Q&A with author James G. Hershberg

James G. Hershberg is a history professor at The George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. His most recent book is Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam, which focuses on a Polish-Italian effort in 1966 to broker U.S.-North Vietnamese talks. Hershberg is also the author of James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Q: Why did you decide to write about Marigold?

A: I was running, in the mid-1990s, the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the whole purpose of it was to go beyond an American-centric view of the Cold War--which was almost exclusively based on American sources, and was constructed from basically the view of the U.S. government--and to incorporate other perspectives.

One day, unsolicited, I received a fax from a physicist working at the OECD in Paris. He was the son of a Polish diplomat who had recently died, and he had found in his father’s papers a never-published report based on Polish archives about Polish secret peace initiatives in Vietnam.

And I worked with the son and we published a summary of that report… The important thing is that as soon as I compared what this Polish diplomat had written about Marigold to the existing version, based on not complete but partial access to just the American side, I realized that they are very different narratives because the American side was simply based on what they heard from the Poles, whereas the Poles also had the record of their conversations with the Soviets, the North Vietnamese, their interactions with the Chinese, the intracommunist side of this….

I became fascinated by the idea that, hey, this is one of the last great mysteries of the Vietnam War but also a potentially compelling test case study of trying to end wars, and the role of mediators in communication between belligerents separated by language, culture, ideology, many other things. Why had it failed?...

I had a manuscript virtually done in 2003, and then I discovered almost by accident, going through the records, I had assumed that [key Marigold figure and Polish diplomat Janusz] Lewandowski, like [American diplomat] Henry Cabot Lodge and [Italian diplomat] Giovanni D’Orlandi, was already a senior diplomat. I hadn’t noticed that he was only 35 in 1966, so I immediately started contacting colleagues saying is Janusz Lewandowski still alive….

I was able to have a colleague get in touch with him, give me his phone number, and I called him up. No one had known that he was living quietly…no one had interviewed him.  I asked if it would be all right if I asked him some questions, and he [answered] in English because he had been posted at the U.N. for a while, and he said, Sure, that would be all right. I cashed in my frequent flier miles, flew to Warsaw, and immediately I realized that this is an entirely new book because he had a fantastic memory, was happy to talk about anything I asked him about, and was also still [believing] that this was the most important aspect of his career. …

I realized that this is not just a story of Marigold, this was a year in the Vietnam War through an absolutely unique perspective, of a communist diplomat behind enemy lines in Saigon. He would hobnob [in Saigon] with Henry Cabot Lodge and William Westmoreland and play tennis at the Cercle Sportif, and…he’d wrap it up and go to Hanoi and be Comrade Lewandowski and meet with all the communists.

Q: Why was there so little focus on Lewandowski before?

A: Most of those who cared about the history were Americans who only knew English. To really delve into this you had to be able to get Vietnamese sources, Polish sources, Russian sources, but also no one knew or cared among the Vietnam historians that Janusz Lewandowski was still alive. 

Q: How many years did it take you overall to write this?

A: The first fax showed up in 1995 and by 1998 I was writing conference papers about it. In 2000 I published 100-something page single-spaced analysis of it as a working paper of the Cold War Project, and I’ve been working on it as my primary focus for about a decade, but as a partial focus for about 15 years, but of course I was doing many other things at the same time.

Q: Was there anything that you found particularly startling or surprising as you worked on the book?

A: I had numerous epiphanies. There’s something about the internet and this process—I went to archives in at least 10 or 15 countries, but I also had the experience of coming to my computer in the morning and never knowing if there would be an e-mail with an attachment with a translated Mongolian document or Albanian document or Dutch document or Italian document or Chinese source, and to know that I’m the first person to ever see this in English, and where it fits in the story—it is an incredibly exciting way to do history....

Really the most emotional moment was talking to the North Vietnamese diplomat [Nguyen Dinh Phuong] who had been a courier to carry instructions from Hanoi to Warsaw, and until he met me and talked to me he had believed that the whole thing had failed because the Vietnamese waited [for a meeting in Warsaw in December 1966] but the American never showed up. … Only when I gave him American declassified documents and he read them and we had a four-hour conversation--this was in Hanoi in the summer of 1999--and he realized that actually the American was not only ready to meet with him but wanted to meet with him, and the Vietnamese ambassador could have picked up the phone and said where are you, we’re waiting for you, but as the smaller power did not want to seem eager, and he became completely crestfallen and said, This is a pity.

