A Normal Interview with Dinty W. Moore

By Bonita Hele

Bonita Hele: You’re a busy writer, speaking frequently at workshops and conferences. How do you find your work at conferences and seminars informs your writing?

Dinty W. Moore: I learn a lot from teaching, both in my regular Ohio University faculty position and teaching around the country at various weekend and week-long workshops. Teaching forces you – if you do it right – to articulate what you believe makes for successful writing, and to seek out practical, craft solutions to common narrative concerns. It keeps my mind alert, I think, or hope.

BH: This July, you will be participating in the CSU Summer Arts program, for The Normal School’s Creative Nonfiction Workshop. Are we allowed a sneak preview of topics or themes you’ll be covering? More broadly, do you have a similar approach to workshops you teach, or do you revise your material each time?

DWM: My plan for my workshop is to help participants generate new work, growing out of a series of brief writing based on prompts I will bring along. (I revise the prompts regularly, so we’ll see what new ideas July brings.)

I like to think of the work produced in a generative workshop as seedlings – little sprouting things that the writer takes home and nurtures, discovering eventually whether one or the other will grow into a 1,000-word essay, a 4,000-word essay, or something longer. But the seedlings are there, for whenever the writer finds the time to dive back into the work.

BH: The online nonfiction journal Brevity has been around for roughly 20 years now. How have you found its shape transforming or reforming over that time?

DWM: Brevity began as a home for conventional narrative nonfiction of a very brief nature, but over the years it has expanded – thanks to the submissions that come in – to include lyric essays, experimental essays, ruminative (Montaigne-ish) essays, literary journalistic works, and work that is hard to define but stunning. Of course, we have transformed into something much larger than I ever anticipated as well, with thousands of regular readers spread across the globe. We’ve published work from writers living in India, Egypt, Ireland, Spain, Dubai, Malaysia, and Japan. I find all of it – the reach, the success, the level of work – to be staggeringly wonderful.

BH: In an interview with Jenny Patton, you remarked on your fascination with the short form. What is the shortest piece you read that still worked, that drew you in as a reader? Is there such a thing as “too short” in the brief art form?

DWM: I’m going to duck the first question.  There are too many examples of “super short” flash and new ones pop up every day.  But no, I don’t think there is a too short limit. Or if there is, someone will prove it wrong.

BH: I’ve read that between first draft and final publication, your essays go through 40 revisions on average. Do you find that as you have developed the writing craft, you don’t revise as much or as deeply as in earlier writings? I guess another way to put it is, is it easier for you to assay these days, or is it as much a journey now as it has ever been?

DWM: No, I still revise almost as much as I did before. Sometimes I may revise even more, because I’ve set my sights higher. I’m one of those writers who works out what he is trying to say in the process of writing and revising, and refining, and rewording, and redefining, and finding new question to ask somewhere in the middle of the revision process.

BH: What excites you most about your current writing project? Is there anything that frustrates you or that you’re finding an inordinate challenge?

DWM: My current writing project is kicking me in the butt right now. Nothing excites me about it but the prospect that someday the tide will turn and I’ll get the better of the project instead of the project having the better of me.

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Dinty W. Moore is author of The Story Cure: A Book Doctor’s Pain-Free Guide to Finishing Your Novel or Memoir; the memoir Between Panic & Desire; and many other books. He has published essays and stories in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Harpers, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Arts & Letters, The Normal School, and elsewhere.

Dinty has won many awards for his writing, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. He edits Brevity, an online journal of flash nonfiction, and lives in Athens, Ohio, where he grows heirloom tomatoes and edible dandelions. 

Nonfiction writer Bonita Jewel Hele, a freelance editor for nearly ten years, spends weekday mornings encouraging elementary students to love literature, afternoons as a Graduate Assistant with the Fresno State MFA program, and evenings reading stories to her three children. 

A Normal Interview with Christine Hyung-Oak Lee

By Mary Pickett

Mary Pickett: We just passed an anniversary for you - Your debut memoir, Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, was released last Valentine’s Day (Feb. 14, 2017). How have things changed for you within this past year?

Christine Lee: Thank you for recognizing that anniversary.

It has been a year of new experiences. And mostly, lessons learned.

There were amazing things that happened: I had the opportunity to meet and interview with Scott Simon on NPR and had my book reviewed in the New York Times. Those are dream scenarios. And most heartwarming of all—I received encouraging emails from readers.

But there were also so many things I’d not anticipated. Including the changing of my identity—for so many years, I’d been unpublished, and suddenly, I was an author of a book. And the only difference was one day in my entire life—and I had to say goodbye to that writer and embrace a future I’d only dreamt of. So, I was also strangely in mourning.

It’s like when I finally got divorced after four long years of paperwork and court appointments and many talks with lawyers. I seriously thought I’d be overjoyed when the divorce was announced. But when the judge began saying, “I dissolve the marriage of…” I broke down in tears in court. I did not expect that reaction. But you know, grief is part of moving forward and part of achievements—you say goodbye to the past.

It has also been a year of becoming more of a private person—which is ironic, because I just put out a memoir with very personal thoughts and feelings. It is because of that very fact that putting out a book can be a very bruising experience and so I re-prioritized yet again and focused on my inner life. This meant holding dear my closest friends. This meant focusing on my daughter and partner more than ever. This even meant ramping up my urban farm and falling in love with beekeeping. You know—non-writing stuff.

MP: I’m intrigued by your above description of book publication as a “bruising experience.” Can you tell me a little more about that? Might this experience occur only within nonfiction?

