This interview first posted on the Military Fine Artists Network, or MilspoFAN, on January 31, 2017. Thanks for letting me repost here!

MilspoFAN: Tell us a little about yourself, your journey as a military spouse, and where you are today.
Siobhan: The journey has been a fairly scenic one. I met my husband in 2000, while I was bartending at my father’s Irish pub right outside the front gate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. My husband, KC, had just graduated and was staying on for a few months coaching soccer at the USMA prep school before heading to Fort Benning. I was working my way through getting an MFA in Creative Writing at the New School in NYC, and my future husband, hearing this, told me he loved to write. I’d met plenty of West Point cadets and soldiers and officers over the years, but this one won me over with talk of literature.

KC went to Fort Benning, Georgia, and then Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, and we were married on the beach in Oahu just before he deployed for a year to Afghanistan in 2004. I’m going to list the other posts we went to after getting married, it’s too exhausting to give a description of each and I have a feeling your readers know the deal: Fort Benning, GA (again); Fort Hood, TX (my husband did two year long deployments to Iraq during our three year assignment at Hood); Monterey, CA; Amman, Jordan; Falls Church, VA; and now we are in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

MilspoFAN: How has your role as a military spouse impacted your work as a writer- creatively, logistically, or otherwise?
Siobhan: Well, creatively each post has been inspiring, and all of them are so vividly different from each other that I usually can’t help but write about them. I like to think that the settings of my work are as important as the characters themselves. All equally determine the story. Perhaps I take the adage “write what you know” a little too seriously? I enjoy examining the different ways people live, whether it be how people are on a military base vs. outside it, or how Western women living in the Middle East blend (or don’t) into a different culture. You Know When the Men Are Gone is set in Fort Hood, Texas, during a deployment of a brigade and I worked very hard to get the real Fort Hood, from the vast, scrubby firing ranges to the clever street names like Tank Destroyer or Hell-On-Wheels, into the stories. I’ve also written about Hawaii: one of the characters in You Know When the Men Are Gone met her husband when he was stationed at Schofield, and my story in the anthology Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War, is also set in Oahu. The new novel, The Confusion of Languages, takes place in Amman, Jordan, where my family and I lived in 2011. Of course we were stationed at all of the above, so I feel like the writing that came out of these places were gifts from the United States Army. It’s also helpful that a writing career is portable; I can take it with me no matter what corner of the world the military throws us into.

On the downside I inevitably miss opportunities in America. It’s difficult to do a reading or book signing at an indie book store in Chicago when you live in Jordan or Abu Dhabi. And while planning the release of my new novel this summer, I know I have a very small window of time when I will be on U.S. soil during the school break of my small daughters. Combine that with the responsibilities of seeing family and friends, who I usually only get to see once a year, and my blood pressure starts to rise with thoughts of all the ground I have to cover in a such a short amount of time. I really have to be focused about what I can accomplish in advance, and get the word out as much as possible before I even get on a plane. Naturally, I also participate in fewer panels and conferences than I would like because of the tremendous distance. But every once in a while some generous writing program will send me a plane ticket, and of course there is social media, email, and Skype for staying in touch with readers or book clubs.

My husband is very supportive and there are times we can work in an extra trip stateside for me, as long as we can balance childcare and travel expenses with his long work hours. So yes, the distance and unpredictable nature of military life does make it more difficult. You do what you can. We military spouses know how to roll with the punches, and my family and I have been pretty darn blessed with some excellent locations. So like everything in life, it’s a trade off.

MilspoFAN: Of your 2011 work, You Know When the Men are Gone, the New York times wrote “This lean, hard-hitting short-story collection outshone some of the year’s most imposing doorstop-size novels.” How does your writing style and writing process for your first work of short stories compare to your upcoming full-length work, Confusion of Languages?

Siobhan: A novel is a pain in the ass. Honestly, I didn’t think I had any idea how hard it would be. I thought going from stories to novels was a natural progression, something that I’d be able to do without much effort, especially after I practiced so much by writing all those lousy novel drafts that are still lurking on my old hard drives. Right? And everyone was always telling me that my stories read like small novels, and that they wanted more. So I thought I’d just write, you know, more, as in a really, really long short story. HA!

You can read a short story in one sitting. Of course there are things that happen off the page, but the author can keep track of every detail in thirty pages, sometimes to the point where I remember whole snatches almost word for word. You can sit down and sip your coffee and read and say aha! I need to change this and this and then go get another cup of coffee and come back and make those changes. Thirty pages is a small town with a no name grocery store. But three hundred pages! I could never get my mind around the three hundred pages. Three hundred pages is New York City on New Year’s Eve. You can’t possibly keep track of what made it into the novel or not in one sitting, especially after all the editing and rewriting and gnashing of teeth. There are notebooks and index cards and piles of drafts taller than your four year old daughter of everything you deleted and reinserted and deleted again, how can you possibly remember everything?

But you do it. It takes time. Painstaking editing and screaming at your children not to come in and disturb Mommy again for another damn cup of apple juice! You feel like the worst writer (and mom) in the world and the biggest failure and no one will read you and those who do won’t ever be able to look you in the eye again because now they know you have absolutely no talent—and then you write the most beautiful paragraph you have ever written, or figure out why one of your characters behaves in a certain way, or how this one very important plot line can tie seamlessly into another. And that epiphany keeps you going. And when all those terrible thoughts seize your brain again, amazingly enough another epiphany will smile at you.

