A while back, mediabistro.com hosted an evening with author Rafi Zabor and his editor, Lorin Stein, in which the two discussed how they brought Zabor’s memoir, I, Wabenzi, from manuscript to publication. (Except that it’s not really a memoir per se, more of “a souvenir that kind of describes two major episodes in Rafi’s life,” according to host Chris Jackson.) As Stein explains it:
“At a certain point pretty early on, I told Rafi that I was in love with the book and that I loved it too much to let him fuck it up. Excuse me. What I meant was not having the tangents come back soon enough. Because I was worried in a commercial way, but also in an aesthetic way because Rafi’s ear is finer than ours, than yours or mine. And his sense of the book is privilege. It’s better than yours or mine. For the average reader, we don’t have the stamina to get to hear it the way Rafi does. So there’s a sort of after-translation that would need to happen. And in the end I said that it was up to Rafi to decide where the tangents ended and what could go and what couldn’t go. But, for a civilian standing on the sidelines, looking over this other border- that would be my job. We would try to save the book from its digressive tendencies.”
The full transcript of the evening’s discussion is available to AvantGuild subscribers, who also get all sorts of other benefits with their membership, now including a 5% discount from Barnes & Noble.com’s “customized online storefront.” The interview was conducted back in November, but someone in the audience did ask a “Freywatch”-ish question, to which Zabor responded, “I’d much rather write fiction than confessional. But, any way of converting it into fiction diminished the reality and the truth of the material. Any way that I could think of… If you’re doing it as fiction, you should be able to find the essence of it and improve the truth telling. But I couldn’t find a way to do it. There was no way I knew.”