CL: I can only speak for my experience with my memoir, because my novel is still forthcoming. I hear publishing a novel is just as bruising for fiction authors, though. Maybe it’s bruising in different ways, because we each have different expectations that might not be met. You’ve spent a lot of time alone writing something for a very long time—maybe a year, maybe ten years, before releasing your dreams and expectations out into the world for judgment. I think in some ways, the MFA workshop is boot camp for that experience—your work, when read by others, is no longer your own. It is absorbed by different minds and it becomes something different altogether.

It’s heartwarming and, also, heartbreaking. Upon publication, your book is no longer your very own. Your book has its own life.

Publishing a book isn’t going to make you happy if you weren’t happy before you published the book. It isn’t going to open doors if you weren’t opening doors for yourself before you published the book. It doesn’t change who you are. To me, it’s like getting married; marriage in and of itself isn’t going to make or break a relationship or change a life. The work is the work. The love is the love. The passion is the passion.

MP: One of my favorite lines in your book is: “This book is about my stroke, but the stroke helped me come to terms with other traumas….” One of which, being your divorce. How did you decide to share these traumas with the world?  

CL: I couldn’t not share the related traumas. My 14-year-old marriage (18 year relationship) fell apart and I was overcoming postpartum depression, and in my misery, I kept looking back at the stroke and the lessons learned therefrom. They were inextricably linked, especially at that time. So, I had to write them down. There is universality in the particular and I hope my readers, whether or not they’ve overcome a medical trauma, also glean helpful lessons from Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember.

MP: Was anything off-limits within this sharing?

CL: I did not share anything about the acute particulars of my separation. I wanted to prioritize my daughter’s wellbeing and that meant not tearing down her biological father. I wanted to write a book about which I’d feel zero regrets.

MP: You have written both nonfiction and fiction. Do you prefer one genre over another? Does genre classification matter?

CL: I really enjoy both fiction and nonfiction—though fiction is my first love, and there is always something special and unique and vulnerable about the thing for which you first feel passion.

Though both genres require craft, they have different requirements. Nonfiction has a hard line in that you must tell the truth as you experienced it. And because you are narrating facts, there is a great burden of curation on the writer to tell the story. You must pick from what you have been given.

Fiction does not have the burden of fact-telling, but it’s not any easier. I like to say that creative nonfiction is about describing the knife and slicing your wrists. Fiction is about building the knife and slicing your wrists.

MP: We first met in the Spring of 2016, when you were a guest lecturer for my Fresno State MFA fiction workshop. I still can’t believe that you drove a total of six hours every Wednesday (from Berkeley to Fresno, and back again)! That’s real dedication to teaching. How does your teaching inform your writing?

CL: That was an epic commute. I can’t believe I did that, either! I ate a ton of Hi-Chews during those drives out of sheer boredom. I think I ate about six packs of Hi-Chews each week and I listened to a lot of podcasts.

But I really did enjoy my time in the classroom with you. Part of the reality is that teaching takes time away from writing—and that is the dirty secret that many writing teachers won’t share. But the other reality is that teaching helps my writing, because by iterating theory and craft to others, it helps me refine my own process and awareness.

MP: What are some of your favorite podcasts?

CL: Dear Sugars, Reading Women, Story Makers Show, and TED Radio Hour.

MP: Can you tell me about your latest writing project: your upcoming novel, The Golem of Seoul?

CL: My novel is about two Korean immigrants who travel to the United States in 1972 to find a long lost relative. They build a golem out of a tin of soil they’ve brought with them from North Korea to help them out. It is a cross-cultural retelling of an old story.

That’s what the novel is right now, but I just got editorial notes back from my editor, so that may change.

MP: I want to thank you for coming back to Fresno State to lead a craft talk and read from your work during WordFest. The focus of your talk was on building worlds - which, as you said, can be applied to both fiction and nonfiction. Do you find the world building process similar for both genres?

CL: I think the world building process differs for each and every book and story. Each story and narrative requires different things out of the writer each time. In one story, you might be intimate with the physical terrain, but have to explore its emotional connection. In another story, you might be imagining a world with which you're not familiar and have to build from scratch, which in some ways means freedom, and in other ways, means more work. I wish I could provide predictive information, but it really is a new start each and every time. But you do hope you've built more muscles and tactics and strategies as time wears on.

MP: You turned the talk into a bit of an art class, by having us build our own worlds out of clay. How did you come up with this exercise? Is this something you might recommend as part of the writing process?

CL: I thought that after sitting and listening in your seats all day that it would be nice for you to get your hands literally dirty. I am very aware that students learn things in different ways - some of us through watching and others through physical experience. And I am aware that playing is very important to art. So, I was looking for an exercise in which you could have "hands-on" experience.

This turned out to be a literal hands-on exercise. I am going to credit Victor LaValle for this exercise. While I was writing the first draft of my novel, Victor suggested I go and build my own golem as my characters do. So, I went out and got some clay and sat down, expecting very little out of the experiment. I learned that it's not so easy to build a little figurine. I learned that it is an emotional experience. I got to embody my own characters and understand what it was like to be in their world - the questions that go through their mind and even the order in which one would build body parts.

