(An earlier and shorter version of this post appeared in the Military Spouse Book Review: Happy New Year! Let’s Read!)

Well, friends, 2019 was the year I became a crazy person (or perhaps a crazier person?). This fiction writer, who spent a lifetime cultivating a cool indifference to military history, suddenly became rabidly obsessed with the life and times of General George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. I joined niche Facebook pages (full of lovely, brilliant people) and paid dues to associations, covered the walls of my office with photographs and maps, and have bought, at my last count, more than one hundred and twenty-five books that deal with the particulars and participants of the battle.

And the reason I became so disturbingly hooked?

Because of Elizabeth Bacon Custer, the feisty, charming, smart, and tiny spouse to the above mentioned general. I happened upon the Wikipedia account of her devoted life, went down every conspiracy theory rabbit hole surrounding the hotly contested accounts of what happened at the Little Bighorn, and am currently working on a novel about her life and times. The three books pictured above illustrate why I have become so obsessed, and why I just can’t stop reading Little Bighorn related materials…

Libbie followed her husband from the outskirts of Civil War battlefields to icy prairies, proud to be one of the only spouses allowed to always travel with the men. From drafty, inhospitable, barren forts, she watched grasshoppers eat every green thing for miles, learned to put gun shot in the hem of her skirts to keep them from whipping around her head, and wrapped herself in fabric, head to toe, to keep out vicious mosquitoes during hot summers. She met Presidents, Russian counts, Native American chiefs, was shot at, and helped save drowning soldiers during an apocalyptic Kansas flood. At a time when the Army gave no allowances for spouses and food was scarce, she found a way to scrape together and create festive dinner parties, plays, musicals, and military balls. 

When her husband died at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876 (with more than 300 men in his command), Libbie was determined to defend his reputation and did so until her own death, nearly fifty-seven years later (she never remarried). Part of that effort included writing three memoirs (THREE MEMOIRS!!!), the first of which, Boots and Saddles, is my favorite. Self-deprecating, funny and brilliantly insightful, bringing to life a military world that feels closer to Little House on the Prairie than any base I have ever seen, the woman was a natural-born writer.

If you are curious to read the flipside of Libbie’s idyllic memoirs of life with her fun-loving husband, as well as insight into life on the plains long before U.S soldiers built their ‘war houses’ or settlers homesteaded (and often trespassed), I recommend Monasetah: The Life of a Custer Captive by Peter Harrison, edited by Gary Leonard.

In November, 1868, George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Calvary attacked a village of Southern Cheyenne on the banks of the Washita River in Oklahoma. They took fifty-eight women and children captive in an effort to leverage other Cheyenne and Native American tribes to move into the reservations. Harrison and Leonard present a very compelling case that Custer chose one of the captives, Monasetah, the daughter of a chief killed during the Washita Battle, as his lover. Monasetah stayed with the Seventh Cavalry for the duration of the time these Cheyenne were held by the U.S Army (from November 1868 until April 1869), accompanying them for a long winter scout to Texas, and helping negotiate the freedom of two white female hostages from a Cheyenne village. She is mentioned and noted for her beauty in both Custer’s own memoir, My Life on the Plains, as well as in Libbie’s books (though any intimate relationship with Custer is not, of course).  But more than allotting Monasetah a mere footnote in white American history, she is developed as a bold and capable woman, offering insight into the day to day life of the Southern Cheyenne before their roaming ways were taken from them.

Lastly, Custer’s Trials by T.J. Stiles, is the perfect bridge to the books above. The Pulitzer prize winning author’s sweeping biography not only reveals Custer to be heroic, contradictory and deeply flawed, but also illuminates how fraught and at odds the United States of America were during the bloody years between the Civil War and the Indian Wars. Covering our government’s many failures during Reconstruction and our shifting policies and ‘treaties’ with Native Americans, lit through with gorgeous writing and anecdotes that breathe, I felt like I relearned a vital but often overlooked period of my country’s history.

…

Siobhan Fallon is the author of You Know When the Men Are Gone and The Confusion of Languages. For more on her current Custer craziness, please follow her on Facebook and Instagram, or check out her website at www.siobhanfallon.com

(This blog originally ran in a slightly different version on the MilSpoFineArtsNetwork blog on Friday, February 22)

1.     We hear that you went to the JAIPUR LITERARY FESTIVAL in India. Was this a work trip? How did you get involved? What was it like? Give us all the details.

Oh, this was pure fun! I have a friend here in the UAE who had been to the Jaipur Lit Fest in the past and kept asking me to go with her. This being my last year in Abu Dhabi and therefore the last time I would be just a quick jaunt from India, I finally said yes. And it was tremendous. I usually attend these sorts of events as part of my job—meaning I am there to be a part of a panel, to do a book reading, or in some way promote my own writing. So it was lovely to attend as a book lover, to be in the audience instead of on stage, to soak it all up without feeling the pressure to perform or be charming. I was amazed by the thousands of attendees– standing room only! Readings were held in a palace! It was incredible to see how revered writing is in India.

I had never been to India before, so that was an entire adventure of its own—seeing tourist sites, eating great food, exploring the textiles and art, soaking up the kindness and generosity of the people.

Christine chatting with a feisty Germane Gree

My traveling companion, Christine, has the heart of a backpacker, so we did everything on a budget. As in we shared a fifteen-dollar-a-night hotel room, slept in the same full-sized bed together, used bottled water to wash our faces and brush our teeth. This made me feel like a college kid with a Euro-rail pass.

*Our great driver & tour guide, Moin (rajasthanexpert.com)

It also made me grateful for all that I have. The young man who worked at our hotel had a small futon mattress he’d roll out each night and sleep on, right there in the freezing, tiny lobby. While America certainly has its issues, a couple of days spent in India reminded me of how much I take for granted every single day.