You need to remember that the things you want to say are there on the page, black and white and real, and it’s worth all the self doubt and agony and hangdog looks of your poor neglected children. Tomorrow you will take the kids to the park, you promise! Writing should be hard. Readers are going to dedicate hours and hours, days maybe, of their precious lives, reading what you have penned, letting your words fill their heads and linger in their thoughts. Those words better be your best.

MilspoFAN: What’s next for you?
Siobhan: The new novel, Confusion of Languages, will be out June 27, 2017. It started as a short story I wrote in Jordan in May of 2011. That means it’s taken me about six years. Dear God, that’s the first time I’ve done the math. SIX YEARS!! Plus more rewrites than I could even count at this point. I’d started each rewrite from scratch– I’m talking blinking cursor on a blank computer screen, five, six, seven times. I would work from a draft that I printed out (300 $%#@ pages!) next to my computer, but I would retype everything all over again because it felt like the only way to really be in the story, to allow myself to write new material and edit/ catch every nuance of the material I might want to reuse/retype. When I just cut and paste, I feel like I am less critical, I don’t get seized by words in the same way or see the story as something malleable that I can drastically change if need be.

That said, now I’m taking a little bit of a break. It feels good to let new ideas sort of well up in me again, rather than focusing so completely on The Confusion of Languages. I’m writing some non-fiction essays about life in Jordan, thinking about ideas for future projects, letting this incredibly weird and wonderful world of Abu Dhabi inspire me. But it’s nice to not be caught in the thrall of something as overwhelming as working on a novel, if at least for a little while.

MilspoFAN: Is there anything else that you would like to share with MilspoFAN readers?
Siobhan: Reach out to other Military spouses who are in the arts as much as possible. There are more of us than you think. And we are pretty freaking fantastic! Read Andria Williams most excellent blog Military Spouse Book Review (https://militaryspousebookreview.com/),every word that lady writes is brilliant (you should see her Lego creations) but Andria also shares the space with other mil spouse writers who chime in to review books or write blogs of their own on her page. It always feels good to know we’re not the only ones who worry about these insane mil lives of ours. For something a little more ‘highbrow’ but definitely worth being aware of, I recommend Peter Molin’s blog Time Now (https://acolytesofwar.com/), which reviews all military related arts, from photography to film to writing to dance to theater productions. Molin is incredibly supportive of mil spouses as well as female vets, so it’s not just a list of macho men war novels, if you know what I mean (I’m sure those of you who married to infantry men like me know exactly what I mean).

I want to thank you, Jessica, and I also want to thank all of you who are reading. We need to support each other, and this site is doing that beautifully. We are far flung, we don’t have the natural support system of the home town neighborhoods where we grew up, the libraries and churches and cafes and town halls where we could gather and spread the word about our different projects, so we have to improvise and create our forums online, in places like this. So let’s spread the word and support each other here, and show everyone how much mil spouses have to offer, how we’re not at all the way stereotypes paint us to be, how diverse and talented and amazing we can be.

MilspoFan: https://milspofan.wordpress.com/
Time Now https://acolytesofwar.com/
Military Spouse Book Review https://militaryspousebookreview.com/

Learn more about Siobhan’s books at: http://siobhanfallon.com/books.html

Excerpt from You Know When the Men Are Gone, Siobhan Fallon

Three a.m. and breaking into the house on Cheyenne Trail was even easier than Chief Warrant Officer Nick Cash thought it would be. There were no sounds from above, no lights throwing shadows, no floorboards whining, no water running or the snicker of late-night TV laugh tracks. The basement window, his point of entry, was open. The screws were rusted, but Nick had come prepared with his Gerber knife and WD-40; got the screws and the window out in five minutes flat. He stretched onto his stomach in the dew-wet grass and inched his legs through the opening, then pushed his torso backward until his toes grazed the cardboard boxes in the basement below, full of old shoes and college textbooks, which held his weight.
He had planned this mission the way the army would expect him to, the way only a soldier or a hunter or a neurotic could, considering every detail that ordinary people didn’t even think about. He mapped out the route, calculating the minutes it would take for each task, considering the placement of streetlamps, the kind of vegetation in front, and how to avoid walking past houses with dogs. He figured out whether the moon would be new or full and what time the sprinkler system went off. He staged this as carefully as any other surveillance mission he had created and briefed to soldiers before.
Except this time the target was his own home.
. . .
He should have been relieved that he was inside, unseen, that all was going according to plan. But as he screwed the window back into place, he could feel his lungs clench with rage instead of adrenaline.
How many times had he warned his wife to lock the window? It didn’t matter how often he told her about Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, who had gained access to his victims through open basement windows. Trish argued that the open window helped air out the basement. A theory that would have been sound if she actually closed the window every once in a while. Instead she left it open until a rare and thundering storm would remind her, then she’d jump up from the couch, run down the steps, and slam it shut after it had let in more water than a month of searing-weather-open-window-days could possibly dry.
Before he left for Iraq, Nick had wanted to install an alarm system but his wife said no.
“Christ, Trish,” he had replied. “You can leave the windows and all the doors open while I am home to protect you. But what about when I’m gone?”
She glanced up at him from chopping tomatoes, narrowed her eyes in a way he hadn’t seen before, and said flatly, “We’ve already survived two deployments. I think we can take care of ourselves.”
Take care of this, Nick thought now, twisting the screw so violently that the knife slipped and almost split open his palm, the scrape of metal on metal squealing like an assaulted chalkboard. He hesitated, waiting for the neighbor’s dog to start barking or a porch light to go on. Again nothing. Nick could be any lunatic loose in the night, close to his unprotected daughter in her room with the safari animals on her wall, close to his wife in their marital bed.
Trish should have listened to him.
. . .
This particular reconnaissance mission had started with a seemingly harmless e-mail. Six months ago, Nick had been deployed to an outlying suburb of Baghdad, in what his battalion commander jovially referred to as “a shitty little base in a shitty little town in a shitty little country.” One of his buddies back in Killeen had offered to check on Trish every month or so, to make sure she didn’t need anything hammered or lifted
or drilled while Nick was away.
His friend wrote:
Stopped by to see Trish. Mark Rodell was there. Just
thought you should know.
That was it. That hint, that whisper.
Mark Rodell.

