Did you interview any veterans or other people who lived during the Vietnam War? If so, what struck you most about their accounts of postwar living?
The closest I came to interviewing anyone was talking with my uncle, who served two tours in Vietnam as a Green Beret and was based at Cu Chi, and who has not had the easiest time of it since coming home, but who is still, thankfully, here. Other than that, I have known quite a lot of people over the years who were either veterans of that war or relatives of the soldiers who fought it. In Vietnam I met and became friends with a lot of Vietnamese who had worked with the Americans during the war, including the mechanics who are now fixing bicycles on the sidewalks, and a photographer who worked with the AP and wound up in a reeducation camp afterward. What struck me most about all those people was how necessary it was for them to try to get on with their lives, despite how difficult it must have been. They seem to have turned that page, at least in regard to what they want to talk about, and they are busy living now and don’t have the luxury or the desire to revisit or revise history. As for being able to relate the stories of that generation and the impacts of the war and its aftermath, my oldest friends and I are that generation. That part is firsthand knowledge.
Are there any works of fiction about the Vietnam War and its aftermath — or about other wars — that you find particularly inspiring or important?
God, so many. The ones that immediately come to mind are Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone, The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien; Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places; Robert Olen Butler’s Good Scent From a Strange Mountain; Michael Herr’s Dispatches; Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake; Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War; Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, and Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History. Way too many more to name, but there is no leaving out The Quiet American, by Graham Greene. Such a perfect book. I love that one so much— I’ve probably read it a dozen times. The rest, maybe five or six or seven, only.
Excerpts of your novel have appeared online prior to the novel’s publication. How do you feel about their having a life independent of the book?
Since I began as a short-story writer, and since those pieces were more or less written as short stories, I am quite comfortable, and in fact I really love having them out there. It took me a while to get used to writing chapters that would not also pass as standalone stories, but those chapters, I think, do okay on their own.
On David Abram’s blog, The Quivering Pen, you said: “A collection of clever lines is not enough… it is only a starting place. I think many writers mistake it for a destination.” Can you speak more about that? What would you say is required of a good or successful work of fiction?
Wow. That’s kind of a huge question. I guess I could begin by reiterating that thought: it’s not enough to be clever, in your sentences or in your ideas. And it’s not enough to get from Point A to Point B, that is, simply telling a story. Writing is hard. One of the hardest parts is creating believable, complex, forgivable characters, but the really hard part is being completely emotionally honest. Ripping the scabs off. Uncovering your own heart and showing it to other people.
To which of the characters in your novel do you most relate — and why?
I guess that depends on what “relate” means, but Riley, for sure, a lot, because so many of her experiences mirror mine, but also Grace, the girl on the train — but maybe that’s not so surprising, since she is sort of a reflection of a younger Riley, by the time they meet. Funny, it was not deliberate, and until I went back for, like, the seventh revision, I didn’t see their similarities. The other characters I relate to in different ways, but every one of them was (and is) important to me, because a lot of them are the kinds of people who brought me up, more or less, when I first got to San Francisco. I was incredibly clueless, then, about so many things, and the people I learned the most from were the ones who had the least access to equilibrium and were the most scarred, inside or out, or both.
How has The Given World influenced your current writing projects or changed the way you write? Do you think you will revisit any of the characters or themes from this novel?
I am working on a new novel, and am much more deliberative about keeping the narrative cohesive, making sure all the pieces fit. I go back to the beginning a lot, to make sure the alignment is tight, and to make sure anything new I add is not random but actually belongs there. Nothing drives me crazier, when I am reading a book or a story, than to come to a part which feels as though the author woke up one morning, sat down at his or her desk, and said, “Oh, here’s an interesting thought I was having,” or “Here’s something unique I overheard; I think I’ll just throw it in,” or “Here’s this paragraph I’ve been saving, and I don’t have much to say today, so let’s just try to squeeze this in and hope no one notices it doesn’t belong.” I believe it is an author’s obligation to build a story, in the same way physical structures are built: you have to have a solid base, and each level (or chapter) has to be supported by what has gone before. Writing The Given World the way I wrote it, and having to go back to make sure that the structure was there, has taught me to stay on top of it all the way through. Going back to the beginning over and over means it will take me a very long time to write the first draft, but it also means less time (maybe) spent revising, even though revision is my favorite part of writing. So maybe going back to the beginning is actually a way to keep doing the part I like, and avoiding the hard part, which is creating new material. Who knows? As far as revisiting characters goes, Lu, or someone who is much like Lu, makes an appearance in the new book. She just kind of showed up, and I liked her, so I kept her. Themes? Oh, yeah. War and the wounded. Bad behavior and what underlies it. Wondering where, or what, home is. Loving the wrong people, or loving the right people the wrong way. Those will always be my themes.
Who are some of the storytellers who have influenced your work?
Graham Greene, James Baldwin, Malcolm Lowry, Michael Ondaatje, Arundhati Roy, James Welch, Lorrie Moore, Barry Hannah, Louise Erdrich, Thomas McGuane, Jim Crumley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. For memoir, Joan Didion, Mary Karr, Alexandra Fuller. For poetry, Richard Hugo, Terrance Hayes, Jane Hirschfield. A million others in all camps.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© KELLY RAE DAUGHERTY
Marian Palaia was born in Riverside, California, and grew up there and in Kensington, Maryland. She spent two of her college undergraduate years on a ranch in Montana and studied creative writing in Missoula with Richard Hugo, Rick DeMarinis, and Barry Hannah. She received her BA from The Evergreen State College, moved to San Francisco in 1985, and received her MA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. In 2001 she moved back to Missoula, where she received her master’s in public administration. At the University of Wisconsin — Madison, she studied with Lorrie Moore, Judith Mitchell, Jesse Lee Kercheval, and Rob Nixon, receiving her MFA in 2012. In 2012–2013, she was a John Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. She currently lives in San Francisco, and has lived in, among other places, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City, and Nepal, where she was a Peace Corps volunteer. She has also worked as a bartender, a landscaper, a truck driver, and as the littlest logger in Lincoln, Montana.