Some people don't have to have the kinetic learning experience. But many of us do to some point. And we need all-hands-on-deck to write a book. We need to learn in as many ways as possible. We need to engage in as many ways as possible. So yes - if you're stuck or even if you're not stuck, go out and build something. If your characters are in agriculture, go plant one of the vegetables or fruits they're tending, whether it is a strawberry plant, cotton plant, or an artichoke. You don't have to plant an entire field, but you have to know what it feels like to plant something, to feel the soil, and to see what it looks like when it first pops up out of the soil. You even have to feel and understand what it's like to watch a plant die; so, if you fail at growing the thing, there's opportunity in that, too. If one of your characters is a housekeeper, go out and clean a friend's home. See what it's like to be tasked with something and to wander around someone else's house and have to clean a mess that isn't your own. Embody the experience. Put yourself physically in your world's space, to the extent that it's possible.

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Born in New York City, Christine Hyung-Oak Lee is the author of the memoir Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Zyzzyva, Guernica, the Rumpus, and BuzzFeed, among other publications. Her novel, The Golem of Seoul, is forthcoming from Ecco/Harper Collins.

Mary Pickett is a third-year MFA fiction candidate at Fresno State and Senior Associate Fiction Editor for The Normal School.

A Normal Interview with Jon Kerstetter

By Brandon Lingle

Brandon Lingle: Tell us about how you came up with the crossings metaphor as a unifying idea for your book?

Jon Kerstetter: That was a late development. I had, in the earliest stages, envisioned the book as a work that played on the practical and literary tensions of being a doctor and a soldier, (the first title was Soldier-Doctor) but in the course of developing it, I realized there was much more to the story because there was much more to me. Who was I in the most complete sense? Well, soldier and doctor certainly, but I was also a Native American with a different cultural perspective, I was a father and an older man. I was a stroke survivor and a patient during the entire time of the writing. Those were the parts that I had to reveal if the memoir was going to be true to my life and the pivotal events in it. During the first four years of the project, I struggled with the unifying theme and the narrative arc. It was only during the final three years that the notion of crossings really hit me as a central metaphor. What had I done during my entire life? Pushed against the boundaries that tried to define me. And I pushed them hard until I was able to cross them all. Crossings, quite literally, were in my DNA. Once I understood my own history, the crossings became clear, both as metaphor and milestones.

BL: I’ve heard surgeons say medicine is as much art as it is science. How do you think medicine and science inform your art?

JK: The core of medicine and science rests in the ability to make precise observations upon which diagnoses and therapeutics are based. To me, that is also the essence of good writing—keen and precise observations about characters, events, and settings followed by thoughtful interpretations of what has been observed. When I first started writing, I tried to write profound meanings for the reader. The writing was forced and unnatural. My mentors gave me some excellent advice: ‘instead of trying to make meaning, focus on making sentences. Give all the details of who, what, where, and when.’ That was great advice. I then drew on my medical training and began writing exactly what I observed, the color of the room, the sound of a bullet, the smell of battle, and when I made the change, my writing came to life and was precise and accurate.  The meanings I sought to provide for readers then flowed naturally out of the story and its details, much like a diagnosis logically flowed out of astute clinical observations.

BL: Proximity and distance are threads that run through the book. You wrote, “I learned to get close enough to patients to show empathy and compassion while remaining detached enough to move from one case to the next with the understanding that medical science could not save every patient.” And, later, “remain detached in spirit without being distant in practice.” How does the ability to detach impact your writing?

JK: That detachment was critical in my writing. It allowed me to gain needed distance from emotionally laden stories that tended to trap me in a rather sad and depressed mood. War is a sad state of affairs, but to write effectively about it, about any difficult and emotional encounter, a writer needs to first convey the details of exactly what is seen and experienced. Doing so helps readers see and feel and hear as if they were real-time observers in a scene. That is the “show versus tell” or the “show and tell” of writing. With respect to difficult and highly emotional stories, the ability to move between the proximity of emotion and the distance of details is imperative in conveying the full range of our human experience.  Writers are translators: we take one language of human experience and translate it into another language so others can understand us. That translation is never easy. The Triage chapter in the book was originally published as an essay that took me a year and a hundred drafts to complete. In writing the first drafts, I would slump my shoulders, weep, and allow myself to be overcome with grief. I had to make a transition from the participant in the story, to the writer of the story. Without that transition, I was too close emotionally to describe the events in the manner it deserved, with the details that allowed readers to experience firsthand the gut-wrenching challenges of medicine practiced in war.

BL: You note your life’s ironies, “A doctor training to become a soldier, a Native American in the modern cavalry whose roots extended all the way back to the Indian Wars.” Some would cite the ironies of our continued interventions in the Middle East. How does your work help you make sense of these complicated relationships?

JK: Life’s ironies. What would we do without them? In a sense, life merely offers us a sequence of events. We make the interpretations and see the ironies, the tragedies and the humor. We see the love and the hate and the indifference. When I write, whether essays or chapters in a book, I objectify my experiences on paper and then come back months later to encounter them much as a first-time reader would encounter them. That’s why it’s important to let material sit for a while between revisions, so one can get as close to objectivity as possible. And that writing/reading/revising process is the most rewarding kind of experience. It allows me to hone my views, challenge what I believe, see the subtleness of some ironies and the hammering force of others I may have been blind to. Case in point: my assignment to the Cavalry as a medical officer. I knew about Custer’s last stand in an academic, historical sense, but when I was revising that chapter about joining the National Guard, the rich details of my encounter with the commander, his black Stetson with its gold cavalry band and the image of Custer on horseback gave me a fleeting sense that we were playing “Cowboys and Indians,” and the irony hit me. How far had we both come. One needing the other. Now fighting together, yet known in history as fierce enemies. A modern Native doctor in the modern Cavalry. Our ancestors might weep or they might laugh, depending. 

