Novel-in-Progress and Publications

The novel-in-progress is sighing loudly while I take a pause in the revisions. Meanwhile, novel excerpts are seeing publication here and there.

Here's the latest!

"The Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds" - storySouth - Autumn 2014

"Something for Nothing" - forthcoming in Waccamaw Journal

"Waking" - forthcoming in Rappahannock Review

The Now and Forever of Luke B. Goebel–An Interview

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Luke Goebel’s award-winning first novel, “Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours,” shakes and rattles and trembles in your hands. From the first lines, the novel throws story at you, and you’d better watch your head. His voice grabs your wrist and promises everything and nothing. Words fly forward and backward—a lone eagle feather, a lost love, the moon, peyote, blanket flowers, myth, dogs, clouds, cigarettes, girls, chores, America—to speak and shout of loss and heartbreak. The ride is rough, but so is grief, and Luke Goebel, man-boy-kid of giant searching heart, knows how to tell this tale.

KARIN C. DAVIDSON: My first impressions of “Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours” result from the telescopic and panoramic storytelling mode. Reflection pours out of reflection, while voice carves language, and lyricism rides rhythm. The rush of words and the nonlinear, bad-ass, spin-and-shoot-the-center-out-of-a-dime directions and redirections send the story reeling. And the impressions keep coming and curling in and fanning out and outright exploding.

There’s a crazy, amazing amount of energy in the writing, a Wild West version of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” John Barth, David Foster Wallace, and Barry Hannah are all nodding. The narrator says as much: “I’m very much here but not, because I buy my own lies. So I need sex and sex and food and cigarettes and hands and skin and arms and the wild look of the words shimmering after not coming back right from being with Natives on Peyote.”

Luke, do the momentum and chase and surprise of these stories arrive in the middle of the night, as a gift of inspiration? Or is there a roll of butcher paper flying around the cylinder of your XE 5200, as you type nonstop, making myth in pica and elite?

LUKE B. GOEBEL: THANK YOU. You know, once you’ve written a book, why talk about it? I’m not being glib. I don’t know anymore. I already wrote it. That miracle of feeling is over. I can mutely point around a little with my hands. Seriously, now it belongs to the readers. I like how you say things—how you can talk about what you feel in the book. I’ve loved books but can’t talk about them that well. All I can say, first, humbly, is I’m very grateful.

The only notion I have is this: I wrote the book in stories, and I worked hard on my words. Then I had a miracle where the stories wove themselves along within my living into a novel shape. I couldn’t have figured it ahead of time. I bought a long RV bus just to have something to do and the next thing that happened was not plan-able.

I don’t get it unless it’s right in my pocket on fire, with something lighting me up. That close to the body. Like smelling something burning like hair on me. Or it’s hell and trying. Because of love and fear and caring too much and being strange, strange, strange, from birth. I’m always nervous and anxious, and that is usable energy. I feel like something is wrong with me in general a lot of the time, except when I’m out traveling free. I’ve always been trapped in the moment thinking it’s all on the line at every moment and it’s now now now now forever and it’s got to make something for itself! Now or never! That’s the feeling when I write. It makes me nuts. Seasick.

Some building pieces like “Boot of The Boot” came to me in streaks of clarity out of the madness with help from editors, like David McLendon, who were spurring me on, but most were a self-struggle to become able to dial a telephone or eat a ham sandwich. It was tiny routine education in letters, I believe. The moments of inspiration were delivery. The rest was bondage.

Then I had, most of them, the stories, fashioned, but a few were not…. Then we lost my brother. You know there are things I can’t say, so I wrote. Then it was true.

One day, on my way to my last editing session with the proofs, a white dove flew up and alongside my truck for so long and it was so gleaming white, heading to Dallas to a hotel to work. Not my brother, but a sign from someplace. Many animals have come to me, as in the story of the book. I worked mostly in hotel rooms on revisions and also on stories. They clear the junk. Hotels. You’re in the communal space. It’s where the reader lives, too. It’s common territory. You can lose yourself.

It didn’t happen by any design of forethought or foresight, the weaving of the stories, the structure of the book. That was just from paying attention. I should give my teacher some credit, my writing teacher. One of them in specific particulars. Gordon Lish. He taught me to train my attention on things that I already knew to train my attention on, but he gave me permission and praise. Just good Jewish and Irish wit to wit. Back in class, with his white peyote hair, and the lines of his face, and his hands out and up like a religious icon, like a child, like a lover, he said, something to the tune of, “Luke, my BOY, your attention is always in the right place. You’re a writer. But you don’t have it yet, so sit down. What you have is terrible.”