Looking back, he realized that for 30 years [he] had one view of it, but that there was a completely different view, and that maybe they had made a mistake, that maybe it could have happened, and it wasn’t just that the Americans had stood them up, which was what the official North Vietnamese version was, whereas the American view of it was that the North Vietnamese had stood us up.

Q: What is the most credible explanation for what happened? Was it a miscommunication?

A: The failure of Marigold is shared by the three main actors, Poland, the United States, and North Vietnam. I think the most important point goes not only to the United States but Lyndon Johnson personally for overruling his national security team…all of whom had recommended that until they find out whether or not this is serious, they suspend authorization for bombing around Hanoi. Johnson was convinced this is the Poles trying to snooker us…The irony is that they bombed Hanoi again…. A day later, Johnson did suspend bombing, but by then it was too little, too late. … I think the primary blame goes to Johnson personally.

Q: Why did Lewandowski decide to talk to you at such length?

A: Mostly because I nagged him. I think it really enhanced his credibility with me because he was not looking to market his story…. He was quietly living minding his own business in Warsaw. I’m the one who pestered him. Had he approached me and said, Hey, I’ve got a great story for you, that would really have raised questions. He was willing to talk because he was polite, I think he did believe that he had done his best, and he did believe that it was a very important story.

Q: This is getting into counterfactual history, but what might have happened if Marigold had worked?

A: Had Marigold led to the beginning of direct talks, there’s every possibility [that] not a single fewer death would have happened. However, when you consider what did happen, the war dragging on for six more years, another 50 plus thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese being killed, and the fact that the difficulty of having serious direct talks continued to plague the war and fueled the escalation, breaking the taboo on direct talks and at least beginning direct discussions, especially when they had seemingly agreed on a lot of bases, could have gone somewhere.

Q: What can we learn from this as a case study?

A: There may be times where having a hard line makes sense and if you show too much of an interest in peace you’re showing weakness and that could prolong a conflict. You’re not going to bargain with Hitler.  I’m not saying in every case you do the same thing.

But if there are ways to limit bloodshed, suffering, war, at minimal military risk, it’s probably worth taking a chance. Because in this case…the bombings of Hanoi were not about bombing some forces before they moved south, or a military target that would be somewhere else a week later. These were fixed targets of more or less minimal significance. Sometimes if it’s a 50-50 thing, go for it.

The other thing that emerged is not to let secrecy…prevent you from getting the absolute best information about the adversary that you’re dealing with. In this case, a lot of people were cut out. But also that they got as close as they did using Lewandowski and D’Orlandi—you have to be creative in your diplomacy and in your intelligence-gathering and not be so focused on controlling policy.

--Excerpted from an interview with Deborah Kalb. The Q&A can also be found on deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com.

Q&A with author Monique Brinson Demery

Monique Brinson Demery is the author of the forthcoming book Finding the Dragon Lady: The Mystery of Vietnam's Madame Nhu, which looks at the life of the former South Vietnamese first lady. Demery lives in Chicago.

Q: Why did you decide to write about Madame Nhu?

A: It started as a little girl—I was fascinated with the woman everyone said was so awful and evil and a “dragon lady.”

It wasn’t until I was out of grad school—I had been studying contemporary Vietnam, but to understand that, I had to look at all of the 20^th century—that I stumbled [again] on the story of Madame Nhu.

I wasn’t sure at first it would be a book. I couldn’t believe that no one had written a book about her before.

Her life story read like a novel. Looking up basic information about her, I found that her parents had been murdered in the 1980s by her brother.

I never thought she would end up speaking to me.

Q: Did your impression of her change over the years that you were working on the book?

A: In the beginning, I was really in awe that she was taking the time to talk to me. What began as, “I can’t believe she’s talking to me,” turned quickly into empathy.

I was not the only person she spoke to—in the last two months, I’ve heard from two [other] people.

At the beginning, I was starstruck, and I took everything she said at face value. By the end, I was less naïve.

Q: I wanted to ask you about the relationships Madame Nhu had with various family members. What about her husband [Ngo Dinh Nhu, his brother Diem’s top political adviser]?

A: She would have described it as the perfect marriage, and that she was the perfect wife. [But] in her diary, she talked about how she resented how hard he was working, and about screaming fights. It’s a very different picture. Was she just venting, or was her marriage really that miserable? Is that [venting] what we would all do [in a diary]?

