Hello all! Hope 2013 has been kind to you so far (I just had a baby so I am especially bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived at the moment, though I hope things get better soon, perhaps when wee wicked changeling is in preschool…)

This post is a chain self-interview; I believe it started on She Writes a few months ago. My good friend Olivia Boler, author of The Flower Bowl Spell, asked me to join the blog, and I want to thank her for thinking of me and giving me a chance to talk about a new anthology I’m a part of. (I, in turn, requested “Next Big Thing” updates from my lovely author friends Laura Harrington and Anne Ylvisaker— please take a look!)

What is your working title of your story?

“Tips for a Smooth Transition.” The story first appeared in an issue of Salamander, a great literary magazine out of Suffolk University, MA. It’s been included in the anthology, FIRE AND FORGET, which will be released in February, 2013.

Where did the idea come from for the story?

When I started writing my story collection, You Know When the Men Are Gone, back in 2007, I felt like there was so much about military life and deployments that readers didn’t hear about in the news. Things have changed somewhat in the past few years, some great memoirs and novels have come out about both the soldiers’ experiences in theater as well as the family experiences on the home front (Laura Harrington’s Alice Bliss, Alison Buckholtz’s Standing By). And, as the years go by, there has been a greater scrutiny about how deployments affect both soldiers and their families. In “Tips for a Smooth Transition,” the protagonist, Evie, is almost too aware of what her husband may have gone through in Afghanistan, and she expects him to return to her damaged to some degree. So she watches him with a critical eye, expecting his reactions to be tinged with PTSD. She also feels guilty about her behavior while he was gone. I want the reader to wonder who is more unhinged by the deployment/marital separation: the guilt-ridden wife or the returning soldier? Who can the reader trust?

What genre does the anthology fall under?

War literature.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Oh, fun. The spouse, Evie, could be played by Rachel Weisz. I think she is a tremendous actress, and she could perfectly express Evie’s emotional ambiguity toward her husband. The husband, Colin, could be played by Alexander Skarsgard. Don’t tell my husband, but I developed a serious crush on Alexander Skarsgard after watching him play Sergeant Brad Colbert in HBO’s Generation Kill. I’ve seen him in other roles, but, oh boy, the guy makes a great Marine/soldier. The interloper, John, could be played by Matthew McConaughey, he’s so smooth, can do a great Texas accent, and could nail a slightly slimy character who would pursue a woman whose husband is deployed.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your story?

Evie welcomes her husband, Colin, home from his deployment to Afghanistan, unsure if their difficultly reconnecting is due to his long absence or if he has somehow found out about a dalliance she had while he was gone.

Will the anthology be self-published or represented by an agency?

The book is represented by E.J. McCarthy, and it’s being published in paperback by DeCapo Press in February.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

It took me a few years to write/rewrite the failed novel that the story is based on, and about a month to write the short story. It was a relief to turn all of that material into something I could use. I may go back the novel someday, who knows, but I loved being able to find a way to recycle some of the scenes that resonated with me the most.

What other books would you compare this anthology to?

Jeffrey Hess edited a powerful collection in 2009, Home of the Brave: Stories in Uniform, which is full of both iconic and lesser known war stories. Fire and Forget has a few names readers might recognize, like the lauded writers David Abrams (author of Fobbit) and Matt Gallagher (author of Kaboom!). Many of the other authors are newer to the writing scene. As recent members of the armed forces, they bring a freshness and urgency to the fiction about our current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Who or what inspired you to write this story?

Friend Matt Gallagher, who is one of the editors of Fire and Forget, asked me to contribute. Other than myself, all of the stories are written by military veterans. Matt was giving me an opportunity to be the one civilian/family member in the mix. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a story at the time, but I did have a novel-in-progress hanging around rather uselessly. Matt gave me a month to get a story to him, and I managed to cut the 300 page novel down to 30 pages. Fellow anthology editor, Roy Scranton, gave it a sharp-eyed edit that also helped trim the story down to the final anthologized version. The story is very different than the novel draft, but the characters and some of the situations (a supposedly romantic trip to Hawaii to celebrate the husband’s return) are the same.

What else might pique the reader’s interest?

E.L. Doctorow referred to the anthology as: “Searing stories from the war zones of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the USA by warrior writers, Fire and Forget is about not forgetting. It is a necessary collection, necessary to write, necessary to read.” And we are taking the show on the road. I’ll be doing events in DC, NYC, and Boston with some of the other writers. Please check out the website, http://www.fireandforgetbook.com/, for reviews and other details about this exciting new release!

It seems like my first official on-site blog should address another first: attendance at a conference. Granted, it was a little bit like the rest of my life– half military, half civilian. It was the War, Literature, and the Arts Conference, held at The United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Perhaps it was a strange introduction to writers’ conferences, but, as an army wife, everything bizarre about it was absolutely ordinary to me.