As for the XE 5200, that was bought from ACE Typewriter in Portland, Ore., over in St. John’s, and in fact it was given without payment, and without the owner even knowing my name he said, “Just send me a check,” all after I wrote and edited and submitted the final proofs for “Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours.” So, I didn’t write that book on that typewriter. I feel like he could tell I wasn’t bullshit about using the typewriter when he let me take it without paying. He could tell I would use it for real good. That felt like a nice gift from the gods of faith.

That day I just talked about when I went in to the shop, bell dings, the owner was celebrating the day of the birth of his father who founded the shop. He had become 93 or 94 or 99. He was in the store, the father, with his cane and his little laugh, and I wished his father a mighty celebratory moment and the old man waddled with his tight little frame and butt in his pants, down away on the street, and the next thing… you know, I had no cash and it was 45 dollars for the unit. He wouldn’t take anything but cash, you know, so… it’s a wheel writer, the XE 5200 series. NOT like a great ball IBM 240 dollar number… and the son said just take it and mail him a check. Months later, went in and gave him cash, just before heading back to Texas. He smiled.

I took the typewriter and used it. We flew to Joshua Tree, Calif., via the Palm Springs Airport, where I got a loaned-out 19.5-foot Buick estate wagon, which my lady friend left for me, which was and is robin’s egg blue with fake wood paneling with no AC and off we all went into the 116 degree desert, not her and me, but only me and the typewriter and the Buick with my dog, Jewely, into a house with no AC in Joshua Tree, and walked around in my skivvies where Mojave Green Rattlesnakes—which are territorial and want to bite your ass and fill your cheeks with their venom, venom that contains blood toxins & neurotoxins both, and will make you require ten times the usual amount of antivenin as regular rattlesnake bites, because these green Mojave bastards are ten times as poisonous, stand four feet up from the ground just to mess you up psychologically, in the deserts sands around the boiling house—were roaming. There, as everywhere, no butcher rolls of paper flew as I kept on the trail of my second book. Which I’m still on. But I wrote. Felt good. Thrill to be trying, asking yourself: Well, do you? Can you? What? What can you accomplish?

 

Sun of the desert’s red and blonde. Sage, shadow of salt scrub, chaparral—racing through the cholla, saguaro, barrel and yucca and dust.

–Luke B. Goebel

 

DAVIDSON: Joshua Tree, Mojave Green Rattlesnakes, journey, your pup Jewely, stillness, and place. Out there is the landscape that calls to you. And in this first book, loss and heartache and love and grief create the landscape of the story—the story that is made of many stories. A journey created from past and present takes the narrator, in nonlinear directions, from childhood—lying in bed with his mother on a summer day—to coming-of-age and adulthood, when lying in bed with girls is happenstance. But the heartbreak that comes of great loss—that of his true love and his older brother, the Catherine and Carl of his life—forms the narrator and the narrative. East Texas, Ore., N.Y., Calif., Puerto Rico. The desert, the Tenderloin, the sea. Heart, soul, anguish, astonishment, envy, anger, and joy. Emotion is far from derivative; it loops and spins and takes us hard by the hand, reminding us, yes, there is direction here and it’s spun with emotion, so pay attention and follow along.

Tell us more about the ways in which you explore landscape, whether America the beautiful un-beautiful or an examination of the pancreas or the underside of the heart.

GOEBEL: I did everything you mentioned above. I wrote and went all those places, suffered those ailments, and yet it’s all fiction. And yet it isn’t at all. I felt it directly in living. I went to every one of those places, and I watched every one of those landscapes unfold, and I am carrying every one of those places. I am all the loves of my life, I hope. I love them still more than I can tell. I tried to tell it, the particulars of my love affairs with my beloved ones. And I am not talking about women. I’m talking about blood and family. People who are both to me, here and not here. I cannot un-live the life and its errors and beauties I have lived. I would love to try and go back and fix the mistakes. I am just as locked in and totally free to change as any living being human. The Buddha said we are a fathom high. That’s ninety feet high. Why can’t we get clear and find peace and love? Is that so insane? Once there was a way it seemed to just stop fighting. Now we have got to find love. LOVE. Crazy divining love. Love is the only thing that’s going to mean a thing to any of us.

 

—out there—the madness in me—and in her—the inevitable end of journey, a moment to rest and sleep like a child overlooking the slamming of sea—you know—to feel, before sleep, the listening, to listen, listen—and see and feel what is lost and cannot be regained, what has escaped the grasp, what every journey feels at the end of a long wild stretch where nothing is held and all is lost and fantastical.