2.     We hear that you are moving back to the states this summer. How are you preparing for this transition?

Ah, yes, the great big, bad, move. We’ve been in Abu Dhabi for almost six years. Which is the longest we have every been anywhere as a family. Which is crazy. I have two daughters, ages eleven and six. Almost all of their memories involve life in Abu Dhabi. Their tender little American roots are actually Abu Dhabi roots—friends, school, their very idea of ‘home’ is this Arabian Gulf country. Of course, we have family in the states, cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents that my girls adore, but our day to day life is here. My youngest will randomly burst into tears and beg us to stay. So that’s stressing us all out a little.

My daughters at the Louvre, Abu Dhabi. I know they will fearlessly jump into life at our next post. It’s the momma who is having difficulty with the latest leap…

We recently learned we are headed to Tampa, Florida, which is a completely new place for us. And while I’m excited to be back in the USA myself, I’m not looking forward to starting life from scratch. The housing, schools and dentists, the grocery stores and dance studios, the meeting and making of new friends. Finding an art, or, even better, a writing community of some kind. You all know what I’m taking about. Even after all of our military moves, I have a very fixed idea of ‘home:’ for me, it’s Highland Falls, a small town in Upstate New York where I was raised and where most of my immediate family still resides. I have always wanted to get back to that home, or at least get close.

It will be comforting to be in the same time zone as my parents and siblings, but I wish I still didn’t have to board a plane to see them. I know, I know, this is our military life. Frankly, after fifteen years of it, I’m tired. But I have a few more months to start excited. “Selling” a new life to the girls will make me see the opportunities too. And the more I learn about Tampa, the more people who tell me about their own fabulous Tampa experiences, the more excited I get.

3.     Do you have a plan for continuing to write while in transition? What is it?

Ouch. I haven’t thought that far ahead. I’m always trying to find more time to write, even under the best circumstances. And my very busy husband kindly tries to give me few hours each weekend to steal away and get work done. But I’m already seeing my writing schedule deteriorate as I try to figure out the move (actually, as my husband and I try to untangle the paperwork hell of getting our three cats out of the UAE. We’re talking four veterinarian appointments just this week alone).

Abu Dhabi

Writing, fortunately, is something I have been able to take with me and do almost anywhere. So I imagine I’ll be continue jotting down notes from airplanes and gas stations, and during the never-ending vet appointments. During the move, I might not be able to do my best work; I know I’ll be distracted and time will be fragmented, but it is still work. The words will accumulate, and that’s what a writer must do, write. When I am settled and have hours and hours ahead of me, I’ll fine-tune and rewrite and transform those words into something more than ink.

Research on the walls of my office…

I entered 2019 with the optimistic new year’s resolution of “writing every day.”  I’m in the early stage of a new novel, still doing a great deal of research, so even if the day is completely overwhelmed by kid activities or the usual mayhem life loves to throw at us all, if I delve into research, if I rework just a couple of pages of my work-in-progress, that counts as writing, and keeps me connected to the work. Even if it just means carrying one of my research books around with me (like when I attended the mass held by Pope Francis recently in Abu Dhabi. We had to get to the stadium hours in advance and, of course, I had one of my Libbie Custer memoirs in my bag. So when I waited an hour to use the restroom? I was reading. I was working! HA! Win/win, thank you Pope Francis!)

I never go anywhere– kid dance class, to see the Pope, horseback riding– without one these books in my bag.

This habit has helped keep the work alive for me day in and day out, from that particular moment in 1800’s history so different than my own, to the sound of my character’s voices. I recommend all of you out there who are writing to do the same, as best as you can, dip into the work in some way every single day, small or large, and you will see the difference.

4.     What’s next for you?

I’m throwing myself completely into this new novel. My first book, the collection of short stories, You Know When the Men Are Gone, is set in Fort Hood Texas during the deployment of an infantry brigade, circa 2006. I started writing it while living at Fort Hood, in between my husband’s deployments, and I tried to capture the different sort of experiences military families, both deployed soldiers and milspouses at home, were having. My novel, The Confusion of Languages, is set in the U.S embassy community in Amman, Jordan, during the Arab Spring, circa 2011. I started writing Confusion when we lived in Jordan, and finished it while we were living in Abu Dhabi. So again I was inspired by the present day world around me.

But my new novel is something very different. At least for me. It’s historical fiction, set in 1879, and it examines the fall out of the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Most of us vaguely remember that General Custer and two hundred of his men met their deaths at the hands of the largest gathering of American Plains Indians ever seen. But what surprised me was the military world of the Seventh Cavalry, stationed at Fort Lincoln, in Indian Territory. The officers had been together for years, yet there were these strange and bitter factions among them. And then there are the wives, from learned and pampered families back east, suddenly thrust into drafty, ill-made housing (hmm, that’s not necessary so different from today ;), who wait for weeks for a newspaper from “the states,” who put lead shot in the hems of their skirts to keep them from flying into their faces on windy days, who don’t see fresh produce for months at a time, who face drought, grasshopper plagues, prairie fires, Native American attacks.

My office desk– Marie Kondo, stay away!

For me, most fascinating of all is Libbie Custer, George Armstrong’s widow. She was this feisty little thing who was determined to justify her husband’s military career and get to the bottom of what really happened at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. She wrote articles and memoirs, collaborated on an autobiography of her husband, even helped instigate a military tribunal with the hopes it would decide that officers under Custer had disobeyed his orders, and it was their cowardice that led to the massacre. She is one heck of a military spouse. She was also a huge supporter of the arts—she had wanted to be an artist/fashioner designer until she met her ‘boy general’ during the Civil War, she wrote both fiction and non-fiction, and spent chunks of each year living in an artist colony in Upstate NY.