Q: What about her relationship with her brother-in-law, President Diem?

A: It seemed to me that by the end of her life, she respected him. In her heart of hearts, I think she thought her husband was a little smarter than Diem. She seemed to think he [Diem] was sort of naïve and trusting.

Q: She seemed to have a difficult relationship with her parents.

A: I tried to make sense of all the pieces that put Madame Nhu together. She struggled with trying to seem important to them [her parents], to be more than the middle child, the girl child, who wouldn’t amount to much.

Q: What do you think happened between her brother [Tran Van Khiem] and their parents?

A: Khiem stayed in the country after Diem and Nhu were killed. He wrote letters about how he was tortured and put in prison; it took a toll on him. He was not the best representative when he was 100 percent—he was seen as a playboy who was riding on his sister’s coattails. For all I know—I have not found him—he may still be living in France. He left the United States in the 1990s.

Q: Why did you decide to structure the book in alternating sections that describe your life and your reactions to Madame Nhu, and her own life?

A: It was to be the most honest I could. It was a nonfiction book. Some of the sources, like Madame Nhu herself, were unreliable.

[Also,] I was born in 1976 and a lot of people in my generation have trouble connecting to the Vietnam War. This put a younger spin on it—how Vietnam has come down through the decades.

Q: Why did you choose “Finding the Dragon Lady” as the book’s title?

A: I chose it because it was what I started out looking for—the powerful, diabolical woman. It doesn’t tell the whole story but it was what sucked me in, and I hoped it would draw readers.

“Dragon lady” is a racist thing to call an Asian woman. [It was used] in the 1960s, and it seemed like it was in keeping with the context. These stereotypes are based on sexism and racism. I chose the title because it fit with the concept of when Asia seemed so far away.

The cover is really provocative—I was blown away. It reinforces the “dragon lady” stereotype, but it really grabs you.

Q: What was Madame Nhu’s reaction to the term “dragon lady”?

A: She was strangely flattered by it. She would rather go out as a dragon lady than as a nobody. “Dragon lady” would not be her first choice, but the saddest thing to her would be to be forgotten.

Q: What do you think people who know something about Madame Nhu have as their first impressions of her?

A: The Buddhist monk who burned himself and she said she would clap her hands and [talked about] a barbecue—that was so shocking, and it cemented her reputation as the terrible face of that regime.

I’m not sure people who remember the dragon lady remember that she was no longer in power as of [the coup in November] 1963. Most people associate her with the Vietnam War, but she was there before [the escalation] even started.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: The book is out on the 24^th. I’m still in the thick of publicity, and I hope people will talk about and read the book.

I hope that when I’m done, I can pay more attention to my family.

I’m so grateful to Public Affairs—they believed that the book could be done by the 50^th anniversary of the coup in November. For 18 months, I’ve been working very hard on the book.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: It’s been 50 years since the coup, and 50 years since Kennedy died. I hope Madame Nhu’s story is a way to look at history, personalize it, and make it more whole.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This Q&A is also posted on deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com.

Q&A with author Dana Sachs

Dana Sachs's books include The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam, If You Lived Here, and, most recently, The Secret of the Nightingale Palace. She has written for a variety of publications including National Geographic and The Boston Globe, and she lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Q: Vietnam has been a big part of your writing. What about Vietnam has captured your imagination, and will you continue to write about it?

A: I fell in love with Vietnam when I first travelled there in 1990, just as it was opening to Americans for the first time since the war ended. Subsequently, I’ve been lucky enough to live there and visit many times and it became the subject of my first book The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam.

It first captured my imagination because I went there thinking only of the place as a setting for a terrible war and discovered, instead, a complex and thriving nation with a dramatic history and rich culture. If a subject is fertile in your imagination, then the more you learn about it, the more intriguing it will become to you.

Vietnam’s culture, history, language, and people have continually inspired me, which is why I returned to it in my novel, If You Lived Here, and my nonfiction book The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam.

My most recent novel, The Secret of the Nightingale Palace, is not about Vietnam. In fact, I made a promise to myself that the word “Vietnam” would not appear at all. I know, it’s a weird challenge! I wanted to see how it felt to write about something else. 

