My Link in "The Next Big Thing" Blog Chain
What is the working
title of your book?
“Fayettenam: A Memoir”
Where did the idea
come from for the book?
Several years ago I was preparing to drive back to Texas
with my wife and son after a Christmas visit to my mother’s home in Fayetteville,
North Carolina – home to Fort Bragg, where I had lived three different times
myself as a boy. As I was packing up the car, my mother gave me a tin box
filled with letters my stepfather had sent home during his third tour of
Vietnam, 1969 – 70. I had known about the box since I was a child; it was one
of several artifacts in a deep drawer in a tall chest that had traveled around
with us through the many moves typical of a military family.
After I got back to Houston, I opened the box and re-stacked
the 145 airmail envelopes on the desk in front of me. I recognized my
stepfather’s handwriting, and my mother’s as well: she had numbered each one as
she’d received it. Her own letters, probably twice as many, must have been
discarded 13,000 miles away and nearly forty years earlier, in the jungles of
III Corps, in the vicinity of Long Binh, where my stepfather had served his
tour as CO in a Ranger battalion.
I opened the first few envelopes and unfolded the letters
inside. My stepfather, who disappeared in 1982, had been a terrifying man to me.
He was charming, violent, intelligent, domineering, heroically responsible,
brutal – oversized, in my mind, even today, though I am many years older than
he was when he went missing. When he wrote these letters, he was young enough
then to be my own son now. (That chastens me, and deep down, confuses me: how
can a father be younger than the son?) A junior officer, he was, on the other
hand, an “old man” to his troops; and from the letters, and other documents I
eventually gathered, as oversized and fearsome to them as he was to his family.
I read the letters, a few at a time over many days, because
it was too much to take in all at once. They represented the body of the man
who had disappeared all those years before, but whose ghost still occasionally
visited my dreams: in the dreams, the only recurring sort of dream I’ve ever
had, my stepfather has just returned; he walks through the door as if he’d been
gone a short while, out for cigarettes or just back from the field. In the
dreams, I am not pleased to see him return. The dream would echo into my waking
moments, my anxiety and ambivalence slowly converting to the knowledge he was
still long gone; “dead” by default and by legal declaration, but still
disappeared. My relief, as I realize the dream was just a dream, is always
tinged with guilt, or my guilt with relief.
The letter formed a narrative, or one recursive, insistent
point of view in a narrative I’d always known, that had always been a part of
my own sense of self: the War, now no longer “the War” – we always have another
one, after all. My stepfather managed to lead his company that year, while
managing by mail our home affairs half a world away; the letters are filled
with minutiae of family budget, childcare, discipline ( the same thing in his
mind, essentially), gossip about his comrades and their spouses, current
events, his desires, his hopes for the future, all woven into occasional
references to the war around him: who had been wounded, who killed, whom he’d
dressed down, what engagements they’d had, etc.
I spent a few weeks re-reading the letters, then typing them
out, then photocopying them, and later scanning them, so that I could fold each
one back into its envelope, re-stack them in the cookie tin with Victorian Christmas
scenes on it (a gift from someone, perhaps another Army wife, decades ago), and
ship it back to my mother, so she could place it back in the drawer where it belonged.
For a missing man, such relics must reside in their reliquary; more than
relics, they are a series of cenotaphs, or effigies, or the man himself.
After I had completed my archival chores, or rather my
ritual procrastinations, I started writing around the letters. The first plan
was to co-write a memoir with my stepfather: to use his own letters as one half
of a dialogic story, not only of that single year, but of my growing up, our family
travels, and the era. It worked well enough as a siphoning or invention
strategy. Simply to fill the gaps, to digress into small corners of memory or
find my way in the vast, open fields of it, writing between his letters helped
me find the raw matter for a memoir.