#confusionoflanguages

(This interview first ran on The Huffington Post Book Blog)

As part of Words After War’s September book club selection, Siobhan answers a few questions from Michael Pitre, author of Fives and Twenty-Fives.

Michael Pitre: You Know When the Men Are Gone was published a few months after I left the Marine Corps. My wife read it immediately, and showed me the scene from “Inside the Break” where Kailani finds a pamphlet of family reunion rules hidden among her husband’s equipment. The rules include, “Your family members are not your men; they don’t have to obey your orders,” and, “Do not engage in intercourse with your wife immediately upon your return.” My wife asked me if I remembered how many of those rules I’d broken when I came home, and we laughed because of course I’d broken all of them. So, having lived the experience, we found humor where others might’ve been dismayed. Do you think the book resonates differently with military families than with the general public? Which potential audience was more important to you when you were writing it?

Siobhan Fallon: Civilians always ask me if those pamphlets mentioned in that story are real! And of course they are, I used the one from my husband’s return from Afghanistan in 2005 as my template for the fictional version. If I remember correctly, it really did recommend, “Take time to be charming.”

There was so much I didn’t understand about the military even after I became a spouse. So yes, I hoped to show a glimpse of day to day military life to those who have never stepped inside our gates, to offer civilians more than the splashy headlines of deployments and homecomings.

As an officer’s wife, and especially as a Company Commander’s wife who led a Family Readiness Group, I was someone who was supposed to be capable and confident and I often found myself being a cheerleader. I was full of “You can do it!” or “Time will fly, before you know it your soldier will be home!” or, my least favorite, “It’s time to put on your big girl panties!” (OK, I never actually said that but I did have a magnet on my fridge that did).

None of those statements reflected the magnitude of shit spouses could go through with their mate halfway around the world when you need new tires for the car, when you, your three year old and your six month old all have strep throat and are awake at three a.m., when a tree falls on your roof during a storm, when you lost your husband’s dog, when you’re depressed and anxious and suddenly a stranger completely disconnected from your life wants to buy you a drink and that drink promises to give you a momentary escape. These are of course things that can happen to anyone, but the stress is heightened when every newspaper mentions dead soldiers in Iraq and you maybe haven’t heard from your soldier in four days, you’re in a new base far from family and friends, and on top of it all you’re thinking that to be a good wife and a patriot, you need to act like this is a breeze.

So more than thinking about ‘audience,’ I was hoping to be more authentic in my fiction than I could be as a living, speaking human being. I wrote the stories in an attempt to say yes, it’s actually OK to feel like this sometimes, the news programs are leaving so much out when they narrow military life into images of parades with heart swelling music, or even flag draped coffins. The fact that military life is so nuanced and weird, so potentially tragic as well as wonderful, is also why it’s fascinating to write about.

I was also writing while we were still there, boots on the ground, FOBs going full steam, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and seeing the evidence of that in every house or apartment in Fort Hood that was missing a spouse or parent. It was happening around me, the seemingly unending deployment cycles of deploy a year, home a year, deploy again. I didn’t have any long view or hindsight yet, I had no idea we would withdraw troops out of Iraq in December, 2011. I was busy writing the now, that small window of 2007-2009, for whomever was willing to read it.

MP: There’s a real tension between the husbands and wives in your stories. Deployed soldiers are convinced that their wives are cheating, and don’t know how to relate to their wives when they finally come home. Wives have similar suspicions of infidelity, and grow bitter while stranded in the middle-of-nowhere Texas by their husband’s profession. You walk a tightrope between these two perspectives, and both sides get an equal hearing. How did you retain your neutrality during the writing process?

SF: Well, at times it did feel like a very black and white world, women on one side, men on the other. My husband was a company commander of an infantry unit (all male) and I was the Family Readiness Group leader of all those spouses (all women). More times than I could possible count, while he was either home or deployed to Iraq, we’d have a conversation or email dialogue where each of us had to advocate for the spouse of our own gender. I’d tell him the aggrieved wife’s side of things, and he’d come back at me with the soldier’s side. I’d like to think that some of those balancing acts surfaced in my stories.