Happily, I found other things to inspire me—Japanese printmaking, 1940s San Francisco, World War II, mid-20th Century women’s fashion—so I discovered that I can find other subjects that intrigue me.

I have to add, though, that I couldn’t stay away from Vietnam for long. In my new novel (see below), one of the main characters is Vietnamese and another one, an American, lives in Hanoi.

Q: You've also collaborated with your sister, Lynne Sachs, on a film about Vietnam. How did that project come about, and what was it like working with a family member?

A: I was living in Hanoi in 1992 and Lynne, who is a documentary and experimental filmmaker, came to visit me. We never planned to make a movie, but as we travelled together through the country, she shot film.

After she returned to the States, she called me and said that she had all this evocative footage. Did I want to make a documentary with her? So we started working long distance on the film that eventually became Which Way is East. I’d interview people and write sections of the narrative in Hanoi and she’d work on editing the actual film in the United States. After I returned home, we finished it.

It was really interesting to work with a family member. As a writer, I mostly work alone. Filmmaking is more collaborative. The process actually revealed a lot about our characters as human beings and there was a natural tension between us (sometimes testy, but usually good-natured.)

I had more of a journalistic attitude, wanting to capture as much as we could of people’s real-life experience. Lynne was more aesthetic. She wanted to make sure the film looked and sounded beautiful. I hope that, when people see it, they’ll feel that the creative tension was productive for the film, and that it does both.

Q: What changes have you seen in Vietnam over the years that you've been traveling there?

A: Oh, so many. The obvious are things like the increase of motorbikes and cars on the streets (almost everyone rode bicycles when I first went there in 1990), fancy new restaurants, fashionable clothes.

But I think that, in many ways, the most important changes are less obvious. For example, people used to have so much free time (for years, very few Vietnamese people had work that actually produced a viable income). I learned to relax in Vietnam. I mean, really relax, like spending all afternoon sitting on a front stoop watching the traffic pass by. 

My friends can’t do that any more. They’re really busy. When I go visit, they need to schedule me in on their iPhones in order to make time to see me. It’s a good sign that the economy has improved, but I do miss that time on the stoops. I notice that sense of nostalgia in my friends as well.

Q: The Secret of the Nightingale Palace centers on a difficult relationship between a grandmother and granddaughter. How did you create these characters?

A: Well, the grandmother, Goldie, is based on my own grandmother, Rose, who is 101 years old this year. As people can see when they read the book, she’s a force of nature: tough, single-minded, outspoken, and extremely well-dressed.

I started out writing the novel by thinking of my grandmother and trying to imagine her youth, but the story itself quickly evolved away from her actual story and into something very different. Goldie’s personality comes from Rose, but her life story comes from my own imagination.

And, by the way, I did not base the character of the granddaughter, Anna, on myself. I suppose, though, that all fictional characters are, in some sense, the offspring of the authors who created them.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: A new novel, which is tentatively titled Happy in Budapest. An American diplomat begins to show signs of a rare form of dementia, and his two adult daughters try to figure out what to do to help him.

 As you probably guessed from the title, it takes place in Budapest, and it’s also about art nouveau design, Raoul Wallenberg, tour guides, neo-Nazis, sperm donors, and an exceedingly difficult piece of piano music, Franz Liszt’s transcription of Richard Wagner’s Tannhauser Overture. I’ve been on a research binge to write it, which has been quite glorious.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Since this is a conversation about books, and since I have benefitted from so many great recommendations myself, let me suggest a few terrific authors. One is the British novelist Jane Gardam, who has written loads of books but seems to have only recently begun to achieve widespread fame. I’ve just devoured the first two books in a three-book series, the first of which is Old Filth.

I also, belatedly, just read my first novel by Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety, which is so wise and beautiful that, after reading it, I felt I was seeing the world in an entirely new way.

Finally, since my own work has particular focus on Vietnam and, more recently, Hungary, two really wonderful authors from those countries: The Hungarian author Imre Kertesz, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature (his novel Fatelessness is a profound and, oddly enough, often funny take on the Holocaust) and the Vietnamese author Nguyen Huy Thiep. Like Kertesz, Thiep has a dry, funny tone that reveals so many layers of complicated humanity that I find myself turning back to his stories again and again.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This Q&A can also be found on deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com.