BL: You sought out dangerous and necessary humanitarian work in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo and wrote, “disaster medicine forced a reliance on the ‘thinking’ aspects of medicine rather than the ‘technological’ aspects…” and “I needed those patients just as they needed me. Their need for a doctor fueled my need to be a doctor. Everything I did for them mattered, and as detached as I had to become for professional survival, I became attached to those patients; I was the doctor who gave hope and even laughter with medicine. I lifted patients’ spirits and by doing so, lifted my own. There was a feeling that unified us, patient and doctor, against whatever calamity was trying to destroy us, so in the end we all survived together.” How does writing compare?

JK: Writing defines writers. I am now a writer who is as defined by my writing as I was by my career in medicine. But the defining is not one way. As in medicine and soldiering, I have become part of cadre of people who define writing by pushing boundaries with my unique perspective. We writers all have that opportunity; we shape our craft at the edges where it needs redefining, we bend the rules, twist the structure, challenge the paradigms of what it means to write and create. As much as I need writing now, I have a sense that it also needs me. I have my need to bring a new way of talking about combat and healing and loss, a fresh way of dealing with tragedy and hope. And the canon of literature needs that new approach, needs all of our new viewpoints. I need writing; it needs me.

BL: You spend time discussing the spin-up for your first Iraq deployment… the call up, balancing family with deployment preparations, and training. Then we land in Kuwait. The transition from home to war is a major crossing, and I’m interested in the creative choice to leave the physical trip out?

JK: That trip caused lots of mental anguish in terms of the prospects of putting all that I had learned in training to the test of real-time war medicine. But the anguish was mostly internal and I struggled with its usefulness in the work as a whole. I had written a separate essay in which I explored that physical trip to Iraq, but I had also written about my physical medevac out of Iraq. I decided to maximize the impact of the arrival transition by compressing the time: the reader sees the home preparation and then Bamm! Arrival. That transition is abrupt compared to the months of training preceding it, and the abruptness, I think, adds to the gritty effect of unexpected nature of war. I could have gone the other way and included the trip to Iraq, but that was a choice I made in pacing the story. And that brings up a good point, pacing is a key element in writing. The writer faces many difficult choices in tuning the pace of a story. An essay with the same thematic material may have one pace, yet as part of the larger story in a book, the same material may require different pacing and a different strategy. Choosing what to include or exclude in a story is always a debate.

BL: The entangling nature of war surfaces throughout the book. After orchestrating the autopsies and transfer of Saddam’s sons, you wrote, “I felt my refusal to witness the bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein was my way of protecting my family from the entangling influences of their evil.” I appreciated your candor and understand this act of looking away. Do you think our country looks away too much from the truths of war? How do you think our society should recount and discuss war? If our society was more candid and open about the costs, would we be less apathetic when it comes to sending people to fight overseas?     

JK: I think society as a whole looks away from the horrific and difficult truths of war. It is one of the ways we tell ourselves war is not real, that we humans have not crossed into inhumanity. Of course, we know that is self-deception on a grand scale. The role of war writers and war correspondents is that of truth telling—we writers bear the responsibility of telling about war from our unique vantage point. We are the ones who must call to society, sound the warning bell and show the true cost of war and our inhumanity. Hopefully our candor makes people think enough to challenge our politicians and military leaders as to our future roles in conflict. We all know that some wars must be fought; that will perhaps never change. But what must change is our proclivity for conflict leading to war. We, the military writers must become the lens and the mirrors that show the price of apathy. If we continue turning out excellent literature of war, we have a better chance at driving a cultural dialogue that focuses on the true costs of war. That is why it is important to keep writing and keep pushing our readers.

BL: On war’s insidiousness, you wrote, “In one moment you recalled the good things of home, and in the next moment the things of war and its inhumanity would creep in and destroy a perfectly beautiful and peaceful memory.” Can you discuss how writing this book affected these intrusive memories of war for you?

JK: Well, the intrusions were no small thing. They were the cost of writing about war. Writing makes writers relive experiences and when those experiences make writers plunge headlong into personal conflict and pain, the process takes on a horror all its own. There were several times when it was just too difficult to write. And frankly, some of the most difficult pieces I wrote were difficult for my first readers to get through. I had to learn to write in smaller, manageable chunks of the most gruesome war scenes. I even debated about leaving the most difficult scenes out, but that felt like a violation of the truth and my writing task.  I decided that if I was going to write about war and all its ugliness from a physician’s point of view, I had to tell the truth to remain faithful to the craft of writing, but also to the men and women under my care who lost their lives in a most horrific way. My memories would become the memories of readers who trusted me to write the truth… and that became the balm that helped me deal with the intrusiveness of the horrific scenes of war. Yes, there was pain, but the telling of the truth helped in the comprehension of it all.

BL: This vignette about a dying soldier... “The general laid his hand on the expectant soldier’s leg—the leg whose strength I imagined was drifting like a shape-shifting cloud moving against a dark umber sky; strength retreating into a time before it carried a soldier into war. And I watched the drifting of a man back into the womb of his mother, drifting toward a time when a leg was not a leg, a body not a body—to a time when a soldier was only the laughing between two young lovers who could never imagine that a leg-body-man-soldier would one day lie expectant and that that soldier would be their son.” Heart breaking and beautiful, this section captures war’s costs. What can we learn from this loss?