In death, as in life, Libbie wanted to be seen only in the shadow of her husband. But I know there is a lot more to her. General & Mrs. Custer’s graves at West Point Cemetery, NY

I had never heard of Libbie, her tenacity and dedication (she remained unmarried until her own death fifty-seven years after Custer’s). I never would have even imagined the likes of this military tribunal, or the intrigue and back-biting of the officers in the Seventh Calvary. This paired with the injustices the United States government was meting out to the Native American populations, and the entire chapter in our nation’s history just blows me away. Not to mention it is pretty amazing material for a novel!

So while I say that this is different material for me to work with, it does match up with themes I tend to write about. I like to explore life in small, insular military communities (like Fort Hood for my first book, embassy life abroad in my second, and life on a military outpost in the 1800s for my latest). The sometimes fraught dynamic between husbands and wives, friends and enemies. So there are familiar reverberations.

5.     Is there anything else that you would like to share with the readers?

Yes! Thank you for reading this! Thank you for every ‘like’ or ‘click’ or ‘share’ on behalf of myself and every other military spouse artist. It’s hard for us to have community since we move so often, and therefore all of this virtual support is so very, very important for us.

You guys are the best!

(* And if you are planning a trip to Jaipur, please contact Moin at rajasthanexpert.com, he is the loveliest, most trust-worthy guide and driver you could possibly find.)

Website at: www.siobhanfallon.com

Facebook at: www.facebook.com/SiobhanFallonAuthor

Twitter at : www.twitter.com/SiobhanMFallon

Insta at: www.instagram.com/siobhanfallonwriter/

The original blog can be found here:

Catching Up with Siobhan Fallon

It’s time for the PAPERBACK release, my friends!

Updated cover, new author conversation, discussion guide, and excerpt from You Know When the Men Are Gone in the back materials. Hurray!

Events are currently being updated on my website, please check them out (Bethany Books on June 22 and One More Page in Virginia on June 25!)

I have an article about a day in my Jordan life that just ran in Stars and Stripes: 3 blondes in an ancient car in an ancient land. What could go wrong?

I also have a ‘My First Time’ short essay about writing, traveling, and attempting tasks that start hard but are worth every stressed and sweaty minute, on David Abram’s esteemed Quivering Pen blog.

If you’ve missed it, I made my own book trailer (yes, I know, not exactly my lane; you can stop laughing now). Here it is on YouTube.

A friend of mine from The New School writing program wrote an outstanding review of Confusion, here’s Jude Joseph Lovell’s book blog review: https://www.judejosephlovell.com/books

And I’ll be on Army Wives Radio doing an interview LIVE on Monday, August 13, 8:30 PM Eastern time.

Sorry to throw all of this information at you at once, can you tell I am chugging directly from a liter bottle of Diet Coke as I type???

Well, folks, I’m heading stateside in a couple of weeks. Hope to see some of you there!

Thank you, thank you, thank you for loving books.

Happy reading,

Siobhan

P.S. For those of you savvy enough to be on that hip young thing called “Instagram” or maybe the young ones call it “insta,”  I have recently tried my old hand at it. You can find me at @siobhanfallonwriter There’s a give-away going on at the moment so please pop on over before it finishes up on June 7, 2018.

P.S.S. The cat and the kids really, REALLY wants you to spread the word about The Confusion of Languages…

(A version of this guest blog post first appeared on Military Spouse Fine Arts Network, MilSpoFan, on February 13)

The oldest coffee shop in Manama, Bahrain

I am still in Abu Dhabi, which has been a pretty terrific place to live for the last four and a half years. This past fall I cobbled together what I like to self-indulgently refer to as “The Confusion of Languages Middle East Book Tour,” making stops at book clubs, embassies, literary salons, high schools and universities, you name it, here in Abu Dhabi as well as Dubai, Oman, and Bahrain.

The brightly beautiful American Women’s Association Book Club, Manama, Bahrain. There were a few mil spouses in attendance too!

American Culture and Education Center, Manama, Bahrain.

One thing I have been trying to figure out lately is social media. I feel like I am constantly evaluating whether I am doing the expected book advertising or indulging in disgusting self-promotion; where is the line between necessity and vanity? Twitter, Facebook, and this new frontier (for me) of Instagram. Does a tweet really sell books? And, of course, there is the more prosaic daily tug of war of being the mother to two wild little dancing girls and, like many working moms, trying to figure out how I can support and foster their creativity while supporting and fostering my own.

If any of you have figured out either of the age-old dilemmas above, please do share your wisdom.

An interview with Bahrain author Noor Al Noaimi, who is a military ‘brat.’ Cross-culture military family members unite!

In terms of current writing, I have a few different projects I’m working on. I want to write about Abu Dhabi and have an idea for a story collection but, at the moment, it’s mostly just a jumble of ideas, notes in my journals, character sketches, snippets from real life I’d like to flesh out into fiction, but not much substance with plot or timeline yet. I’ve been finding it easier to throw myself into reading up on women who have been remembered as footnotes in the history of great men.

Right now I’m researching Libby Custer, wife of the doomed General (both pictured at the very bottom of this blog because I can’t figure out how to correctly add an image into the body of the text, which goes back to my cluelessness on all things social media, sheesh). Libby followed her husband wherever the Army sent him, even during the Civil War, and continued to travel after her husband’s death, writing books about him and giving speeches all over the country in an attempt to make sure he was remembered as a hero. That sort of determination and resourcefulness is pretty inspiring. I have to do lots of “research” still. Which really means I am having a delightful time procrastinating and being a promiscuous reader, which is lovely after having been under the whip of a deadline for my novel for so very long.