–Luke B. Goebel

 

DAVIDSON: Yes, love. Love is thick and beautiful in your story, “The Minds of Boys.” A great, disturbing, wondrous story about boys, gone away from their mothers, living on the beach, stealing dogs, staring up at the clouds, dancing with girls. Its beauty is different from the other more structurally challenging stories of the novel, though, like those, it deals with archetype and myth.

Tell us about Keiko, the leader of the pack, and about how this story fits inside the novel.

GOEBEL: That was the one I felt the most like, how does this fit? Quite simply, it’s about the trap door opening and taking the best one away. It’s about my brother, but I wrote it long before then. There are such weird things that have happened in the time of my life. Sometimes it feels like it was always all fated and I always knew this story would unfold the way it has, I mean life. Other times, I just wonder, does anyone know who they are?

The story just makes sense there, I guess, because it brings in the beach, childhood, longing, disaster, losing the big-hearted leader who was never one to fit in societally. Who just was who he was, better than social pressure to conform and fit the times and the mold, you know, the pressure to hate oneself society gives you, this society does. The one who doesn’t need the merchandise to live with his giant heart and unreasonable beauty. The dream to live.

Then it also is where I spent a lot of time. In San Francisco. On the beach. And where I went with the RV to edit the story before that story in the novel and wrote more into the story “Out There,” which comes before “The Minds of Boys.” It’s just how the book came together with the RV trip in the long van with the generator and fans and windows and the world was my oyster where I owned real estate every place I went. I made decisions, and like Padgett Powell said, it came together as a lucky mess that ended up with a work deliberate and accidentally maybe more correct than not in its composition. You follow your instincts and attention to craft and recursion and themes and what delights you as a reader and write from that attention and the parts become miraculously whole, as if the world is alive. Because it is. Alive. Conscious. Working with you.

 

After rehab. After jail. After love. After the big never ending loss.

–Luke B. Goebel

 

DAVIDSON: The world—inside and out—is definitely alive in your novel. Mythmaking. Horseracing. Chasing a dream. And then, finally, chores. The “faceless” narrator is “trying to be a real man with a face.” He explains his aspirations in first, second, third person—pushing against identity boundaries—“trying to make something out of yourself, trying to figure out how to present yourself as yourself, making up your myth, finding a way in.” Structurally, this story has found a way into pain, never avoiding its sharpest edges, but leaning into them. Memory isn’t hardened, nor is it sentimental, and there’s regret, but there’s also pushing on into life, washing the truck, writing the stories.

What is the spring that you dip into to find story and structure, truths and untruths? Are there writers, teachers, landscapes, “you’ve been here in the world, have you not?” moments that lead you to understanding to then pounding the typewriter keys to translate that understanding?

GOEBEL: Yes.

Here is a brief list: Grandma, Grandpa, Carl, Marie, Dad, Mom (I’m sorry), Gordon Lish, Catherine (I’m sorry), David McLendon, Jesus, Elvis, John Lennon, Lolita, Barry Hannah, peyote, tears, Jewely, foxes, coyotes, mountain lions, Waylon Jennings, AA, rehab, nicotine, caffeine, the West, mountains, the smell of horses, prayer, church, the smell of high mass, Chanel No. 5, my father again, Wes Anderson, Paul Simon, New York City, Portland, rivers, fish, trout, my luggage, the sky, storms, rain, eating fish, deli food, greens, having a body.

 

5_Luke Goebel.jpg

Some building pieces like “Boot of The Boot” came to me in streaks of clarity out of the madness with help from editors, like David McLendon, who were spurring me on, but most were a self-struggle to become able to dial a telephone or eat a ham sandwich. It was tiny routine education in letters, I believe. The moments of inspiration were delivery. The rest was bondage.

Then I had, most of them, the stories, fashioned, but a few were not…. Then we lost my brother. You know there are things I can’t say, so I wrote. Then it was true.

One day, on my way to my last editing session with the proofs, a white dove flew up and alongside my truck for so long and it was so gleaming white, heading to Dallas to a hotel to work. Not my brother, but a sign from someplace. Many animals have come to me, as in the story of the book. I worked mostly in hotel rooms on revisions and also on stories. They clear the junk. Hotels. You’re in the communal space. It’s where the reader lives, too. It’s common territory. You can lose yourself.