Q&A with author Kim Fay

Kim Fay, photo by Julie Fay AshbornKim Fay is the author of the novel The Map of Lost Memories and the food memoir Communion: A Culinary Journey Through Vietnam. She created and edits the To Asia With Love guidebook series. Fay, who resides in Los Angeles, lived in Vietnam for four years and travels often to Southeast Asia.

Q: How did you come up with your main character, Irene Blum, in The Map of Lost Memories?

A: This is always a difficult question for me to answer. Each character in my novel has a specific inspiration … with the exception of Irene. One day she simply existed when I found myself writing a scene about a twelve-year-old girl searching for “lost treasure” in the manor house of an old family friend.

Because Irene first came to me in her youth, rather than as the 29-year-old woman she is throughout the majority of the book, I suspect she owes her existence to Nancy Drew. As a girl, I admired Nancy’s independence, curiosity and determination. Of course, Irene is far less noble than Nancy—Nancy would never rob a temple, no matter how justified she felt!

But I wanted Irene to be an authentic product of her time. During the 1920s, it was acceptable for Westerners to appropriate the relics of countries they considered to be uncivilized and therefore unworthy caretakers of their own cultural treasures, and so Irene often behaves in ways that are unsavory by today’s standards.

Q: What type of research did you need to do to evoke Cambodia and Shanghai in the 1920s? 

A: This time period was long familiar to me. My grandpa was a sailor in the South China Sea in the early 1930s, and his favorite place was Shanghai. Not only did he tell me stories of his experiences there, he had numerous photographs. As a young girl I became fascinated with that part of the world, and by the time I started The Map of Lost Memories, I had been reading about it for decades.

As for research specific to my novel, I relied on period travel narratives, history books, old photographs and personal experience—visiting each location in the novel. Because The Map of Lost Memories was started in the 1990s, many of the settings in Cambodia, Vietnam and Shanghai still looked as they did in the 1920s. This is not the case today, as many historical buildings have been torn down.

Q: You also have written about Vietnamese food. Why did you decide to focus on that topic in your book Communion? 

A: Having lived in Vietnam for four years, from 1995-1999, I wanted to write a book that would express my love for the country while giving me the opportunity to deepen my knowledge of it. While I had many memorable experiences living there, I didn’t feel that a straightforward memoir was the right path for me to take.

But as a foodie whose friendships in Vietnam were most often developed in kitchens and at the table, writing a food book made sense. Once I began researching, I was hooked. The country’s cuisine turned out to be an ideal way to explore the nuances of Vietnam’s culture and history.

Q: What draws you to Southeast Asia, and how did the To Asia With Love guidebook series come about?

A: As I mentioned, my grandpa traveled in Asia as a young man, and his stories sparked my own interest in the region. I first traveled there when I was 22, and I was smitten. I loved the humidity, the food, the smell of incense at dawn and jasmine at dusk, the rich histories, the unique cultures and—when I finally moved to Vietnam—the people. I felt so at home.

While I was living in Vietnam I started writing for a small specialized magazine called Destination: Vietnam. The magazine evolved into a website, and the website into the boutique ThingsAsian Press.

By this time I had developed a strong working relationship with the publisher, and he asked if I had any book ideas I would like to pursue. I had been toying with a guidebook concept for a while—one that combined travel essays with factual information. 

Each book would rely on approximately 50 experts, people who lived in-country or had traveled to a country often. Each person would write personal stories about favorite experiences not typically found in guidebooks, and these stories would be paired with fact files so that readers could follow in the writer’s footsteps. I was fortunate to have a publisher willing to take chances, and now the To Asia With Love series is up to eight volumes.

Q: What are you working on now? 

A: There will be a sequel to The Map of Lost Memories, but it is simmering on the back burner while I pursue another novel that has been begging for my attention for a few years. Having studied various aspects of Vietnam’s history, I am fascinated with the late 1950s, that time of transition between French colonial rule and America’s ill-guided and fatal meddling.

Using a pivotal few years as the anchor, my new novel is told from the point-of-view of an American culinary anthropologist who was born in Vietnam to sociologists in 1937. When her closest friend, the granddaughter of the head chef for Vietnam’s last emperor, is murdered, she attempts to put the pieces together. As she solves the mystery, I hope to explore mid-twentieth-century Vietnam while telling a compelling story at the same time.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: The Map of Lost Memories has been marketed as a literary adventure novel, a suspense novel and a mystery novel. While it does contain all three of these elements, it is not a fast-paced book. Its pace reflects the time in which the story takes place—the 1920s—before jets whisked people halfway around the world in a day and the Internet put information at our fingertips. It spends a great deal of time developing characters, exploring history and immersing readers in a sense of place. As such, this is a novel for those who want to embark on a leisurely journey through Shanghai, Saigon and the Cambodian jungle.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This Q&A also appears on deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com.