You can find more concrete examples of my work in the new anthology The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers, by Norton, edited by the great poet Brian Turner. I’ve read some of the selections and they are amazing, so if you are curious please pick up a copy at your local book store.

And the paperback of The Confusion of Languages, with a new cover, will be out on June 5, 2018! I’m hoping to hit a few bookstores on the east coast when I am home in the states this summer. Please ask your local bookstore to order copies and maybe have me stop by for a reading!

I’ll end with this lovely quote from Van Gogh: “One must work and dare if one really wants to live.” I just attended a Van Gogh exhibit here in Abu Dhabi (#VanGoghAliveUAE ) and I was struck, as I always am, by the amount of work he managed in his brief and tortured lifetime. HE ONLY SOLD ONE PAINTING! But he forced himself to continue, living, breathing, creating. And ever single one of us knows who he is, this depressed, poverty stricken, suicidal, self-trained artist. So don’t ever give up on all of those projects you are pouring your passion into, dear reader. They will be worth it.

Here are all my social media “handles” if you all have any epiphanies for me…

www.facebook.com/SiobhanFallonAuthor

twitter.com/SiobhanMFallon

www.instagram.com/siobhanfallonwriter/

THANK YOU!!!

Libby and her husband.

THE KISS! Edited by Brian Turner, W.W. Norton & Company, is debuting TODAY, February 13, 2018!

Featuring work by Benjamin Busch, Roxana Robinson, Patricia Smith, Andre Dubus III, Mark Doty, Honor Moore, Brian Castner, and so many more.

From Sioux Falls to Khartoum, from Kyoto to Reykjavik; from the panchayat forests of India to the Giant’s Causeway on the coast of Northern Ireland; in taxis and at bus stops, in kitchens and sleigh beds, haystacks and airports around the globe—people are kissing one another. The sublime kiss. The ambiguous kiss. The devastating kiss. The kiss we can’t take back. The kiss we can never give. The kiss that changes a life. In this anthology, writers and thinkers share their thoughts on a specific kiss—the unexpected and unforgettable—in an attempt to bridge the gulf, to connect us to one another on a deeply human level, and to explore the messy and complicated intimacies that exist in our actual lives, as well as in the complicated landscape of the imagination.

This is a book meant to be read from cover to cover, just as much as it’s meant to be dipped into—with each kiss pulling us closer to the moments in our lives that matter most.

“A kiss, you see, can carry not just a heart in it, but a soul.” —from Pico Iyer, “The Kiss at Dawn”

“There are countries in that kiss, years of experience, ghosts of past lovers and the tricks they taught you.” —from Siobhan Fallon, “The Ride”

Not only is The Kiss full of great fiction and essays, but all the writers in the book donated all proceeds with 50% going to The Ocean Cleanup and 50% to editorial internships at Guernica Magazine.
Give your Valentine a dose of literary love that also does some good!

Find The Kiss at all your local indie bookstores, and everywhere else.

Amazon link here

Happy kissing!

I’m very excited to reveal the new cover for PAPERBACK…

drum roll please….

Paperback release is JUNE 5, 2018!

The paperback is available for pre-order through all your trusty booksellers, from Amazon to B&N to your favorite indie book shop. Speaking of those book shops, it’d be wonderful if you could contact your local store and ask them to stock the paperback of The Confusion of Languages. And if that store of yours seems like the cozy type that hosts authors and fun reader events, please suggest that they get in touch with Putnam and see if I can do a reading there this summer. Paperback releases are usually much more low-key than hardcover releases, but, hey, it’s worth a try, and I love an excuse talk books…

For future events, or if you are just curious about where I have been lately, please take a look here.

Thank you!

In early 2011, my family and I lived near the US embassy compound in Amman, Jordan—so near, in fact, that our apartment was inside the outer guard ring. I was very happy about this situation. Two weeks after my three-year-old daughter and I arrived, my husband was sent to Italy indefinitely to help with a NATO mission. Meanwhile, the Arab Spring was taking root and there were protests outside of the Syrian embassy, protests outside of the American embassy, protests in the rural areas outside of Amman over the high costs of cooking oil and bread, and protestors in Amman demanding political reforms. Then Osama Bin Laden was killed by US Special Forces in Pakistan, which was seen by many as another US invasion of a country’s sovereign territory. Prime-time news was filled with burning American flags.

So you can imagine how much I loved seeing the US embassy guards standing at the gates.

Everyone stationed at the embassy had to attend a Regional Security Brief within a few days of arrival. We were told to change up our driving routines in order to make it hard for us to be followed, to look under our vehicles for explosive devices, to not drive beyond Amman city limits after sunset, and to always let a fellow American know when we went on a trip.

We had also been warned about our Western ways, with a special emphasis on how American women needed to be sensitive to this culture quite different from our own. It was recommended our clothing cover us from wrist to ankle. That we be aware conservative Muslim men would feel uncomfortable shaking the hands of women not related to them. How it was verboten to sit in the front seat of a taxi, the front seat being reserved for the wife of the taxi driver and our presence there could be misconstrued as a sexual advance. How we should try to not touch the hand of a male cashier at a grocery store when he was handing over change, lest he view this as suggestive.

But the embassy guards, well, we did not need to worry about them; they had been thoroughly vetted, many had worked with Western companies in the past, some had even lived in America. Their English was better than the average Jordanian, and they were accustomed to our strange cultural differences, like American women wearing shorts and tank tops to the embassy gym (otherwise we were advised to never wear shorts and tank tops in Jordan).

There was the guard who showed me video of his son’s gymnastic competitions. The guard who handed candy to my daughter, his pockets crammed with single-wrapped mints. The guard who meowed because he’d seen us feed stray cats. I brought them cookies, bottles of water, chocolate bars. I would have my daughter present the treats, and the guards would direct their thanks at her, press their hands to their hearts, say “Alhamdillah,” or “Praise God,” pinch her cheek or ruffle her blond hair.