It didn’t happen by any design of forethought or foresight, the weaving of the stories, the structure of the book. That was just from paying attention. I should give my teacher some credit, my writing teacher. One of them in specific particulars. Gordon Lish. He taught me to train my attention on things that I already knew to train my attention on, but he gave me permission and praise. Just good Jewish and Irish wit to wit. Back in class, with his white peyote hair, and the lines of his face, and his hands out and up like a religious icon, like a child, like a lover, he said, something to the tune of, “Luke, my BOY, your attention is always in the right place. You’re a writer. But you don’t have it yet, so sit down. What you have is terrible.”

As for the XE 5200, that was bought from ACE Typewriter in Portland, Ore., over in St. John’s, and in fact it was given without payment, and without the owner even knowing my name he said, “Just send me a check,” all after I wrote and edited and submitted the final proofs for “Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours.” So, I didn’t write that book on that typewriter. I feel like he could tell I wasn’t bullshit about using the typewriter when he let me take it without paying. He could tell I would use it for real good. That felt like a nice gift from the gods of faith.

That day I just talked about when I went in to the shop, bell dings, the owner was celebrating the day of the birth of his father who founded the shop. He had become 93 or 94 or 99. He was in the store, the father, with his cane and his little laugh, and I wished his father a mighty celebratory moment and the old man waddled with his tight little frame and butt in his pants, down away on the street, and the next thing… you know, I had no cash and it was 45 dollars for the unit. He wouldn’t take anything but cash, you know, so… it’s a wheel writer, the XE 5200 series. NOT like a great ball IBM 240 dollar number… and the son said just take it and mail him a check. Months later, went in and gave him cash, just before heading back to Texas. He smiled.

I took the typewriter and used it. We flew to Joshua Tree, Calif., via the Palm Springs Airport, where I got a loaned-out 19.5-foot Buick estate wagon, which my lady friend left for me, which was and is robin’s egg blue with fake wood paneling with no AC and off we all went into the 116 degree desert, not her and me, but only me and the typewriter and the Buick with my dog, Jewely, into a house with no AC in Joshua Tree, and walked around in my skivvies where Mojave Green Rattlesnakes—which are territorial and want to bite your ass and fill your cheeks with their venom, venom that contains blood toxins & neurotoxins both, and will make you require ten times the usual amount of antivenin as regular rattlesnake bites, because these green Mojave bastards are ten times as poisonous, stand four feet up from the ground just to mess you up psychologically, in the deserts sands around the boiling house—were roaming. There, as everywhere, no butcher rolls of paper flew as I kept on the trail of my second book. Which I’m still on. But I wrote. Felt good. Thrill to be trying, asking yourself: Well, do you? Can you? What? What can you accomplish?


Sun of the desert’s red and blonde. Sage, shadow of salt scrub, chaparral—racing through the cholla, saguaro, barrel and yucca and dust.

–Luke B. Goebel


DAVIDSON: Joshua Tree, Mojave Green Rattlesnakes, journey, your pup Jewely, stillness, and place. Out there is the landscape that calls to you. And in this first book, loss and heartache and love and grief create the landscape of the story—the story that is made of many stories. A journey created from past and present takes the narrator, in nonlinear directions, from childhood—lying in bed with his mother on a summer day—to coming-of-age and adulthood, when lying in bed with girls is happenstance. But the heartbreak that comes of great loss—that of his true love and his older brother, the Catherine and Carl of his life—forms the narrator and the narrative. East Texas, Ore., N.Y., Calif., Puerto Rico. The desert, the Tenderloin, the sea. Heart, soul, anguish, astonishment, envy, anger, and joy. Emotion is far from derivative; it loops and spins and takes us hard by the hand, reminding us, yes, there is direction here and it’s spun with emotion, so pay attention and follow along.

Tell us more about the ways in which you explore landscape, whether America the beautiful un-beautiful or an examination of the pancreas or the underside of the heart.

GOEBEL: I did everything you mentioned above. I wrote and went all those places, suffered those ailments, and yet it’s all fiction. And yet it isn’t at all. I felt it directly in living. I went to every one of those places, and I watched every one of those landscapes unfold, and I am carrying every one of those places. I am all the loves of my life, I hope. I love them still more than I can tell. I tried to tell it, the particulars of my love affairs with my beloved ones. And I am not talking about women. I’m talking about blood and family. People who are both to me, here and not here. I cannot un-live the life and its errors and beauties I have lived. I would love to try and go back and fix the mistakes. I am just as locked in and totally free to change as any living being human. The Buddha said we are a fathom high. That’s ninety feet high. Why can’t we get clear and find peace and love? Is that so insane? Once there was a way it seemed to just stop fighting. Now we have got to find love. LOVE. Crazy divining love. Love is the only thing that’s going to mean a thing to any of us.