JK: I think the most poignant section of that chapter is the connection I made with the soldier and his mother, with his birth as it relates to two lovers who will one day realize that their greatest joy has become the source of their greatest sorrow. That is the part of war that makes soldier’s human, on both sides of the enemy lines. We are all sons or daughters of someone who loves us; and that relationship will cost some parents and families dearly. The pain will never die. That is the absolute tragedy of war, the loss, the terrible unending loss. That is the part of war that families must shoulder when nobody is looking, when all the Homefront support dies down. It is the part that makes for divorces and drunkenness and depression for survivors. It is the part that no medal or flag ceremony at a military funeral can erase. It is the part of war that continues even when the armistice is signed and armies return home.

BL: Regarding the dying soldier, you wrote, “If this were my son, I would want soldiers to gather in his room, listen to his breathing. I would want them to break stride from their war routines, perhaps to weep, perhaps to pray. And if he called out for his dad, I would want them to be a father to my son. Simply that—nothing more, nothing less—procedures not written in Department of Defense manuals or war theory classes or triage exercises.” How can we develop this type of humanity in our society?

JK: At the heart of that moment I drew on my experiences as a father of four children. And in that, one thing defined my role: love. In that singular moment, love was needed more than all the other things we could give a dying soldier. He didn’t need more medical expertise, no military honor and no blessing from a chaplain. He needed the tenderness of his father holding him in the grasp of loving arms. How do we develop that kind of compassion? That is the stuff of being human and being a parent. It is the stuff of deep reflection on what things are truly important in our lives. Yes of course, as members of the military community we value the mission and our commitment to each other, but in the final hour, in the final moments of our understanding of what it means to be human, we must come to value our love above all else.  Not an easy thing to do, and doing so in the crucible of combat is always a challenge, but I think it is exactly what defines us as human and gives us hope that we shall survive from one generation to the next, both as soldiers and as citizens.

BL: Tim O’Brien says “True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis,” and “It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.” You’ve written some stomach believing moments in this book. One example that stays with me, “As I slid the remains across the stainless steel table, the sharp edges of bone and the tiny rocks embedded in the tissues made a scratchy, metallic sound. I felt the sound in my teeth.” How do you distill such complicated images?

JK: I distil them by working the memories until the details become so clear I can smell the smells and hear the scratching. That is the work of asking questions of the event and revising to get the details just right.  The mass of details that can be remembered is truly amazing and it becomes my job to sort through the most telling of details to form the images that carry the most power. When revising, details that are most powerful bubble to the top because they are usually the ones that elicit the most emotional or visceral response. Feeling sound in your teeth, like the scratching a chalkboard, is a sound that we all detest. Equating that kind of “universal” experience to a unique medical experience in battle is one of connecting experiences through common language. Again, I see my role as one of translation. In order to bring readers into my emotional landscape, I must translate things I see into something they can see. And precise control of words and details is what I use to get that done.

BL: The rendering of your stroke and its aftermath offers powerful insight. The moment when you’re looking at the MRI images, and you think, “Those brains have stolen my name,” really hit home. Did you find it difficult as a medical doctor to write about medicine for non-medical professionals?

JK: It’s somewhat difficult. Medicine contains its own special language and doctors are guilty of being so deep into their own specialties that making sense of the very complicated nature of disease and trauma if often not their forte. I had to learn not to speak in medicalease but in language that could be understood. Yet in that, I still used medical terminology without necessarily defining all my terms at the risk of slowing pacing. O’Brien does the same thing in describing things soldiers carried. He does not define every technical military thing and it works to the benefit of his readers. Much of what may be said in medical terminology can be understood contextually without having to know the exact definition of a medical word. More of the issue of writing about medicine came as a result of writing about something from which I was estranged. I was no longer a practicing physician, and the difficulty of using medical language only heightened the distance between me and my love of medicine.

BL: Books and writing helped you during your recovery. I appreciated how writing helped you understand “the dual nature of trauma, real versus remembered.” Do you want to write more about Iraq and your recovery?

JK: I want to write more about recovery because there is much more to be said about it, much more that I learned about the process.  I might write another book about war, but I need to rest a bit and consider the emotional cost of doing so.  Recovery is different; it is more about healing and hope and the future, and that excites me.  One thing I and my healthcare providers learned about my recovery is this: it was unique in that writing had some unforeseen consequences in terms of cognitive recovery and even PTSD recovery. A healing brain is stimulated by use, by thinking and processing. And what is writing but thinking and thinking and thinking. That has been the core of my recovery. Writing and thinking.  If I can write about that in more precise clinical terms or even team up with one of my neuropsychologists, that may lead to some very fruitful writing.

BL: In therapy, writing helped you organize and understand your thoughts and experiences. Later you entered an MFA program to hone your craft and create art. What was that crossing like? 

JK: It was crazy scary. At the time I entered the writing program I had a reading speed and comprehension rate at the 5th percentile of adults my age (60 at the time). I felt inadequate and ill-prepared to learn something I thought was so far out of my lane of expertise.  I felt like an old man on skies with youngsters whizzing by me on a steep slope. I envisioned myself as getting tangled in the rope tow. But the program I attended promised to work with me, and they did. They critiqued my writing as they did other students and pushed me to focus and write better. The environment they created was accepting and challenging. That brings up a point about pedagogy. Teachers have the ability to influence the lives of their students, and the students have the ability to change the way they see and do things.  That was certainly operative in my case and I was able to respond in kind to the teaching and mentoring that I received.

BL: The recent politicization of soldier’s deaths in Niger highlighted the civil-military divide in the national dialogue. How can we continue to build understanding in our society?