The guard who worked the gate closest to my house spoke very little English, and while I spoke very little Arabic we exchanged pleasantries almost every day. He was in his forties, clean-shaven, wore glasses, and would throw open his arms when he saw us. Most Jordanians said “You are welcome!” This guard would shout, “A million, million welcomes!” Then one of us would inevitably say something the other would not understand, we’d pantomime merrily for a few incoherent minutes, and I’d wave good-bye.

About a month after my husband left, my daughter and I came to this particular gate and found him on duty with another guard, a young man with beautiful green eyes whose English was better than most. The older guard reached into his back pocket as I drew close, produced a carefully folded piece of paper, and handed it to me. I hesitated, knowing this was out of the ordinary.

I opened the letter and began to read, the words in capital letters, the writing painstakingly exact:

You are beautiful. Your smile is the sun—

I looked up, startled, feeling a blush warm my neck. The guard was watching me, nodding. I glanced down to read more just as the younger guard tore the paper out of my hand. He began to yell at the older man in rapid, angry Arabic, pointing at the high embassy wall behind us, then stabbing his finger in the direction of my apartment. I froze, trying to keep a smile on my face and ignore whatever was going on.

The young man crumpled the paper in his fist. He stared with those green eyes into mine.

“He does not understand,” he said. There was something combative about his face, his words. I nodded, chastened, as if I did understand. I took my daughter’s hand and walked toward the embassy. Later, I exited the embassy by another gate, sneaking around to my apartment building without having to pass those guards.

He does not understand.

What could those words possibly mean? And how could I ever find out? He didn’t understand I was married? He didn’t understand it was odd for a near-stranger to tell a woman she was beautiful?

Or he didn’t understand that I smiled and chatted with everyone, that it wasn’t a declaration of affection on my part?

***

They relocated those guards.

I’d occasionally see the older guard at one of the farther gates. He always welcomed me but he did not put his arms out in the joyful way he had before; he did not say “A million, million welcomes!”

And he never wrote me a letter again.

How I wish I had held on to it, read it in its entirety, studied the intentions and misspellings. It could have been nothing more than a show of friendship, Jordanians often being more effusive than Westerners. I had strangers tell me I was like a daughter to them. Once, I spent a few hours with a woman and she yelled as I drove away, “I love you! I love you! I love you!”

He does not understand.

So I started writing a short story about Jordan as a way to figure it out.

That story became a three-hundred-page book, The Confusion of Languages, and could have been much longer. All those endless opportunities for miscommunication.

I lived in Jordan for a year. While I never wore a tank top or sat in the front seat of a taxi, I’m still not sure exactly what I understand—not just about the Middle East, but about men and women. About people. About the ways we get one another wrong every day, about the moments that seem small but for some reason linger.

About all the fragile messages we want so desperately to share with another human being, only to find the distance is just too far, and it’s too easy to lose the words before we ever get the chance to read them.

***

For more of Siobhan’s essays, fiction, photos of Jordan, or to order copies of her new novel, The Confusion of Languages, please see her website: www.siobhanfallon.com

My, oh my, I feel my excitement (read: blood pressure) rise: the long awaited book release is almost here!!!

I mean, what can possibly compete with the glorious book tour, with it’s long flights, hotel stays, visits to book stores, chats with readers, ALL WITHOUT CHILDREN?

I’ll take on my public speaking anxiety any day.

Bring it on, stage fright!

Please stop on by if you are near any of the above bookstores/libraries!

If I get my act together, I’ll try to blog a bit along the way, so please check back again soon.

THANK YOU and hope to see some of you on the road!

I love to read. But the older I get the more critical I am of words on the page, and the more willing I am to put a book down unfinished, in a way that my younger self, that (pre-childrearing) self, who thought she had endless time ahead, would never have dared do. Now I find myself impatient with other people’s words unless, well, the writing is amazing. Occasionally I come across a book that clutches me by the core and demands that not only must I read from beginning to end TWICE, but I must tell every other person who loves words to read it too. And the book that most recently possessed me so thoroughly was Valerie Trueblood’s Criminals.

No one writes like Trueblood. Her books (I have read her three story collections, as well as her novel) are not ‘easy’ reads. The tales are intense, complicated, sprawling, multi-layered. There are mentions of Frost and Whitman. There are times when I begin a story and feel as if I’m blinking at disparate puzzle pieces, but slowly, expertly, Trueblood gently guides those pieces together and the image/epiphany that snaps together is worth every ounce of close reading I had to do get there.

My favorite story in Criminals is “Skylab.” In thirty pages, Trueblood manages to do everything I tried to do in my three hundred page novel, The Confusion of Languages. It’s the story of Amy, a newlywed nurse who falls in love with a much older, married doctor. The two flee America together, leaving damaged families behind, and land in Malaysia, where everything, from stray dogs to bumble bees to random cans of hairspray, are not what they seem. Amy, suddenly unmoored from a capable life that gave her meaning, feels an unfathomable, Shakespearean guilt, and their love, which had seemed so vital and epic in the hospital where they had met and hatched their escape, is suddenly no match for the misery the affair has set into motion. And all along a satellite, the doomed Skylab, careens off course just as surely as Amy does, the trajectory marred and flawed, now dangerously flailing, falling, and the best possible outcome is that no one will be killed by its plummet.

Criminals is full of stories about unexpected passions, of people trying to do the right thing and failing again and again, of heart break and insecurity, of flaws and attempts at redemption. In other words, it’s about every person you’ve ever known. When I read Valerie Trueblood, I want to write better, wiser, more resonate fiction. And in some strange way but beautiful way, when I read Valerie Trueblood, I also want to be a better, wiser, more resonate human being.