—out there—the madness in me—and in her—the inevitable end of journey, a moment to rest and sleep like a child overlooking the slamming of sea—you know—to feel, before sleep, the listening, to listen, listen—and see and feel what is lost and cannot be regained, what has escaped the grasp, what every journey feels at the end of a long wild stretch where nothing is held and all is lost and fantastical.

–Luke B. Goebel


DAVIDSON: Yes, love. Love is thick and beautiful in your story, “The Minds of Boys.” A great, disturbing, wondrous story about boys, gone away from their mothers, living on the beach, stealing dogs, staring up at the clouds, dancing with girls. Its beauty is different from the other more structurally challenging stories of the novel, though, like those, it deals with archetype and myth.

Tell us about Keiko, the leader of the pack, and about how this story fits inside the novel.

GOEBEL: That was the one I felt the most like, how does this fit? Quite simply, it’s about the trap door opening and taking the best one away. It’s about my brother, but I wrote it long before then. There are such weird things that have happened in the time of my life. Sometimes it feels like it was always all fated and I always knew this story would unfold the way it has, I mean life. Other times, I just wonder, does anyone know who they are?

The story just makes sense there, I guess, because it brings in the beach, childhood, longing, disaster, losing the big-hearted leader who was never one to fit in societally. Who just was who he was, better than social pressure to conform and fit the times and the mold, you know, the pressure to hate oneself society gives you, this society does. The one who doesn’t need the merchandise to live with his giant heart and unreasonable beauty. The dream to live.

Then it also is where I spent a lot of time. In San Francisco. On the beach. And where I went with the RV to edit the story before that story in the novel and wrote more into the story “Out There,” which comes before “The Minds of Boys.” It’s just how the book came together with the RV trip in the long van with the generator and fans and windows and the world was my oyster where I owned real estate every place I went. I made decisions, and like Padgett Powell said, it came together as a lucky mess that ended up with a work deliberate and accidentally maybe more correct than not in its composition. You follow your instincts and attention to craft and recursion and themes and what delights you as a reader and write from that attention and the parts become miraculously whole, as if the world is alive. Because it is. Alive. Conscious. Working with you.


After rehab. After jail. After love. After the big never ending loss.

–Luke B. Goebel


DAVIDSON: The world—inside and out—is definitely alive in your novel. Mythmaking. Horseracing. Chasing a dream. And then, finally, chores. The “faceless” narrator is “trying to be a real man with a face.” He explains his aspirations in first, second, third person—pushing against identity boundaries—“trying to make something out of yourself, trying to figure out how to present yourself as yourself, making up your myth, finding a way in.” Structurally, this story has found a way into pain, never avoiding its sharpest edges, but leaning into them. Memory isn’t hardened, nor is it sentimental, and there’s regret, but there’s also pushing on into life, washing the truck, writing the stories.

What is the spring that you dip into to find story and structure, truths and untruths? Are there writers, teachers, landscapes, “you’ve been here in the world, have you not?” moments that lead you to understanding to then pounding the typewriter keys to translate that understanding?

GOEBEL: Yes.

Here is a brief list: Grandma, Grandpa, Carl, Marie, Dad, Mom (I’m sorry), Gordon Lish, Catherine (I’m sorry), David McLendon, Jesus, Elvis, John Lennon, Lolita, Barry Hannah, peyote, tears, Jewely, foxes, coyotes, mountain lions, Waylon Jennings, AA, rehab, nicotine, caffeine, the West, mountains, the smell of horses, prayer, church, the smell of high mass, Chanel No. 5, my father again, Wes Anderson, Paul Simon, New York City, Portland, rivers, fish, trout, my luggage, the sky, storms, rain, eating fish, deli food, greens, having a body.


kcd 2

 

 

 

Karin C. Davidson, NEWFOUND JOURNAL Interviews Editor

As first posted at NEWFOUND JOURNAL - Autumn 2014 Issue

Points of Connection

A Conversation with Bich Minh Nguyen

“In August 1965 a woman named Rose walked into my grandfather’s café in Saigon.

That much is known. My grandfather would say that’s the beginning of this story.

My mother would say I should have left it at that.”

 

So begins Bich Minh Nguyen’s much-praised second novel, “Pioneer Girl.” As in her memoir, “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner,” and her first novel, “Short Girls,” thematic points of connection–places of origin, family relationships, and comforts of food–are laid out before us, each influencing the next, each as important as the others. These points are textured by differences between the first and second generations of immigrant families, the feelings of belonging and not belonging, and the weight of lives that lead from east to west, all the while anchored in both places.