MP: Speaking of tension between service members and spouses, I’m sure you’ve seen the bumper sticker around military installations with some version of the phrase, “Soldier’s Wife: Toughest Job in the Army.” I’ve heard young service members with extremely demanding and dangerous jobs express irritation at the sight of that bumper sticker. What would be your response to a young, unattached soldier who doesn’t yet understand the burden placed on military families?

SF: I can understand how that would make a young soldier, or any soldier/airman/Marine bristle. But that’s what slogans or bumper stickers or tweets do–find a glib way to express something has a lot more depth to it than a glance allows.

A spouse appreciates a sentiment like that not because her ‘job’ boils down to being more life threatening or specialized or physically taxing than her soldier’s. But it recognizes that there’s so much more to being a spouse than cashing your soldier’s check every month: being the one who stays and waits and manages to turn whatever quarters you are assigned into a real live home, being the one who picks up that home and takes it to the next place when the military member with the functioning career is stationed somewhere new every couple of years, being the one who usually does not get the certificates and medals and plaques, being the one who is there when the movers come, who is there with the kids every day when the soldier has a two week training exercise in the field. We are called ‘dependents’ in official military speak. There are plenty of successful men and women who would gladly depend on themselves but sometimes they chose to put their military member’s employment first, sometimes the demands of being a military spouse make it very difficult to maintain a stable career of their own.

So, yes, all you EOD techs getting blown up, you guys probably win. But mil spouses like to think that the work they are doing is valid, indispensible even, and that bumper sticker acknowledges that.

MP: “Remission,” is the story of a woman dealing with a rebellious teenage daughter and a possible cancer diagnosis, all while her husband is deployed. A good friend from my time in Iraq was the daughter of a colonel who got hooked on the family business and joined the Marines. She told me a story about how when she was a little girl her father deployed to Somali while her mother was battling cancer. The tone of her story was so casual, so matter of fact. Her childhood, harrowing in retrospect, seemed ordinary to her at the time. Her dad deployed, and there was no use dwelling on it. That was his job. Military reality can be harsh, but I’ve found very little bitterness among military families I’ve known. Why do you think military families are so loyal to the service? And what would you think if one of your children wanted to join the military?

SF: Military life takes a certain type of person, and well, I like that person. Obviously no stereotype is true of all people, but I usually feel comfortable with military spouses or members of the military, we ‘get’ each other on a different level, we have touchstones we can rely on, like comparing the bases/states/countries we’ve lived in or figuring out whose baby learned to talk or walk or read while their daddy/mother was deployed. The military community is made up of hardy folk; they can hold usually their liquor and are pretty proficient at profanity and gallows humor. But most of all there’s a sense of having lived through a very specific sort of fringe lifestyle, especially since September 11, and even if you’ve never met that person before you feel like you have shared something.

Do I want my two girls to join the military? I don’t know. I was there the day my husband graduated Ranger school. He had foot rot, could hardly look me in the eye because he was so socially retarded from being in a pack of filthy men, he was nothing but skin and cheek bones. If a woman can do that, then hell, she’s amazing, I hope she runs for President someday. But do I want my little Maeve or littler Evelyn to lose forty pounds and get recycled if she’s gets caught digging through a trash can for dinner? Not so much. Of course that’s the extreme. And I would probably feel the same way if I had a son. Worried, because that’s what a parent is supposed to feel about everything related to their kids. But I’d also be proud to have instilled a sense of service into a child, the way I’d be if one of my daughters decided to become a police officer or fire fighter, a social worker or a teacher. There are jobs that people do that serve a higher purpose than filling up a bank account, and I’d be pleased to have a child chose a path that puts others first.

MP: What are you working on now?

SF: A novel tentatively titled: The Confusing of Languages. It’s set in Jordan during the Arab Spring, and I turn to the embassy community in much the same way I turned to the military world in You Know When the Men Are Gone. Embassy culture is naturally diplomatic: on the one hand we are expected to embody American ideals, on the other we are meant to embrace the culture we find ourselves in. My novel revolves around two American couples, especially two female Army spouses who become fast friends. One wife embraces Jordanian culture while the one remains very firmly rooted in her idea of America, and the two outlooks and behavior collide. The word collision sums what I am trying to get at, the collision of American and Middle Eastern culture, the collision of very different personalities, the collision of female friendship vs. marital love, all with the Arab Spring unraveling in the background.

*****

Words After War is a nonprofit literary organization with a mission to bring veterans and civilians together to examine war and conflict through the lens of literature.

Follow Words After War on Twitter @WordsAfterWar
Follow Siobhan Fallon on Twitter @SiobhanMF
Michael Pitre doesn’t have Twitter, but for information about him or his terrific novel, Five and Twenty Fives, look here.

This Words After War interview first appeared on the Huffington Post Words After War Book Blog site.