Q&A with author Gail Hosking

Gail HoskingGail Hosking, a writer and poet, is the author of Snake's Daughter: The Roads In and Out of War, a family memoir focused on the life of her father, Charles E. "Snake" Hosking, Jr., an Army master sergeant who was killed in action in 1967 while serving in Vietnam and posthumously won a Medal of Honor. Gail Hosking (who wrote Snake's Daughter under the name Gail Hosking Gilberg) was 17 at the time of her father's death. She teaches in the English department of the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Q: In the process of writing Snake's Daughter, do you feel that you found out as much about yourself as about your father?

A: I suppose I found out that I really missed him, and that I had cut off feelings about the relationship in order to survive beforehand. I found out how beloved he was to so many soldiers who looked up to him. I was told a Vietnamese soldier came out of retirement to fight alongside my dad. I found out that the VC would send messages about my father--trying to capture him, promising good things if the U.S. gave him up. I found out just how lonely I imagine my father was and perhaps even disappointed in his country by the end. Though I have nothing to prove that, it seemed to seep out of the edges of conversations.

I think I realized how different I am from my friends, my civilian friends whose experiences were so different than mine. It helped me sort that out, accept it.

The writing made me see the threads that connect my father's life to mine--how clearly I am his daughter. I had not thought of that before.

I saw the wider picture of what the war did to our country, its families, its trust...

It got me in touch with a grass roots organization called Sons and Daughters in Touch.

Q: How did your family members react to the book?

A: I think my family was proud, though a sister asked why I had to delve into all this sadness. Another sister was running a group of Vets (therapy) and many of them started talking more after they read the book. That I was proud of.

Q: You write of your experience visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, "I had not expected to feel anything at this wall everyone was talking about because I had grown accustomed to the walls around my heart. But when I saw my father's name and my family's reflection in the black stone, I stood there with tears flowing down my face....I found myself for the first time wanting to talk to those who surrounded me....Tell me your story, I wanted to say." Why do you think the wall evoked this reaction in you?

A: There was so much silence during the war, especially from family members. We all pretended not to be involved or believed that no one else in civilian life would know about this war. That was a bit of denial since it was on TV news.

I never met another person whose father was in the war until I went to Vietnam with Sons and Daughters in Touch. It was there I found out through these fellow military brats (now all of us grown) what they experienced.

It wasn't pleasant--people avoiding us because we had fathers there--people sending nasty letters or phone calls--people calling our fathers "baby killers"--people who stopped dating us because of Vietnam--people who refused to come to our house—etc. etc. etc...

It made me angry, I have to say. Very angry for the first time. I wanted so badly to find more people--perhaps that's why at the wall I wanted to meet these others who knew of this particular sorrow, like long lost relatives. I didn't want to be alone anymore. I had felt like I was off the mainland--not military anymore and not civilian...so where did I belong? These people seemed like family in an odd way.

Q: What role did your father's photographs play for you, both in the writing of the book and in your understanding of his life?

A: It seemed eerie for a man on the go to have left these labeled and organized photographs--that he had given me a typewriter as a final gift--that this had fallen into my hands...eerie as though he planned this all along. My son just got his MFA in photography and think of the thread back towards my dad who was always interested in documenting life, taking photographs.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I've written a book on the healing from trauma (divorce in this case)--short lyrical essay collection. It's with an agent (Leigh Feldman) in NYC at the moment. Cross your fingers! I wrote a book about my mother and the war on the homefront but it got rejected and I think needs a lot more work. I write poems and essays, short things at the moment since teaching takes up so much time.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I did not start out to write Snake's Daughter. I did it as a photograph/essay project for a class. Then a photographer friend suggested I get a grant and frame them. I did...and the reaction was powerful. Why don't I put this into a book, people asked. So I did. Slowly. I would have been too self-conscious if I had known from the start it would be a book. I'm so glad I did. It changed my life...got an MFA in literature and writing after that and now teach at a university. I didn't think that would ever happen.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This interview is also posted at deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com.