We had a rigid schedule; after showing identification and having our names checked off a list, we boarded a bus that took us through the guard gates and onto the Air Force Academy grounds. There were young, smiling cadets in their shiny dress blues, who made sure we crazy artists didn’t stumble off on our own and get lost on the parade grounds. We were not allowed to leave the main area of the conference EVER, unless guided by one of those cadets. Every sort of military uniform was represented among the attendees, from your current desert-ready Marine, Navy, and Army camouflage, to the snazzy dress blues that those Air Forcers shined up, to the office greens of the West Point English Department professors, to the strange little Star Trek outfits of even more of those adorable cadets. (Do I spot a trend? Am I in love with cadets? Perhaps. College students all over the world are doing keg stands and these cadets get up at 5 a.m, don uniforms, get into formation, debate Just War Theory, make out their wills, AND knowingly face deployments soon after graduation. From a gal who stupefied half of her brain cells in college, how can I not think these kids are super?)

 While some of the writers maybe have done a double-take at all the uniforms and rules, this is the world I am most comfortable in. The in-between life of military and ordinary. The guard gates, the imposing face of military buildings, even the awkward mouthfuls of acronyms, make me feel safe. As do the salutes and disciplined ‘yes, sirs’ overheard at every turn. And I always feel relieved talking to people whose daily lives have been impacted by deployments, who feel lucky to spend Thanksgiving and Christmases with their spouses and kids: after a few short sentences we know that we share many experiences. We understand so much about each other immediately.

Cadets sat in the back of the lecture halls, drinking their Gatorades and chewing their gum like students who spent the previous night cramming everywhere else in the world. There was a sprinkling of more weathered military faces in the crowds, with rows of medals on their chests. There were a lot of men, yes, but also a lot of women. Women who were Air Force professors or Air Force students. Women who were instructors at small mid-western colleges and taught War Literature courses. Women poets. Women writers who had nothing to do with the military, and women writers who were military spouses like me. Sometimes the presenters wore uniforms, most often they did not. And while the themes might have been related to war, there was no topic that was off limits. Here we were, standing on official military property, near huge American flags and a hallway lined with paintings of American Air Force Deans who kept their students in tip-top order, yet everyone, from cadets timidly raising their hands, to poets reading anti-war comedic riffs, were able to speak their mind. Even within the rank and file world of the military, all types, religions, and political parties, were represented.

Ultimately, military-themed or not, I had the time of my life.  Like I imagine most other conferences to be, there was a well defined delineation between the Famous and the Unfamous. The Famous were the key notes who dabbled in war: from Benjamin Busch, war photographer, ex-marine, actor and director; Mark Boal, previously embedded journalist-turned-screenwriter of Academy Award winning The Hurt Locker; Dexter Filkins, renowned foreign correspondent from The New York Times and author of the book The Forever War; and Brain Turner, Army veteran, of Here, Bullet and other acclaimed books of poetry. They had an entourage of dress-blued majors and colonels showing them around, they went to nice restaurants that required reservations, they did not take the bus with the rest of us, they did not stay at the Embassy Suites but somewhere rumored to have leather couches and personal Jacuzzis.

The Unfamous lapped up the “manager’s special” at the Embassy Suites and listened to spastically bad karaoke at the hotel bar afterwards (except for that dapper older gentleman who sang Sinatra. Thank you, handsome septuagenarian with your gold cuff links and suave twirling of your microphone!). But we Unfamous had fun, dammit. I hung out with a brilliant non-brat pack: Matt Gallagher of the electrifying war memoir Kaboom: Embracing the Suck of a Savage Little War, poet Victor Inzunza, literary critic Matt Hill, poet and English professor Bradley Johnson, Australian iCinema researcher Timothy Barker, fiction writer James Moad. We talked war and writing, MFA programs and literary magazines, new books and old, and, most informative for me, even after my third glass of Chardonnay, we took notes as Matt Gallagher, whose book came out a few months ago, told us about his book tour and what worked best when he gave a reading.

Reading an excerpt of You Know When the Men Are Gone.

On the final day of the conference, I shared a panel with Matt Gallagher and James Moad. I hadn’t read any of my fiction in almost a decade, but I managed to stand up, read an excerpt, and I didn’t die. People even made eye contact with me afterwards and claimed that they just might order my book.

When the conference was finished, we Unfamous hopped on our bus and rode away from the military installation, the Air Force Academy and its strange nuclear silo-looking cadet chapel safely disappearing behind its check points and mountains. We grabbed our bags from the hotel, shared a long cab ride to the airport, talked excitedly about the conference, swapped business cards, promised to find each other on Facebook. We went through security, stripping off our shoes and belts and lap tops, forgetting perhaps, that all of these new security measures are a result of recent wars (no one had given a lecture about TSA).

We went directly to the airport gift shop, buying Colorado themed stuffed animals and t-shirts, admitting sheepishly that we were excited to fly home to our families. We did not run into any of the Famous when we boarded Economy Class.

And I? Well, I returned, very happily, to my mostly civilian world.