These points of connection are exactly what I love about Nguyen’s books. There is the sense of geography, which spans from Vietnam to the Midwest to the West all the way to the Pacific, which leads back to Vietnam. There are the relationships, close and distant, caring and complicated, between sisters, grandmothers, fathers, uncles, grandfathers, mothers, brothers, and friends. And then there is the food: from all-you-can-eat childhood comforts to the more mature market-grazing of peaches and oysters, white wine and lemon-lavender cake, and throughout the years, the love of banh mi and cha gio and pho and, ultimately, the shared love of eating.

Nguyen approaches these elements with the consideration and concern of a scholar, yet invites her readers in with the ease of a storyteller, her intricate narratives threading through terrain that is as tough as it is touching, revealing characters we come to care about.

“Pioneer Girl” by Bich Minh Nguyen

Thank you, Bich, for agreeing to this interview. You’ve had an incredible year, what with the publication of “Pioneer Girl,” moving from your longtime home in the Midwest to the Pacific Coast, and joining the MFA in Writing Program faculty at the University of San Francisco. Do you see a parallel between your own move to the West Coast and the travels of the narrator, Lee Lien, in “Pioneer Girl,” as well as those of Rose Wilder Lane, the mysterious subject of concern in the novel? 

Thanks for inviting me to do this interview!

I wanted to write a book that brought together some of my enduring obsessions: the immigrant experience in the United States; the “Little House on the Prairie” books; and bad food in small towns. In “Pioneer Girl” the city of San Francisco becomes hugely significant to more than one character; it was also the place where Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter and editor/co-author, became a writer in the early 1900s. When I wrote “Pioneer Girl,” I’d been living in the Midwest for years. I also grew up in Michigan and have spent more time in the Midwest than anywhere else. I had no idea I would leave. But by the time the novel was finished and edited, I had accepted a job in San Francisco. I think what I share with Rose Wilder and Lee Lien is a sense of restlessness, or at least an understanding of that feeling. Neither Rose nor Lee wants to “bloom where they are planted”; they want to roam. They feel the tug of family obligation but also the longing for adventure. I felt many of these complications myself, growing up in a small city in Michigan in the 1980s.

The Midwest

For some, small-town America, as in Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio,” generates a feeling of distress, of feeling trapped and wanting to escape. Your novel, “Pioneer Girl,” and your husband Porter Shreve’s novel, “The End of the Book,” in a way a sequel to Anderson’s book, approach this idea of entrapment with the sensibility and firsthand knowledge of town life in the Midwest.

Lee Lien, of “Pioneer Girl,” questions her family’s choice to remain in the Midwest, once they settle in the Chicago suburbs and open their own café, after years of moving from town to town through a series of Asian buffet jobs. In “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” you wonder at your father’s strength in bringing your family to the Midwest after the Fall of Saigon and at his decision never to leave. Do you think the Midwest will always inform your writing?

It’s true—Porter and I both wrote novels that deal with real-life literary figures, family duty, and the Midwestern feeling of isolation. We didn’t read each other’s work until we had pretty solid drafts and even then, it took us a while to realize we were on similar thematic tracks. I think it must have been because we were both in the midst of questioning where we were, geographically. We had ended up in Indiana for academic jobs and we had two young kids. We’ve both moved quite a bit, but having kids made us more anxious about where we wanted to be. The back-of-the-mind questions became daily ones: Are we going to stay? Do we want to live somewhere else? Where? What are the risks, gains, and consequences of leaving and starting over? Inevitably, these questions also came out in our writing and in our characters.

I’m sure the Midwest will always inform my writing because I am essentially Midwestern; it’s where I grew up and it’s what I know. One of the aspects of geographical identity I wanted to explore in “Pioneer Girl” is how our childhoods are made by other people. As children, we have no control over where we live or where we grow up. But it informs so much and, as adults, we contend with it. Lee contends with it against her mother’s expectations. Rose Wilder hated growing up in Mansfield, Missouri and couldn’t wait to leave. My father gave me and my siblings the best childhood he knew how to give, and it started with his decision to leave his world behind and start over in the United States. No move I make could ever be so bold and brave. Now that I have kids, I am even more in awe of the burden and responsibility involved in his decision.