Jesse Goolsby is the author of I’d Walk With My Friends if I Could Find Them, which has been hailed as “beautiful and brutal” (Janet Burroway), “a major literary event” (Robert Olen Butler), “a book about the human heart” (Brian Turner), “powerful” (Esquire), and “an earthquake-in-your-soul-novel” (Michael Garriga). Opening in Afghanistan, the book follows three U.S. soldiers as they return to their families in small towns across America. Births, deaths, marriages, friendships, and time pass, but the three men are forever connected by one dark moment.
Goolsby, a graduate of the US Air Force Academy and the University of Tennessee, is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at Florida State University and a U.S. Air Force officer. He is the recipient of the John Gardner Memorial Award in Fiction, the Richard Bausch Fiction Prize, and an editor for The Southeast Review and War, Literature & the Arts.

Siobhan: One of the elements of your book that I find the most fascinating (and I have to credit the astute professor and war-lit blogger Peter Molin for pointing this out to me during a discussion of contemporary war literature) is how you’ve created a ‘long view’ of the ways combat affects your characters. So much of the recent writing about Iraq and Afghanistan focus on narrower margins of time, yet you grapple with years and years, examining how one event can ripple outward to affect spouses, sons and daughters, grandchildren. Did you set out with the goal of writing about the larger picture of America at war?

Jesse: I set out with the goal of investigating human yearning for connection, and everything flowed from there—the setting, structure, point of view, pace. Early on in the writing of the novel I knew that in order to appropriately showcase the depth and desire of the three protagonists I needed to follow them before, during, and long after their combat experience, to get to know them as human beings, not just as soldiers at conflict. I also needed to investigate their particular tastes (i.e. Metallica, 49ers, Rocky Mountains) as well as the bonds of family, friendship, and community.
All of those things opened up the scope of the book, in time frame (35 years), geography (across America and Afghanistan), and perspective, where we have chapters that follow Wintric, Armando, and Dax, but also spouses, children, and community members.
I think that this does create a type of long view, or at least a view where simple binaries of “healthy” vs. “damaged” or “hero” vs. “villain” are absent, and instead, we get to see all of these characters as human beings searching for connection and moments of repose.

Siobhan: You’ve spent some time teaching in the Department of English at the United States Air Force Academy, do you think you teach literature differently to these young men and women than you would their civilian counterparts?

Jesse: I’ve taught both academy cadets and civilian students, and I hope I bring the same passion and enthusiasm to the classroom in each environment. There has been nothing in my professional life more rewarding than challenging students with great literature, requiring them to investigate the range of their individual morality, beliefs, and aesthetic joy, and to absorb-consider-react to art like The Illiad, Antigone, Othello, Dracula, Catch-22, A Raisin in the Sun, Dispatches, Beloved, Never Let Me Go, etc. But I admit to answering the students’ questions of “Why does this matter?” slightly different in each setting, even though foundationally the answer focuses on living a life well. This is because of the stakes: our country asks our US Air Force Academy graduates to lead and make life or death decisions—in one way or another—to be culpable in the devastation of war. While investigating literature and art is imperative to every student, everywhere, it’s absolutely vital that our military members engage in lifelong empathy and critical thinking through the humanities.

Siobhan: What sort of reaction have you received from your fellow military peers? Particularly, have you had any push back about being an Air Force officer writing about Army infantry enlisted soldiers?

Jesse: The feedback from my military peers has been overwhelmingly positive. Of course, all readers bring their particular sensibilities to the reading experience, so the responses have been as varied as the number of readers, which I love.
Many of the responses I’ve received focus on an appreciation that the soldiers and the families in the book are not stereotyped, that each character showcases individual and unique hopes, fears, dreams, and traumas. A few soldiers have joked about the fact that an Air Force officer would chose to write about soldiers, as opposed to fighter pilots or something, but I appreciate the minor ribbing from my brothers and sisters in arms.
My particular biography gets some attention, but it is largely ignored because readers are so smart. They know they are reading a novel, and they realize that fiction is appropriation. They don’t want me to only write about the experiences of a 6’4’’ big-nosed Air Force officer, or the Air Force, or war. And, bigger picture, we don’t want the limiting view of only the author’s self from any fiction writer. Fiction is inherently about imagination and creation and lives that are not our own.

Jesse's less serious side: tearing up the dance floor with fellow writer and Air Force pal, James Moad, at AWP2015, MN.

Siobhan: Do you think there is a particular direction current writings on conflict ought to take or areas the military writing community could look at more closely? And are there any exciting new books or writers you’d like to mention?

Jesse: I love the fact that writers get to follow their creative impulses wherever they lead, so I’m not much for prescribing direction, but I would love to read more fiction that deals with the consequences of conflict that showcase female protagonists. Off the top of my head, your wonderful book does this, Sara Novic’s Girl at War is another great one, and O.A. Lindsey has a novel on the way that will also help answer this call.
And wow, there are so many exciting books out! I’ve been on a roll with great reads lately. Each of these have blown me away and I encourage folks to seek them out:
The Grief Muscles by Brandon Courtney (Poetry)
The Evil Hours by David J. Morris (Nonfiction)
The Animals by Christian Kiefer (Fiction)
Demon Camp by Jen Percy (Nonfiction)
The Longest Night by Andria Williams (Fiction, out in Jan. 2016)

Siobhan: What are you working at now?