JK: I think we need to understand that the military is part and parcel of society. We get our mandates from the greater society from which we belong. We are charged with an imperative to kill and destroy, two actions that in a setting other than war, would result in criminal charges. It is that sort of binary social ethic in which the military must do its missions: we are members of our society and members of our military forces; we walk the ethical lines between being both soldier and doctor, soldier and father and soldier and mother. And society demands that we walk that line well. They are the senders: the military are the goers. They are both essential to our continuing existence and even our continuing peace.

BL: I see your story as one of strength, recovery, and resiliency. It’s not a “damaged veteran” narrative. Unfortunately, the “damaged veteran” stereotype still pervades our society. Many works about our nation’s forever wars perpetuate this image. How can we battle against this worn out storyline?

JK: I hate the damaged veteran narrative. It gives such a weak and worn out picture of who veterans really are. The entirety of military training, hopefully of life training, focuses on the ability to adapt and overcome and to interpret the ongoing battle, and if a change is demanded, a change of course follows. What is more demanding of change than a veteran with injuries, mental, physical or both? The veteran must change in order to survive and most do. We are not stuck in a corner of a room twitching at the slightest sound or incapable of learning. My story and so many more like it are the prime evidence that veterans are capable of learning and adapting to change, of moving on in terms of healing and recovery. One of the challenges in redefining the veteran narrative comes in the form of challenging some of the thinking at of healthcare providers who still cling to the damaged veteran model. That is changing as military medicine makes known all it has observed from the current conflicts, but the progress is slower than I would like to see. Interestingly, some of the most intriguing approaches to challenging old paradigms has come from the arts. Private non-profit groups have engaged veterans in plays, painting, paper making, writing and story-telling as forms of healing and growth. If veterans are to expect a different narrative, it may well be up to them to challenge the “expected” with their own stories. And that gives me great hope. As in the battlefield, I see strength and courage displayed among our veterans who face the enormous postwar challenges of healing and learning.

BL: Any advice for veteran writers?

JK: Yes. Write like your life depends on it. Take the time to reflect on all that you have experienced and then put in a first draft and then a second and a third…. When you get to the point where you think you have captured the essence of your story, put it down and revisit it a month later and see how it affects your emotional terrain. If it makes you laugh or weep or cry out in anger, you are on the right track. Give your writing to a very few trusted readers who can give you honest feedback. You are not looking for writing that is just good; you are looking for writing that disrupts readers and demands reflection, writing that is real and truthful, bold and risky. If your writing makes your readers pause and consider things they never considered, you might be done, otherwise, keep writing.

BL: What are you reading now?

JK: I am reading some histories of my tribe and visiting some military museums. Interesting how much can be learned reading those museum placards that you tend to brush over. They tell a story, the visuals and artifacts of a museum tell a story. I want to take more time to learn what they are saying. Currently, I am reading, Empire of the Summer Moon by Gwynne. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. I tend to think of histories as dry and boring, but in the hands of a master story teller the subject tends to come alive with meaning. Oh, and I finished Everyman, by Philip Roth. It was a Pen/Faulkner Award Winner. Both books, one nonfiction, the other fiction, challenge common presuppositions about their subject matter and in that regard are just the kind of reading I enjoy the most.

BL: What’s your next project?

JK: I am busy defining that now and will most likely go in the direction of writing about stroke recovery. I have learned so much in recovery that it seems almost imperative that I should share it. I am also working on some short essays in fiction.  I know, essays are in the nonfiction column. But what if I could write one that uses fictional composites of characters and events to make the same points as its nonfiction counterpart. I say it can be done just as easily as a Native American physician can join a Cavalry Regiment in the U.S. Army. If I can entertain that irony, can I not entertain an irony of literary form? I think your readers know the answer.

BL: Anything else you’d like to add?

JK: Life is full of the unexpected. I never thought I would have a stroke. Never thought I would write a book telling about how I recovered, or write essays about my life as a soldier doctor. What I turn to now is legacy formation, not only for my family and grandchildren, but also for my readers.  I trust I am doing that just as I did soldiering and doctoring. 

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Jon R. Kerstetter is a physician and retired U.S. Army Flight Surgeon. He is a graduate of the Mayo Medical School in Rochester, MN (Class of 1988). He was the in-country director of the Johns Hopkins program in Emergency Medicine in Kosovo and provided humanitarian medical care in the conflicts in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo and in the hurricane disaster in Honduras.  After joining the Iowa Army National Guard in 1994, he served as a medical officer until his retirement in 2009.  Kerstetter completed three tours of duty in Iraq with the U.S. Army as a combat physician and flight surgeon.

Dr. Kerstetter also holds an MS in business from the University of Utah and an MFA in creative non-fiction at Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio. He is the author of the memoir, Crossings: A Doctor Soldier’s Story and his essays have appeared in literary journals including The Normal School, Best American Essays, Riverteeth, Lunch Ticket and others.

Brandon Lingle’s essays have appeared in various publications including The Normal School, The American Scholar, Guernica, The New York Times At War, and The North American Review. His work has been noted in five editions of The Best American Essays. An Air Force officer, he’s served in Iraq and Afghanistan. A California native, he currently lives in Texas and edits War, Literature, and the Arts. Views are his own.