Bich, Anh, and their dad – Grand Rapids, Michigan – mid-1970s

In “Pioneer Girl” you have created remarkable moments between the first- and second-generation members of an immigrant family. You’ve shown the conflicting sense of guilt and sense of responsibility, as well as the loyalty and memories that bind one to family. The daughter Lee’s relationship with her mother is seemingly no-win, the mother always disapproving, criticizing. Yet Lee tries to imagine why her mother is this way, and generosity, understanding, and compassion rise above feelings of shame, anger, and guilt. The grandfather, Ong Hai, is nonjudgmental, always understanding and optimistic, always caring and loving without agenda. His is true unconditional love. And the brother, Sam– first-born, the son, “spoiled”–separates himself from family by disappearing.

Could you comment about these relationships, how you found a way to describe them so deftly, focusing on each character, keeping their wants and needs distinctive and yet tied together, so that family remains the true collective sum of its individual members?

I wanted to explore the way people take on certain roles in a family and how sometimes those roles are given. You know—that’s the artsy kid, that’s the athletic kid, that’s the good one, that’s the wild child. These identifiers can be only partly true because they’re too reductive. But once they get made they can be hard to shake; they can end up becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. Yet everyone has a secret self, a set of secret beliefs and feelings: this is who I really am, and no one else knows it. Lee feels this for herself, but it takes a while for her to realize that’s true of everyone else in her family too. She thinks she knows her mother so well, but there are, of course, hidden wells. The same goes for Sam and Ong Hai.

I also wanted to explore the way families make their own myths. Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder did that through the “Little House” books—and they fought quite a bit while working on them. Most families have internal and often passive-aggressive struggles for power: who gets to control the narrative of the family story? In “Pioneer Girl” Lee’s mother seems to be in control, but Lee begins to question that. She does and does not want to be the good daughter. Obligation is inescapable in most families, I would guess, and not just Asian ones. And it’s a major factor in the conflict between the first and second generations in immigrant families. I wanted to find ways to show that conflict emerging, not just in big fights, but in everyday interactions.

Bich and her sister, Anh

“Short Girls” by Bich Minh Nguyen

Early in your novel “Short Girls,” the chapters alternating between two sisters’ viewpoints, the character Linny has a moment of understanding and empathy for her older sister, Van. She “thought of her sister driving through her subdivision in Ann Arbor, decelerating, directing the car into the driveway. She pictured Van just sitting there, almost unwilling to move. How well Linny knew that feeling… a mixture of relief and dread. Now I have to get out of the car, she thought at those times. And she always did, even though she dreamed of driving on without a map… For the first time, it occurred to Linny that maybe her sister had fantasized that very same thing.”

Would you speak about your process of approaching the tougher, more emotional concerns of relationships, especially between siblings?

Fiction writing requires empathy and understanding. In many ways, that’s why we read and why writers are born out of reading: we want to understand the lives and experiences of other people. “Short Girls” was partly inspired by my own relationship with my two older sisters and partly by Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” (a book I’ve loved since high school). My sisters and I aren’t much like Marianne and Elinor, or like Linny and Van. But we had, as those characters do, our ups and downs, our arguments and resentments. I remembered always trying to figure out my sisters when we were growing up. Why won’t they play dolls with me anymore? Why are they listening to that same Led Zeppelin record over and over? How do they know how to behave as girls? Do they like me? Are we going to get along today? I wanted to apply these feelings toward Linny and Van. They have to figure out how to see each other not just as sisters, bound by the common, irrefutable bond of a shared childhood experiences, but as people who are in some way essentially unknowable. By the way, I should say that my sisters and I get along great; it’s just much more interesting to explore the conflicts!

Noi and her sons

Bich, Anh, and their grandmother, Noi

Food, family bonds, and identity are recurring themes in your writing. One example of how these themes come together, and in which you pay beautiful tribute to you grandmother, Noi, is in the chapter “Cha Gio” of “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner.” When Noi prepares the ingredients of cha bio for Tet–the grated carrots, fish sauce, black pepper, mung bean noodles, the ground shrimp and pork–you recall the “forkful of filling on a triangle of banh trang spring roll wrapper,” Noi’s laughter and how later she would “pluck the cha gio from the frying pan,” and “the first anticipated bite, the sweet and peppery flavors of shrimp and pork and fish sauce weighted against the delicate crunch of the fried wrapper.” In Noi’s cooking there is love, as seen in the lines: “I ate slowly, trying to memorize the flavors, trying to know what my grandmother has always known: this amount of pepper, this amount of fish sauce. She had always been there to show me this world without measurements.”

Would you tell us more about how the world of tastes and meals, both Vietnamese and American, was influenced by family and friends, creating new ties and strengthening or complicating old ones, and how all this shaped your identity?