Jesse: I’m at work on a novel, tentatively titled Derrin of the North that will come out with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017. I’m also in the final year of my PhD in English at Florida State University, and working on my dissertation. Most important, I have a family with three young kids, so I forecast a role of soccer and T-ball coach, and cannon-balling dad at the local pool.

For Jesse’s upcoming events and more information, please take a look at his author website at http://jessegoolsby.com/
For more on Words After War, please see http://wordsafterwar.org/
Also see Peter Molin’s very astute blog about literature and art relating to war at http://acolytesofwar.com/

Thanks for reading!

As Memorial Day approaches, I keep thinking of a young man I met in March 2012 during a book event at the Walter Reed National Military Hospital in Bethesda: Sergeant Derek McConnell. I spoke with many devastatingly young men and women that day, in wheelchairs, with crutches or canes, with scars and burns.

I remembered Derek because of his broad shoulders and fresh, baby face, as well as his mother who shared my first name, another Siobhan who lived with a lifetime of mispronunciation.

Derek had ‘the map of Ireland on his face’—red haired, fair skinned, smattering of freckles, a mischievous look in his eyes. On July 23, 2011, on patrol in Kandahar, Afghanistan, Derek was struck by an improvised explosive device while trying to rescue a fellow soldier. He lost his left leg from the hip and the right leg just above the knee and received blast wounds, including a fractured right arm, a skull fracture and kidney damage.

A year and a half later, while I was chatting with his mother, Siobhan Mary Fuller, he was doing wheelies in his wheelchair and joking around with his glossy-haired fiancé in the hospital foyer. His mom told me a little about Derek’s ongoing recovery, the thirty-three surgeries, transfusions, dialysis.

His vitality and pluck stayed with me, but I was haunted by this other Siobhan, this woman about my age, her ready smile and capable attitude. From New Jersey, she had moved to Maryland and utterly dedicated herself to her son’s recovery. I was pregnant at the time with a four year old at home, and I couldn’t imagine finally handing a child over to adulthood, having vigilantly gotten him that far, safe and whole, and then to have him return to me wounded, missing limbs, needing to learn to walk again.

On March 18, 2013, scanning my Facebook feed, I read that Derek had died at Walter Reed. The young man who had fought again and again couldn’t fight the impossible odds anymore.

And then there is one of my husband’s closest friends, Captain KJ Smith, who my husband has known since he was fourteen.

I remember meeting KJ while bartending one very busy night at my father’s Irish pub. He was off to the side, waiting patiently as thirsty customers waved money in the air and I slung pints and brimming wine glasses. He stood above everyone else, exuding the contained physical power of a star athlete, with thick black eyebrows and eyes wide with kindness when we finally shook hands.

KJ had given up soccer scholarships to go to West Point and worked doggedly to join that long gray line. He was planning to propose to his girlfriend on mid-tour leave when he died in Baghdad on December 8, 2005, his humvee hit by an IED.

When I see the Memorial Day photos of Arlington, row upon row of engraved names, I know those simple white markers and small fluttering American flags represent the entire lives of men and women like Derek McConnell and KJ Smith. Young, healthy, strong, willing to go places most of us don’t even Google. They are the boys running across a soccer field, the kid bagging your groceries, the high-schooler getting straight As in science, the girls playing varsity volleyball, every one of them somebody’s child who had an entire life of promise ahead. They are our own children in a couple of years.

Please remember them this Memorial Day.

To read my March 12 blog about meeting some of the young military men and women at Walter Reed please go to: http://siobhanfallon.com/blog/?m=201203

Well, I was scolded for not taking better care of my blog by fellow mil spouse author Andria Williams last night (she said something along the lines of being sick of my ‘camel kissing’ photo from a past blog), so I’ve decided to quickly post before she beats me to it (take that, Andria!).

I’m warning you right now that this will be mostly a big gush. I’m so happy. I got off the plane Wednesday afternoon and just started smiling my face off and saying hello to everyone, and you know what? everyone smiled and said hello back!! People are friendly in Abu Dhabi, but I have missed looking total strangers in the eye, women and men (hurray, I can be friendly to men and not worry they will think I’m trying to seduce them!). I love America. I love the older man security guard here at the Hilton who started chatting with me when I was putting sugar in my coffee. The homeless man playing a little drum on the corner who said God Bless you when I gave him a dollar (though I was shocked to see homeless people again. No stray cats like the Middle East, but lots and lots of homeless people). The super friendly staff at Target (TARGET!!!) who chatted on and on about how nice my scarf was.

I am not the least bit jet lagged.

I mentioned this to Benjamin Busch last night at the Sierra Nevada College Reception and he claimed it was the air here, more oxygen, good for working out, but I’m convinced it’s just because I am in America.

The above ROCKED their panel, Women Writing War, with Andria Williams, Jehanne Dubrow, Emily Tedrowe, Katey Schultz.
I highly recommend everyone check out these authors’ varied and amazing work, I sat there jotting down notes from all of them (and feeling oddly, but nicely, uncomfortable, when Andria read a scene from one of my stories– people actually laughed where they were supposed to laugh). I was moved by line after exquisite line of Jehanne’s poetry (short excerpt below), by Emily Tedrowe’s heartfelt tackling of issues of authority and writing “credentials,” by Andria’s vast understanding of mil spouse literature, and Katey Schultz’s assertion that, though she’s not married to the military or a veteran herself, she was compelled to write about our wars out of “civic duty.”