A Normal Interview with Joe Oestreich

By Barrett Bowlin

I first met Joe Oestreich through his writing, in an Esquire feature on the best bars in America. Out of two dozen or so places mentioned, the write-up on a Columbus, Ohio, watering hole with a tree growing out of the middle of it stood out. And then I met him proper-like, in person at a bar in Daytona, Florida, in 2008, just a few years before his rock memoir, Hitless Wonder, came out, which was followed shortly by a book centered on an infamous, South Carolina high school football game: Lines of Scrimmage (which he co-wrote with Scott Pleasant). Recently, Black Lawrence Press published Oestreich's first nonfiction collection, Partisans, which starts off with an essay on love, murder, and family pets.

Barrett Bowlin: Let's talk a wee bit about "The Mercy Kill." You published it with The Normal School back in 2012, and I was curious what the impetus was for you to write that piece in that particular period. If you can remember, when did you start work on it, and what made it an essential piece to write around that time?

Joe Oestreich: Back then, there were so many bestsellers about dogs. Dog books were everywhere, man. So I consciously set out to write a dog essay—as a challenge. There was this voice in my head like the one from the film Barton Fink that says, "A wrestling picture!" But my voice kept saying, "A dog essay!" The trouble was, my best dog story wasn't the fluffy kind that appeals to dog people. Mine has more of an Old Yeller kind of ending. Still: A dog essay!

BB: And I love how your dog from that period became kind of the side item in the narrative. Tangentially, when did you know you were going to place John Parsons as the central figure?

JO: I found out pretty quickly that I couldn't write about the dog—an old female mutt named Rex—without writing about the man that did her the kindness of putting her out of her misery. And the guy who did that merciful thing—a neighbor named John Parsons—was the same guy who'd been charged with murder. He’d later be convicted, and my parents would testify on his behalf during the sentencing phase of the trial. He's a complicated man, which makes him a compelling character.

BB: What was behind the decision to include "The Mercy Kill" first in the collection? If we're thinking of the essay collection as an album, it's the opening track. Highly coveted space there, dude.

JO: It was a practical decision, rather than, say, a thematic one. At minimum, the first essay has got to make the reader want to stick around to read the second one. I guess I figured if a reader gets to the end of "The Mercy Kill," says "meh," and puts the book down, then there was nothing I could have done to keep him. If that first essay is not for you, no problem. Don't waste your time with the rest of the book. Maybe go rake the leaves or something.

BB: Don't sell yourself short on it, though. Seriously, it's got murder, euthanasia, the story of your father leaving your mother for another woman. What's not to love?

JO: The dog getting shot in the head. That's what's not to love.

BB: True. But the essay works in that essential—and I'm going to call it essential, damn it!—Old Yeller cultural moment. Why do you think of the essay as more of a threshold than an invitation?

JO: It would be great if "The Mercy Kill" worked as both an invitation and a threshold. With that essay, I'm trying to invite the reader into my—I don't know—sensibility, I guess I'd call it. And then, after that first piece, I'm hoping they want to hang around for a while.

BB: Touching on that, too, much like it served as the central subject matter in your first book, Hitless Wonder, music figures into Partisans as an essential component: as a question of what it means to 'rock' (in "This Essay Doesn't Rock," for example); as an exploration into mood and music theory; as part of the larger narrative of your band, Watershed, and so on. When you were assembling the essays for the collection, did musicality figure into the order? If so, how?

JO: You nailed it earlier, when you compared an essay collection to a record album. I was really thinking of Partisans of having an A-side and B-side. In this collection, the A-side essays are largely memoir and travel writing. They concern stuff I did and stuff that happened to me. The B-side essays deal much more in cultural criticism, stuff I notice rather than do. I was born in 1969, so I come from the era of vinyl records. From my perspective, when you flip that record over to the B-side, you’re preparing yourself for a change in mood rather than a rehash of what you heard on Side A. I'm thinking here of a record like Abbey Road.

Wait. I don’t want to compare myself to the Beatles. Maybe I should have said Heaven Tonight by Cheap Trick. Better yet, Van Halen's Diver Down.

BB: In terms of the collection's content, you really do manage to cover a huge amount of real estate. Regarding geography (the U.S., Mexico, France, Turkey) and subject matter (murders, escaping time-share presentations, marriage, the death of animals, tattoos, migrant workers, etc.) and time (1969 to the present), Partisans gets into a fair amount of disparate material. What made you think the essays could function together in a single collection?

JO: That's a tricky one. Maybe they don't. But the way I see it, there are two types of essay collections. In the first type, the essays have an obvious topical or thematic link. Fifteen essays about waterfalls, say. Or thirteen essays about Montana. In the second type, the essays are linked by the voice and (here's that word again) sensibility of the writer. I'm thinking here of books like Tom Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored, Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem, George Saunders' The Braindead Megaphone, and the Davis Foster Wallace essay collections. I tend to prefer the second type—the wide-ranging type—over the first. I like variety. I also like to fall in love a little bit with the narrator and then have him or her act as my tour guide through a bunch of different places and ideas.

The complication is that unless the author is already famous, it's hard to get that second type published. A wandering, disparate collection by a famous writer like George Saunders is going to be a bestseller. But what if the author isn't famous? Then it’s hard for agents and publishers to identify a clear audience for a wandering, disparate essay collection. Fifteen Essays about Waterfalls might not sell a million, but at least the audience is clear. And in the book proposal, the agent can bullet-point it:

·      Couples looking for moist, outdoorsy places to kiss;

·      Shampoo marketers;

·      Daredevils/barrel makers.

My feeling is that super-cohesive essay collections are easier to sell but not as much fun to read.

BB: I'm curious, then: what was the place or subject matter where you felt most excited about taking the reader to in the collection? Similarly, what was the place you were most worried about taking them?