In typical Siobhan-smitten fashion, I chose Valerie Trueblood’s Criminals for our most recent embassy book club, hosted at my home (I didn’t think to take the photo above until most of the book club had already left, darn it!). The night was fantastic, my husband, KC, who’s a sharp reader, said it was the best book club discussion we’d ever had. It also gave us a great opportunity to email a few questions to Trueblood, who was so lovely to provide these indepth replies:

1. Would you mind giving us a little biographical information? Did you ever live abroad, especially in a Muslim majority country, similar to Amy’s time in Malaysia in Skylab? And the details in Astride are so amazingly specific (the typewriter tape!), did you intern at the Pentagon in the sixties? If so, how did those experiences inform your stories, and if not, how did you research and develop such settings and details?

My father grew up in a farm family, but became a geographer with an Asian specialty (Burma) and taught for several years at the University of Rangoon. There he met my mother, a Yorkshire missionary’s daughter who was teaching zoology. She was known thereabouts for her beauty and their story was the first romance I heard and loved. They left Burma when WWII began, and he went to work for Army intelligence in D.C., commuting fifty miles from our rural home in Virginia. I was one of their four children, and had the long happy childhood people say does not produce writers.

I can honestly say I always wanted to write stories. I didn’t even want to; I was more or less at the mercy of the scenes populating my mind, and hijacking it in grade school once I got there. I would sneak off to tell them or act them out aloud when I thought I was alone—a family joke, as it wasn’t easy to be alone in a family that size. We had no TV (my English mother thought it was an American notion and would go away), but stories were everywhere in that part of the South, in all the talk in stores, in the sermons, coming over the P.A. system in high school, in visits from the doctor and the milkman, the vet and the occasional drifter coming down the B&O railroad tracks needing food. Everybody had stories. And there was the glorious radio with its serials and soaps—X minus 1, Helen Trent, Sergeant Preston, The Shadow.

Do I write anything resembling these things? No. But I do hear the voices of Virginia always, and I remember the stories, the gentle ones told to instruct us but more particularly those of disaster—barns afire, ordeals of weather & crops, rogue animals who jumped gates or trampled their owners, murders, revenges taken, children sledding into cars. I’m sure they deepened my interest in how people cope with what happens rather than how they cause what happens.

I attended the county high school with a superb Latin teacher, Mrs. Lillian Bridges, who made me love the Aeneid and go off to college planning to major in Classics. At Brown I fell under the spell of the avant-garde novelist John Hawkes. Writing classes were a rarity then, and his was an ordeal by fire for the provincial I was. Why he encouraged me I don’t know. Then John Berryman had a year there as visiting professor, and his blazing mind was a guide for my own stumbles into language.

I did intern in the Pentagon; I did live with my husband in Malaysia when he taught at the Universiti Malaya. My circumstances weren’t those of the characters in my stories, and never have been, although no one can write fiction scrubbed of what’s been seen, known, experienced and felt in her/his own life.

2. There is a feeling of Hemingway in your stories – the prose and especially the dialogue is very lean and makes the reader work. Do you have a deliberate process that you use to cut and trim your stories or do you write the stories as they generally appear on the page?

I’m chuckling at the mention of Hemingway, though the Nick Adams stories meant a lot to me, and the novels were what we read in American lit classes back then along with Fitzgerald and the newcomer Flannery O’Connor. The leanness in my stories is probably due to cutting rather than to luck with a draft or not having drafts at all. I have them and they go on changing for years. That can be good or bad!

I do love dialogue, what people really say, and I hurry to get it written down when I hear it. The country voice in particular is music to me, from any region of the U.S., and it will well up in my own speech I’m told. Like many writers I’m an awful eavesdropper. I love the things people say in cafes and gas stations and at my son’s gigs in dive bars, but also what they say—we say—when we are at the extremes of emotion in our yards and kitchens and bedrooms, or when we’re hopeless and trying to find a truthful answer or an extenuating lie.

3. Most of these stories seem to be from the point of view of women. Not to say that they paint men in a bad light, since it’s the women who often stir up the trouble, but we have less insight into the male mind. Did you deliberately try to write stories from the female point of view?
You’re right that I more often write in the voice of or from the perspective of a female character, but I do have quite a number of stories (not all yet published) from the point of view of a male, and I find that no matter what the difficulties are, my female characters are usually very sympathetic to the male. I think the human predicament is just that, and even as a feminist I would not want to weigh the sufferings of one sex against those of the other. In CRIMINALS, the stories “His Rank,” “You Would Be Good” and “The War Poem” take place in the sore hearts of men.

In every other story in that book (I think, I hope) the problems of the males, including the young boy as well as the bodyguard in “Sleepover,” are close to the center of the story and bring out a fierce, if frustrated, tenderness in the female protagonist. In “Astride,” the Ukrainian Orlenko isn’t just a foil for the maturing process of two American girls, but the source and victim of the story’s action. In “Skylab” the young woman endures and externalizes all the pain of her husband’s acts and choices as well as her own. But that’s just how I see it; I’m sure there are other interpretations, and I’d love to hear them. It will be enlightening and helpful to me to hear how readers react to this question and to these characters!

Cork International Short Story Festival, 2011. Patrick Cotter, poet & festival organizer, Valerie Trueblood, and me, clearly thrilled to meet one of America's finest short story writers

(For more on Cork International Short Story festival, see my blog from September 2011: http://siobhanfallon.com/blog/?m=201109)

This interview first posted on the Military Fine Artists Network, or MilspoFAN, on January 31, 2017. Thanks for letting me repost here!

