction novel a longitudinal case-study into motherlessness. “And that I would be credited with finding the voice of this new genre. I sincerely did. I couldn’t believe in any other outcome. But then suddenly it was just out there, and some people read it. Few liked it and few hated it, and you need a lot of one or the other to really start anything. So nothing started and nothing stopped. And I was surprised, honestly — which sounds like such an arrogant thing to say — but I mean it that I really thought this thing I was making would be important. So when it wasn’t, I just sort of decided to keep going. I wanted people to see the things I made and to experience something new — because I really did think it was something new. And they didn’t change anything. […]

Seven months later, Thresher Charles came out with his book, sponsored by Frē. It started during a double credits week and it garnered incredible interest, then when it came out it sold very well. On the front cover was a Public Opinion that said, “Thresher Charles is the voice of Freeform Fiction. — by an anesthitician named Barnold Galbredth.” In his full Opinion, Galbredth cites my book to quote the poem the definition of freeform fiction, and then nothing else. […]

Tee B. Killoway interviews Samson Manoah