I was on a panel, No Country for Good Old Boys: The Remaking of the Masculine in Contemporary American Fiction with heavy hitters Shann Ray, Kim Barnes, Alan Heathcock, Ben Percy. I’m kicking myself for not getting a photo, what a crew. I’d also like to quote our pre-panel discussion but I am afraid my mom might read this, particularly the comments about the appendages some of the above claim to write with… ahem, Ben Percy). They all have something in the pipeline, Percy’s newest novel, The Dead Lands, comes out next week.

Well, #AWP2015 is young, there is much ahead, I’m going to keep breathing this intoxicating American air and smiling my face off at every inspiring person I meet, writer or man playing drums!

P.S. If you are here at #AWP15, check out this kick*ss panel tomorrow, Saturday, 1:30-2:45, Telling Our New War Stories: Witness and Imagination Across Literary Genres, with Benjamin Busch, Phil Klay, Brian Turner, Katey Schultz, and me…

excerpt from Jehanne Dubrow’s work (from the online site Project Muse):

He brings me chocolate from the Pentagon,
dark chocolates shaped like tanks and fighter jets,
milk chocolate Tomahawks, a bonbon
like a kirsch grenade, mint chocolate bayonets.
He brings me chocolate ships, a submarine
descending in a chocolate sea, a drone
unmanned and filled with hazelnut praline.
He brings me cocoa powder, like chocolate blown
to bits. Or chocolate squares of pepper heat.
Or if perhaps we’ve fought, he brings a box
of truffles home, missiles of semisweet
dissolving on the tongue. He brings me Glocks
and chocolate mines, a tiny transport plane,
a bomb that looks delicious in its cellophane.

Nearly every time I gave a reading or discussion about You Know When the Men Are Gone, someone would inevitably ask me why I hadn’t written a story from a female soldier’s point of view. I just didn’t have the insight or the story to tell, I’d reply, a little ashamed of my lack of imagination. So as soon as I finished watching the powerful FORT BLISS, I wanted to reach across cyber-space, find all those people, and tell them to watch this film.
FORT BLISS is the story of a female medic who returns to Texas after a deployment and tries to salvage her strained relationship with her young son. The movie viscerally sums up everything I hoped to cram into my stories, that razor-edged tight rope walk of being part of the military community, either as service member or family member, during this prolonged period of war. It strikes the right note about deployment vs. home front, duty toward country vs. duty toward family, and everything in between, without getting clouded by politics or headlines. FORT BLISS is one of the most authentic pieces of art I’ve watched or read about our current military situation. Bravo to actress Michelle Monaghan and director Claudia Myers and everyone else who made this film happen.
This Army spouse is recommending it to everyone she knows.
Last I checked it was streaming on Netflix so everyone please take a look soon…

I might be making some poor decisions in an effort to not seem like an ‘ugly American.’ It’s just really difficult to decide what is an accepted cultural norm and what is just plain-out-of-line. Like when my family and I went to the camel market in Al Ain. Maybe I shouldn’t have just giggled uncomfortably when a fifty year old Pakistani man tried to kiss my six year old daughter on the mouth. Hmmm.

I better start off by describing the camel yard. All the guidebooks claimed it was the last of its kind and something we should not miss. So, after two days of Al Ain’s forts, mountain passes, and an amusement park (Hilli Fun City, oldest amusement park in the Gulf! Ride a roller coaster that’s almost as old as the UAE! Yeah!!), we drove through warehouse area after dodgy warehouse area at sunset, with KC determined to find this fabled tourist site.

We smelled it before we found it. Pen after pen with lots of camels inside, exactly as you’d expect, if you are actually expecting to find something as odd as a camel market.
We parked our shiny white Volvo SUV behind a closed up feed store and we stuffed our youngest into a backpack contraption that KC swung over his shoulders.

There was not one other non-camel herd person there until a car full of German-looking people passed by slowly (fair haired with square, wire rimmed glasses, definitely European).

“Oh, phew, we’re not the only tourists,” I said to my husband. I wanted to wave at them, Look at us! We read our guide book too! They stopped in the road just ahead. The women in the passenger seat glanced at us, at the camels, then back at us. She said something low to the driver and they did a U-turn and drove away. Quickly.

That’s when KC suggested I take the scarf off my neck and wrap it around my head.
That’s when I should have decided to get back in the car and demand my husband take us back to our nice hotel. Instead I covered up my blondish locks and held tight to my kiddo’s hand. I’ve found that, here in the Middle East, holding on to a child always helps ease potentially uncomfortable situations, giving me the appearance of virtuous mother rather than wanton great devil whore of USA (yes, I have an overactive imagination).

We were immediately accosted by a man telling us that he had every camel conceivable, big camel, white camel, baby camel. KC began chatting with the gentleman, who said he was from the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, as he led us deeper and deeper into the pens, farther and farther from our first world Volvo. He offered to take photos of us with his camels, and we said yes.