Food keeps appearing in my work because I think about it all the time! Don’t most of us? What should I have for breakfast, lunch, dinner? What’s in the refrigerator? Where should we eat? What should I make? I love thinking about food and reading about it; I love fulfilling a craving. I think I ended up writing “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” because I realized that food was an expression of longing in my childhood, a marker for cultural and social contexts. At home, we ate Vietnamese food. Out in the world of small town Michigan in the 1980s, no one was eating that; they were eating peanut butter and jelly, Chef Boyardee, Hamburger Helper, and casseroles. So much of my experience growing up was about trying to figure out where I fit in as a child of immigrants. I felt totally American, yet could never “look” American enough; I was also Vietnamese, yet knew almost no Vietnamese at all. My relationship with identity became very complicated, but somehow my relationship with food did not. I loved Vietnamese food; I loved American food. No matter what else was happening around me, as long as I had the right food at the right time, then everything was going to be at least a little okay. I credit my grandmother Noi for instilling in me a great appreciation for good food. She truly enjoyed it—the process of cooking, the art of opening a pomegranate, the daily ritual of dinner—and so I did too.

“Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” by Bich Minh Nguyen

“Throughout my childhood I wondered, so often it became a buzzing dullness, why we had ended up here [in Grand Rapids, Mich.], and why we couldn’t leave. I would stare at a map of the United States and imagine us in New York or Boston or Los Angeles… I was convinced people were happier out on the coasts, living in a nexus between so much land and water.” – from “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner”

Bich, now that you’ve landed decades later with your immediate family in San Francisco, a city on the Pacific Coast, do you feel a sense of happiness and possibly a connection—geographical, spiritual, or otherwise—to the distant coast of Vietnam?

I probably felt that way, growing up, because when you live in the Midwest you’re always being told that you’re in the middle of nowhere. Flyover land. But the Midwest—Michigan, Indiana, Illinois—is where I’ve lived the most, and it wasn’t my life’s goal to move to New York or San Francisco. When the opportunity came up, my husband and I really debated it. It freaked me out, really, to imagine living on the west coast, in the Pacific time zone, far from everything I’ve known. Now we’re here in the East Bay and I’m still getting used to it in a sense—getting used to the fact that I chose to change my life. And that our kids are going to be Californian, which seems so strange. I wouldn’t say that living here gives me any particular connection to Vietnam or anything like that. But I do feel more comfortable, by which I mean normal.

Lemon-lavender cake, Twinkies, or a Top Pot hand-forged doughnut?

Lemon-lavender cake. I do love doughnuts though, and almost all kinds of homemade cakes. I love making old-fashioned bundt cakes and layer cakes.

And finally tell us something you’d like to be asked – from inspiration to breakfast to bliss!

Why the obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder?

When I was a kid I read those “Little House” books until I practically memorized them. I loved the descriptions of food, the cozy evenings, the ongoing battle of farmer versus nature. When I reread the books as an adult, it occurred to me that maybe I loved them because the experiences of the Ingalls family—pioneers moving westward, homesteading, in the 1870s—was not unlike the experience of immigrants moving west to America. They’re parallel stories of heading out to unknown places and starting over. Though Laura and I had nothing in common on the surface, I felt a kinship with her. She knew what it was to be restless, to be shy and bookish, to want to stand out while also wanting to hide. She had longings for certain foods and material comforts. She had a great frenemy. She had secret rebellious thoughts. When I started researching the origin of the “Little House” books, I learned that her daughter Rose had heavily edited, perhaps even co-written, the books. Rose is an obscure figure now, but once upon a time she was more famous than her mother. And late in life she went to Vietnam, as a journalist, in 1965. When I learned about that literal connection between the “Little House” series and Vietnam—this was probably twenty years ago—I knew I would one day write something about it. I just didn’t know what it would be.

Bich Minh Nguyen

Bich Minh Nguyen’s most recent novel is “Pioneer Girl.” Her novel “Short Girls” was an American Book Award winner in fiction and a LIBRARY JOURNAL Best Book of the Year. Her memoir-in-essays, “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” received the PEN/Jerard Award and was a CHICAGO TRIBUNE Best Book of the Year and a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book. Nguyen received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and has taught in the MFA Program at Purdue University and the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. She has also coedited three anthologies of short stories and essays. She and her family recently moved to the Bay Area. 

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All photographs with permission of Bich Minh Nguyen.  

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The Poppy: An Interview Series

Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis, 

black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

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First posted in the ARTS section of Hothouse Magazine.