Questions Without Answers with Sarah Manguso
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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This is the Nocturnous Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman. Today I'm speaking with writer Sarah Manguso. I first encountered Sarah's work around 17 years ago when I read her book Two Kinds of Decay, a lyrical memoir of illness that has stayed with me ever since. In crystalline poetic fragments, Sarah described her experience with CIDP, an autoimmune neurologic disease, and the strange world of hospitals, treatments, and survival. Since then, Sarah has written widely across memoir, aphorism, and essay. Her most recent book, Questions Without Answers, began as a Twitter experiment and grew into a collection of children's philosophical questions, illustrated by the cartoonist Liana Fink. In my conversation with Sarah, we explore her formative memoir, Two Kinds of Decay, and what it feels like to revisit that book 17 years later.
Parenting and how toddlers are art machines whose logic and poetry can astonish adults. And the surprising themes that children return to birth, death, chins, and necks, and what they reveal about how. Kids see the world. I was so excited to speak with Sarah after being a fan of hers for so long, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. But first, here's Sarah reading from her new book, Questions Without Answers.
In twenty twenty one, I opened a Twitter account and posted a single tweet. What's the best question a kid ever asked you? Within twenty-four hours I had more than a hundred questions. Within a week I had hundreds more. I asked some famous friends to retweet the tweet. I asked everyone I knew to ask everyone they knew. I read multiple iterations of the if God is everywhere conundrum and multiple accusations of pregnant women having eaten their babies, but I also had the privilege of reading a lot of accidental poetry and philosophy in multiple languages and Death was a common topic, so was birth. I was surprised to receive so many questions about necks and chins. The poet Kenneth Coke, who taught at Columbia University for many years, also taught poetry to young children at New York City's PS61 in the late 1960s.
He wrote three books on teaching poetry to young children, including many examples of the poems that arose from his prompts. When I teach creative writing, I always bring in a few poems from his anthology, Wishes, Lies and Dreams, and I mix them in with my more recognizable texts. I love asking with a straight face if anyone has read the work of so and so, and then to announce that the author was seven years old when she wrote the poem we've just discussed. My students are impressed and a bit unnerved that they weren't able to guess the provenance of the children's poems. Very young children, younger even than Coke's elementary school students, might not be old enough to write poems themselves, but they do have access to imaginative worlds that are just as interesting and just as notable a fount of worthwhile literature.
The word literature might first suggest to the lay reader a Shakespeare play or a Tolstoy novel, but I've spent much of my writing life composing and delighting in very short literary forms, among them the short poem, the very short story, and the aphorism. There's always something a bit magical about one great standalone line. The aphorist James Richardson writes, No one will ever write a novel by accident. A poem, too, takes time. But if I say pick a word and you say one Where did it come from? You certainly don't say you wrote it or created it, more like you chose it or it chose you. One liners must be in the middle of that spectrum. One liners, among them the one line questions that constitute this book, float somewhere between thinking and writing, where verbal but preliterate young children dwell.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–10:46
2
What inspired Sarah Manguso to create the book Questions Without Answers?
10:46–11:59
3
How did a single Twitter post turn into a collection of thousands of children’s questions?
11:59–19:23
4
What role did researcher‑assistants and crowdsourcing play in shaping the book?
19:23–20:10
5
How did the collaboration with cartoonist Liana Finck influence the final project?
20:10–44:54