Every few steps, a young man would peel off from some dark corner and start following us. They were all wearing long knee-length shirts and loose pants in tones of brown, some with black and white checked scarves tied around their necks. KC greeted each; all of them seemed to be from the very place in Afghanistan where he and his infantry company had been searching for Osama Bin Laden in 2004. I couldn’t believe that he was telling these guys that yes, he knew Paktika, why, he had spent a year of his life there! Imagine that! In my mind, my husband looks every bit the Army officer he is. I also didn’t hear him say that he’d been a part of an “NGO” rather than a trigger-finger part of drone-dropping America. So when they started asking for money, I wanted to toss them a wallet and run, assuming there’d be an AK behind that grizzled so-called baby camel. Not KC.

By now we had accumulated about ten men and could no longer see the road. All of them asking for cash. KC gave the guy who took the pictures the 25 AED he had set aside for that very purpose, less than eight dollars, and then amiably shook hands with the others. Not happy with the amount, the man kneeled in front of us, grinned, and tried to plant one my eldest daughter. Who, playing it much better than her mother, smoothly ducked out of the way of the offending mustache and made a face that clearly said kissing was just plain gross.

I managed a pathetic: “Ha, ha, how about a high five?”

High fives seem to be the intimacy substitute of choice. Whenever a stranger gets too close– cheek pinching, bear hugging, random tickling, hair mussing (and then there was that time in Jordan when a guy picked Maeve out of KC’s arms and started throwing her up in the air as she screamed)– I have instructed my daughter to offer a high five. This time I understood we were outnumbered, realizing that whatever Ranger School moves KC remembered, he would not be his fighting-best with a baby strapped to his back, but thank God I was wearing cowboy boots and I was fairly certain I could gouge some eyes if need be (my Irish father didn’t show me how to beat the hell out of that punching bag in the basement for nothing).

Meanwhile Maeve coolly lifted a hand and slapped a sound high five on the man’s palm.
“Ok!” he shouted and stood. KC looked at me. I grabbed Maeve’s hand and started walking with husband bringing up the rear.

That was it. No one followed us. The sun kept setting. The camels kept making the strange noises camels make.

I didn’t take the scarf off my hair until I was inside our car and the camel market was in the rear view window.

Then we gave our six year old a long talk. High fives good. Kissing bad. And no kissing on the lips until she gets married.

Hello there. Sorry about the long hiatus— lots of things getting in the way of my writing lately—new baby (OK, not that new, but I intend on using her as an excuse until she’s at least a year old), new move, new life (Abu Dhabi, UAE!!!).

Visiting the Sheik Zayed Mosque

Though I’ve managed to wring some inspiration from the upheaval– namely in hotel living. I have a new story in the upcoming Holiday Issue of the Washington Post (which will come out the Sunday before Thanksgiving and Column McCann will also have a story inside). I wrote a large part of it while at a hotel (where we were stranded, stateside and in the UAE, for about six weeks), jotting things down when the baby took her miniscule naps. The story takes place in Abu Dhabi, told from the point of view of a disgruntled American who is a bit fed up with children…

But mostly I’ve been soaking up the life here, taking photos and notes in my trusty little notebook shoved deep in my purse underneath sandy pacifiers and ticket stubs.

I thought I’d ease both of us, you and me, back into my writing with an especially easy post today, more photos than words (like the books my eldest child likes best).

So, without further excuses, here is a glimpse of my new world…

Sheik Zayed and sons watch over everything, including huge kid play area in a mall.

The electric cars of Masdar City (kids LOVE these; OK, so do grown-ups)

Apartments Masdar style, built to catch the desert breeze, with solar panels on top.

The Abu Dhabi Zoo, where you can touch all the animals, and all the animals can touch you...

One of the strangest things I have ever seen-- Motorcycle display at Khalidiya Mall

Oh, and for those of you in the DC/VA/MD area, I’ll be at Howard County Community College and the Howard County Library, Miller Branch, for a few events on October 15! Please check out the details here http://hclibrary.org/index.php?page=306 if you think you can come or help spread the word.

Thanks again to all the readers, writers, and friends out there,
Siobhan

p.s. for more on the incredible sustainable dreams of Masdar City and Science Institute here in Abu Dhabi (free PhD program!), check out http://www.masdar.ac.ae/

This mask was created by a U.S. Marine as part of an art therapy program at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE) at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center

Hello there. I was recently interviewed by writer Jim Mathews, the fiction editor of the literary magazine O-Dark-Thirty (and author of the fantastic story collection LAST KNOW POSITION).
O-Dark-Thirty is part of the Veterans Writing Project

The magazine contains poetry, fiction, and non-fiction written by veterans, service members, and military family members. Fantastic, right? So I thought I’d help spread the word to those of you in the military community who are looking for an outlet for your work, as well of those of you in the civilian community who want to support Veteran/Mil Family Members writing.

Here’s an overview from their website:

“O-Dark-Thirty is the journal for the Veterans Writing Project. In our seminars we give participants the skills and confidence they need to tell their own stories; O-Dark-Thirty is the platform to put those stories and others in front of readers. This is not a peer-reviewed professional journal, nor is it a judged literary contest. Our editorial style is more curatorial than other journals. Our editors curate the works submitted to this site. We have two sections. The Report is our hub. It’s where the vast majority of our work will be based.We chose the title The Report because of this quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes: