Shortly after I began interviewing combat veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, I
sent a preliminary draft of what was to become “The Parts” to a friend of mine. He’d been
supportive of my writing and had often expressed admiration for the craft, so I considered
him a kind of sounding board.
When John handed the story back a week later, I could sense his hesitation. “It was
good,” he said. But when I pressed for something more concrete, anything that I could turn
constructive, he said this: “The parts about war felt like you were trying too hard. They
didn’t feel authentic.”
The sections that John singled out as seeming inauthentic, however, were taken
almost verbatim from interviews I’d conducted. They were, if anything, the most authentic
depictions of war I’d written thus far, so you can imagine my dismay. “You’re wrong,” I
wanted to say. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The reality, however, is that John’s skepticism was grounded by a very basic
observation. He knew that I’d never fought in a war. More importantly, though, I knew that
I’d never fought in a war before. I was trying too hard. I was overcompensating for my lack
of authority and consequently riddling my prose with so many details from source
materials and interviews that the underlying narrative was all but indecipherable.
Several years later, my writing managed to evolve from a set of stories that took
place within the context of war to a collection that tells a diverse but connected narrative
about soldiers returning from war. While the interviews I conducted served as a root for
references to the Iraq and Afghanistan War experience, each of my stories assumes its own,
independent authority. This is in part due to my grounding each piece within a civilian
context, but it is also due to my exploration of a subject that has been only superficially
explored in regards to contemporary wars: the story of our soldiers returning home, their
struggles and isolation in the face of reassimilating to civilian life.
It’s easy now to shrug off my encounter with John as inconsequential—as one
person’s opinion of my writing at its most nascent state—but the personal concerns that he
expressed over the authenticity of my collection helped to expose how contested and
problematic the notion of authenticity is within the scope of contemporary war fiction.
Years afterward, this realization would help prompt the questions behind this essay:
namely, 1.) whether civilian authors can assume authority over the subject of
contemporary wars and 2.) if possible, how an authentic rendering of war can be achieved
through research and the deployment of innovative form.
| Date of Award | 1 Oct 2017 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Awarding Institution | - University Of Strathclyde
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| Supervisor | Beatrice Colin (Supervisor) & David Kinloch (Supervisor) |
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