JO: I always get excited by taking seriously a trivial subject, like, for instance, trying to define what rocks and what doesn't or what it's like to have somebody else rifle through your CD collection. Plus the “CD collection” essay—called "Barreling into Uncool"—gave me a legitimate reason to reference not just one but both of Judas Priest's guitar players. Any essayist can name check KK Downing. It takes real skill to work in Glenn Tipton.

I’m always worried about taking readers into my life. The more memoir-y stuff. The worry isn't that I'm scared to reveal intimate details; the worry is that they'll get bored reading about me. But that's the leap all writers of memoir and personal essay must make. You have to hope that, in writing about yourself, you've transcended the personal and stumbled upon something that resonates with everybody, something universal. I worry about failing at that, about navel gazing.

BB: In my literary hopes and dreams, I envision you with a brushed-nickel frame you've purchased from Target and which you've nailed up above your office door, one that reads: "Don't fucking navel gaze!"

JO: Shouted in the same voice that said, "A dog essay!"

BB: Okay, one last question about the selection process: which subject matters have you written about that didn't make the cut for Partisans? Do you see that material coming together for a future collection?

JO: I left pieces out of the collection not due to subject matter but due to form. Many of the essays I rejected were overly fragmented and lyrical in a way that seemed cutting edge when I was in grad school but seems kind of gimmick-for-gimmick's sake now. I dig lyrical and fragmented essays, just not the ones I wrote.

BB: Dude, I, too, love that you play with a variety of structures for the essays in the book, e.g., braided essays like "The Get Down" and "In Any August," segmented essays like "Two Haircuts" and "This Machine No Longer Kills Fascists (Did It Ever?)," and so on. For someone who works so prominently in creative nonfiction, what goes into the decision-making process for you in terms of structure? When do you figure out what the architecture of a book or a short piece is going to look like?

JO: This sounds trite and obvious, but the goal is try to find the form that's organic to the material. That's hard to do, of course. When beginning a new essay, I experiment a little—with voice, with form. But at some point, you have to stop experimenting and commit to a structure, just to get something down on the page. Then, once it's done, you can step back, take stock, and try to assess if the form you chose worked. I'm never totally confident that I've made the right choice. Could a given essay have been better if I’d tried a different structure? Sure, maybe. But look at the structure I did choose—it actually exists. I sometimes tell my students, "Try not to fall victim to the tyranny of the thing that exists. That initial version of your (essay, story, poem) is a freaking bully. It wants not to be changed."

And I do revise a lot. But I will admit that once I have a completed essay with a given structure, I usually don't radically alter the form in revision. If the first draft of the essay is a solid, split-level suburban home, I try to hone it into an even nicer split-level suburban. I don't change it into an igloo. Or a yurt.

BB: There's a line in the essay "This Machine No Longer Kills Fascists (Did It Ever?):" "I want to believe music makes a difference. I really do. But I'm not so sure."

I love the honesty of this jumping-off point in the essay. That said, if music is having—let's call it 'difficulty'—influencing politics and social change, particularly now, let's focus on music itself. What have you been listening to as of late that's helped to change your perspective on music (if at all)? Or like you did when listening to older, less hipster-approved records in "Barreling into Uncool," what music from your past have you re-examined recently and found something new (and hopefully promising) in?

JO: First of all, there's a shit-ton of great new music out there. I just don't know about it. Yet. As a music fan, I'm always about five years behind. This is by design, kind of. New music gets produced and distributed so quickly that it overwhelms me. It's hard to filter out the white noise to get to the good stuff. Luckily, I have friends whose taste I trust. They tell me everything I need to hear. And then, five years later, I get around to it. So for me, bands like Hacienda and Japandroids are new.

Lots of music fans like to go wide; they listen to everything. I like to go deep. I’d rather listen to one thing. Over and over. Like The Weight is a Gift by Nada Surf. I'll listen to that record for two weeks straight, and I'll hear all kinds of nuance during week two that I missed during week one. This repetition is what it was like when I was a kid and I only owned three albums. And I’m sure I will never love and be inspired by music as much as I was then, when I was going deep out of necessity. All of that said, there's a relatively new singer/songwriter named Aaron Lee Tasjan who’s great. Don’t wait five years on him. One other thing: The older I get, the less I care about what's cool. I concentrate more on what's good. Which is why I can say with 100% certainty that history will be kind to Billy Squier.

BB: I am so going to trust you on that. (Also, thanks incredibly for getting "The Stroke" stuck in my head, you bastard.) Quick follow-up, then: I'm curious what CNF you've come back to in a deep dive recently. What's an example of a solidly good work that you've found again that has way more nuance than what you initially assumed?

JO: You know who the Billy Squier of CNF is? Steve Almond. And I think he might appreciate why I say so. It's because, just as Squier does with a catchy pop song, Almond makes writing catchy essays look easy. And because he's so funny, it's easy to overlook the smarts and thoughtfulness. Almond could probably even bust out the dance moves Squier did in the "Rock Me Tonight" video.

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Joe Oestreich is the author of Partisans, Lines of Scrimmage (with Scott Pleasant), and Hitless Wonder. His work has appeared in The Normal School, Esquire, Creative Nonfiction, and many other journals and magazines. He teaches creative writing at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC.

Barrett Bowlin is director of the Writing Center at Binghamton University, where he moonlights as a contributing editor for Memorious. His essays and stories appear in places like Ninth Letter, Hobart, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Salt Hill, Mid-American Review, and Bayou, which awarded him the 2015 James Knudsen Prize in Fiction.