The letters are, I suppose, of interest only to me and my
family; they’re documentary, like all soldiers’ letters, or other letters
salvaged from a significant past; but they’re not, by themselves, compelling to
an audience. Part of me doesn’t understand why not, of course. But it took a
while to allow myself to edit the letters, to rearrange them, condense them, or
consolidate them. Still, the dialogue wasn’t working the way I’d hoped; I didn’t
have an engaging story that strangers would care about – and that care matters
much to me. If this book fails, it’s a second disappearance.
I loved and hated the man. I hate the military, but I love
being an Army brat. I feel pride in my stepfather’s heroism, which has been
written of at length by Michael Lee Lanning in The Only War We Had,
and for which he was much decorated; but I loathe the very idea that the
Vietnam War, that our wars now, have had anything to do with a true defense of values. Everyone has the right to take on
history; but taking on history at the same time I was trying to take on my
stepfather’s ghost was proving too difficult and too painful.
So, the letters have disappeared from the book, first by a
slow attrition, then by complete abandonment.
At this stage, busy with teaching and other matters of the
present life, and suffering as well from a lack of courage, I have let “Fayettenam”
sleep in its own drawer for a few years now; I write poems about horses, about
my wife, about other things. But writing this blog post has made me take the
pages out of the drawer; it’s sitting on the corner of the desk. Let’s see if I
get some courage today.
What genre does the
book fall under?
Memoir; creative nonfiction; confession; history; lyric
essay; possibly a dense sort of prose-
poem sequence, before I’m done with it.
Which actors would you
choose to play your characters in the movie rendition?
They’d have to clone the man himself. I’d insist on it as a
contractual clause. Maybe the rest of us should be Claymation figures.
What is the
one-sentence synopsis of your book?
“In searching the cosmos for a missing man, the author
time-travels through the Sixties and Seventies, with cameos from the Fifties
and Eighties.”
Will your book be
self-published or represented by an agency?
I tried a hundred literary agents and got nowhere a few
years back; a conspiracy to keep the man hidden, no doubt. If I can finish a
new draft, I’ll enter the small-press contests. Then, in a few years, I’ll publish
it online and move on.
How long did it take
you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Three years, as a series of blog posts. A few long-lost
relatives came across it and got in touch – uncertain, I sensed, about exactly
what I was up to. Memoir is treason.
What other books would
you compare this story to within your genre?
The Great Santini by
Pat Conroy is fiction, but a landmark book for military families; then there’s
Sarah Bird’s The Yokota Officer’s Club, and
Patricia MacInness’ Last Night on Bikini:
Marines, Air Force, and Navy, respectively. In memoir, perhaps Danielle
Trussoni’s Falling Through the Earth,
about her father’s troubled postwar life and her discovery of his past; or
William Jay Smith’s Army Brat, about
a military family’s peacetime, indeed rather idyllic experience of the pre-WWII
years.
Who or what inspired
you to write this book?
The letters; my stepfather himself. Also, my friend Phil
Brady, who has written of his Irish-American family in a beautiful memoir
called To Prove My Blood: A Tale of Emigrations and the Afterlife; my mother, who has keep faith, suffered
long, and held the center of our far-flung and much-troubled family, all of us haunted
by my stepfather’s and my first father’s ghosts (another soldier, long dead,
who had gone missing from my life long before he died; he has his role, though,
in the story).
What else about your
book might pique the reader’s interest?
Disappearance fascinates me – obviously. I don’t know about
other people; but if I can tweak my solipsism and various neuroses, my
father-fixation and my overly-dense lyric prose style, I hope fans of mystery
will give the book a try.
Also, it’s a document of the subculture of military
families. There are novels, as I’ve mentioned, but few memoirs, about us. It’s
a facet of American life (and in other countries, I suppose) that deserves more
attention (See Mary Edwards Wertsch’s thorough, somewhat-sociological study called
Military Brats; and a celebratory film
on DVD narrative by Kris Kristofferson called Military Brats: Our Journey Home.)
*
I was invited by Philip Brady; his blog post is here.
I'll update to include links of the five I invite, when/if they follow through...