MilspoFAN: Tell us a little about yourself, your journey as a military spouse, and where you are today.
Siobhan: The journey has been a fairly scenic one. I met my husband in 2000, while I was bartending at my father’s Irish pub right outside the front gate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. My husband, KC, had just graduated and was staying on for a few months coaching soccer at the USMA prep school before heading to Fort Benning. I was working my way through getting an MFA in Creative Writing at the New School in NYC, and my future husband, hearing this, told me he loved to write. I’d met plenty of West Point cadets and soldiers and officers over the years, but this one won me over with talk of literature.

KC went to Fort Benning, Georgia, and then Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, and we were married on the beach in Oahu just before he deployed for a year to Afghanistan in 2004. I’m going to list the other posts we went to after getting married, it’s too exhausting to give a description of each and I have a feeling your readers know the deal: Fort Benning, GA (again); Fort Hood, TX (my husband did two year long deployments to Iraq during our three year assignment at Hood); Monterey, CA; Amman, Jordan; Falls Church, VA; and now we are in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

MilspoFAN: How has your role as a military spouse impacted your work as a writer- creatively, logistically, or otherwise?
Siobhan: Well, creatively each post has been inspiring, and all of them are so vividly different from each other that I usually can’t help but write about them. I like to think that the settings of my work are as important as the characters themselves. All equally determine the story. Perhaps I take the adage “write what you know” a little too seriously? I enjoy examining the different ways people live, whether it be how people are on a military base vs. outside it, or how Western women living in the Middle East blend (or don’t) into a different culture. You Know When the Men Are Gone is set in Fort Hood, Texas, during a deployment of a brigade and I worked very hard to get the real Fort Hood, from the vast, scrubby firing ranges to the clever street names like Tank Destroyer or Hell-On-Wheels, into the stories. I’ve also written about Hawaii: one of the characters in You Know When the Men Are Gone met her husband when he was stationed at Schofield, and my story in the anthology Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War, is also set in Oahu. The new novel, The Confusion of Languages, takes place in Amman, Jordan, where my family and I lived in 2011. Of course we were stationed at all of the above, so I feel like the writing that came out of these places were gifts from the United States Army. It’s also helpful that a writing career is portable; I can take it with me no matter what corner of the world the military throws us into.

On the downside I inevitably miss opportunities in America. It’s difficult to do a reading or book signing at an indie book store in Chicago when you live in Jordan or Abu Dhabi. And while planning the release of my new novel this summer, I know I have a very small window of time when I will be on U.S. soil during the school break of my small daughters. Combine that with the responsibilities of seeing family and friends, who I usually only get to see once a year, and my blood pressure starts to rise with thoughts of all the ground I have to cover in a such a short amount of time. I really have to be focused about what I can accomplish in advance, and get the word out as much as possible before I even get on a plane. Naturally, I also participate in fewer panels and conferences than I would like because of the tremendous distance. But every once in a while some generous writing program will send me a plane ticket, and of course there is social media, email, and Skype for staying in touch with readers or book clubs.

My husband is very supportive and there are times we can work in an extra trip stateside for me, as long as we can balance childcare and travel expenses with his long work hours. So yes, the distance and unpredictable nature of military life does make it more difficult. You do what you can. We military spouses know how to roll with the punches, and my family and I have been pretty darn blessed with some excellent locations. So like everything in life, it’s a trade off.

MilspoFAN: Of your 2011 work, You Know When the Men are Gone, the New York times wrote “This lean, hard-hitting short-story collection outshone some of the year’s most imposing doorstop-size novels.” How does your writing style and writing process for your first work of short stories compare to your upcoming full-length work, Confusion of Languages?

Siobhan: A novel is a pain in the ass. Honestly, I didn’t think I had any idea how hard it would be. I thought going from stories to novels was a natural progression, something that I’d be able to do without much effort, especially after I practiced so much by writing all those lousy novel drafts that are still lurking on my old hard drives. Right? And everyone was always telling me that my stories read like small novels, and that they wanted more. So I thought I’d just write, you know, more, as in a really, really long short story. HA!

You can read a short story in one sitting. Of course there are things that happen off the page, but the author can keep track of every detail in thirty pages, sometimes to the point where I remember whole snatches almost word for word. You can sit down and sip your coffee and read and say aha! I need to change this and this and then go get another cup of coffee and come back and make those changes. Thirty pages is a small town with a no name grocery store. But three hundred pages! I could never get my mind around the three hundred pages. Three hundred pages is New York City on New Year’s Eve. You can’t possibly keep track of what made it into the novel or not in one sitting, especially after all the editing and rewriting and gnashing of teeth. There are notebooks and index cards and piles of drafts taller than your four year old daughter of everything you deleted and reinserted and deleted again, how can you possibly remember everything?

But you do it. It takes time. Painstaking editing and screaming at your children not to come in and disturb Mommy again for another damn cup of apple juice! You feel like the worst writer (and mom) in the world and the biggest failure and no one will read you and those who do won’t ever be able to look you in the eye again because now they know you have absolutely no talent—and then you write the most beautiful paragraph you have ever written, or figure out why one of your characters behaves in a certain way, or how this one very important plot line can tie seamlessly into another. And that epiphany keeps you going. And when all those terrible thoughts seize your brain again, amazingly enough another epiphany will smile at you.

You need to remember that the things you want to say are there on the page, black and white and real, and it’s worth all the self doubt and agony and hangdog looks of your poor neglected children. Tomorrow you will take the kids to the park, you promise! Writing should be hard. Readers are going to dedicate hours and hours, days maybe, of their precious lives, reading what you have penned, letting your words fill their heads and linger in their thoughts. Those words better be your best.

MilspoFAN: What’s next for you?
Siobhan: The new novel, Confusion of Languages, will be out June 27, 2017. It started as a short story I wrote in Jordan in May of 2011. That means it’s taken me about six years. Dear God, that’s the first time I’ve done the math. SIX YEARS!! Plus more rewrites than I could even count at this point. I’d started each rewrite from scratch– I’m talking blinking cursor on a blank computer screen, five, six, seven times. I would work from a draft that I printed out (300 $%#@ pages!) next to my computer, but I would retype everything all over again because it felt like the only way to really be in the story, to allow myself to write new material and edit/ catch every nuance of the material I might want to reuse/retype. When I just cut and paste, I feel like I am less critical, I don’t get seized by words in the same way or see the story as something malleable that I can drastically change if need be.

That said, now I’m taking a little bit of a break. It feels good to let new ideas sort of well up in me again, rather than focusing so completely on The Confusion of Languages. I’m writing some non-fiction essays about life in Jordan, thinking about ideas for future projects, letting this incredibly weird and wonderful world of Abu Dhabi inspire me. But it’s nice to not be caught in the thrall of something as overwhelming as working on a novel, if at least for a little while.

MilspoFAN: Is there anything else that you would like to share with MilspoFAN readers?
Siobhan: Reach out to other Military spouses who are in the arts as much as possible. There are more of us than you think. And we are pretty freaking fantastic! Read Andria Williams most excellent blog Military Spouse Book Review (https://militaryspousebookreview.com/),every word that lady writes is brilliant (you should see her Lego creations) but Andria also shares the space with other mil spouse writers who chime in to review books or write blogs of their own on her page. It always feels good to know we’re not the only ones who worry about these insane mil lives of ours. For something a little more ‘highbrow’ but definitely worth being aware of, I recommend Peter Molin’s blog Time Now (https://acolytesofwar.com/), which reviews all military related arts, from photography to film to writing to dance to theater productions. Molin is incredibly supportive of mil spouses as well as female vets, so it’s not just a list of macho men war novels, if you know what I mean (I’m sure those of you who married to infantry men like me know exactly what I mean).

I want to thank you, Jessica, and I also want to thank all of you who are reading. We need to support each other, and this site is doing that beautifully. We are far flung, we don’t have the natural support system of the home town neighborhoods where we grew up, the libraries and churches and cafes and town halls where we could gather and spread the word about our different projects, so we have to improvise and create our forums online, in places like this. So let’s spread the word and support each other here, and show everyone how much mil spouses have to offer, how we’re not at all the way stereotypes paint us to be, how diverse and talented and amazing we can be.

MilspoFan: https://milspofan.wordpress.com/
Time Now https://acolytesofwar.com/
Military Spouse Book Review https://militaryspousebookreview.com/

Learn more about Siobhan’s books at: http://siobhanfallon.com/books.html

Excerpt from You Know When the Men Are Gone, Siobhan Fallon

Three a.m. and breaking into the house on Cheyenne Trail was even easier than Chief Warrant Officer Nick Cash thought it would be. There were no sounds from above, no lights throwing shadows, no floorboards whining, no water running or the snicker of late-night TV laugh tracks. The basement window, his point of entry, was open. The screws were rusted, but Nick had come prepared with his Gerber knife and WD-40; got the screws and the window out in five minutes flat. He stretched onto his stomach in the dew-wet grass and inched his legs through the opening, then pushed his torso backward until his toes grazed the cardboard boxes in the basement below, full of old shoes and college textbooks, which held his weight.
He had planned this mission the way the army would expect him to, the way only a soldier or a hunter or a neurotic could, considering every detail that ordinary people didn’t even think about. He mapped out the route, calculating the minutes it would take for each task, considering the placement of streetlamps, the kind of vegetation in front, and how to avoid walking past houses with dogs. He figured out whether the moon would be new or full and what time the sprinkler system went off. He staged this as carefully as any other surveillance mission he had created and briefed to soldiers before.
Except this time the target was his own home.
. . .
He should have been relieved that he was inside, unseen, that all was going according to plan. But as he screwed the window back into place, he could feel his lungs clench with rage instead of adrenaline.
How many times had he warned his wife to lock the window? It didn’t matter how often he told her about Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, who had gained access to his victims through open basement windows. Trish argued that the open window helped air out the basement. A theory that would have been sound if she actually closed the window every once in a while. Instead she left it open until a rare and thundering storm would remind her, then she’d jump up from the couch, run down the steps, and slam it shut after it had let in more water than a month of searing-weather-open-window-days could possibly dry.
Before he left for Iraq, Nick had wanted to install an alarm system but his wife said no.
“Christ, Trish,” he had replied. “You can leave the windows and all the doors open while I am home to protect you. But what about when I’m gone?”
She glanced up at him from chopping tomatoes, narrowed her eyes in a way he hadn’t seen before, and said flatly, “We’ve already survived two deployments. I think we can take care of ourselves.”
Take care of this, Nick thought now, twisting the screw so violently that the knife slipped and almost split open his palm, the scrape of metal on metal squealing like an assaulted chalkboard. He hesitated, waiting for the neighbor’s dog to start barking or a porch light to go on. Again nothing. Nick could be any lunatic loose in the night, close to his unprotected daughter in her room with the safari animals on her wall, close to his wife in their marital bed.
Trish should have listened to him.
. . .
This particular reconnaissance mission had started with a seemingly harmless e-mail. Six months ago, Nick had been deployed to an outlying suburb of Baghdad, in what his battalion commander jovially referred to as “a shitty little base in a shitty little town in a shitty little country.” One of his buddies back in Killeen had offered to check on Trish every month or so, to make sure she didn’t need anything hammered or lifted
or drilled while Nick was away.
His friend wrote:
Stopped by to see Trish. Mark Rodell was there. Just
thought you should know.
That was it. That hint, that whisper.
Mark Rodell.

#confusionoflanguages