Interview with Phil Klay, author of Redeployment

I had the good fortune to discuss writing with Phil Klay, a brilliant author whose debut collection of short stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Redeployment, is publishing this Thursday via Canongate. He told me about what got him writing and what kept him at it – about the processes behind his work, his time in the marines and the writing communities that he’s relied on along the way.

How did you get started writing?

I was always a big reader – I wrote in high school. I think that’s how you get into it. I studied creative writing at Dartmouth, and then I kept writing while I was in the Marine Corps, I tried to write while I was Iraq, it was sort of difficult but I kept notes of things that happened, and then when I came back I started the first story of the book. Then I went to Hunter College.

Then John Freeman, the editor of Granta, picked out one of my stories and everything came from there. That was what started me off – and I’m very grateful for that opportunity. I was very lucky. I was very very lucky.

But also finding a community of other writers was very important for me – a community that supports each other.

What communities have you used to develop your writing?

I was part of the NYU Veterans writing group, which was amazing for me, and really important, and then the folks I met at Hunter College. That community of writers makes a big difference, whether you’re publishing or not.

Can you tell us about your writing process?

I slowly developed a process over time – you slowly collect tools as you work on writing – and one of the big things for my process is other people who I share work with. So every story in the collection was read by a couple good friends of mine – I’m writing these things and getting feedback from people and then rewriting and getting more feedback. And sometimes I’d write to people with technical knowledge of the subject – when I was writing a story about a chaplain, for instance, I asked a priest to read it.

Was your time studying creative writing at Dartmouth particularly influential?

One of the most important contacts I had at Dartmouth was a poet called Tom Sleigh, who I studied under. He knew I was getting into the military so he had me reading Tolstoy, Issac Babel, David Jones’ ‘In parenthesis’, Hemingway – all sorts of great writing about war. And that helped.

Did you go to Iraq with writing in mind?

No, not at all. I didn’t go thinking I was going to write about the war, I didn’t go with a plan. The stories I was working on while I was in Iraq weren’t about the military. I continued to read – the first nine novels of Anthony Powell, Gravity’s Rainbow, Don Quixote, Amy Hempel’s short stories.

I think what happened was I came back from Iraq with all these questions in my mind that were important for me to explore, and writing is the best way I know to think about a subject. The nonsense you want to tell yourself, the stories you like to believe about yourself or about an experience that are pleasing to you, the easy way out – those don’t breathe on the page.

And so I started writing, and it was a slow process of finding my blind spots, finding all the areas where I didn’t understand. And I relied a lot on my readers and friends to help me out with that.

Does a lot of planning go into your work?

It comes out a different every time. The first story the first sentence is ‘We shot dogs,’ and that was the first sentence I ever wrote. And I knew I had these ideas and images and experiences people had told me about or that I was thinking myself that I knew resonated.

Normally when I’m writing I’ll have these ideas – like artillerymen trying to figure out their individual responsibilities in relation to the combat action they’re a part of, or a military affairs guy and an experience he might have overseas and also an experience he might have coming home. And I’ll sort of have this sense that some of these ideas, they resonate. That they should be together in the same story – even if it’s not always apparent why.

What kind of writing habits do you have?

I always write by hand first. I think it’s a way of motioning towards those things that you feel resonate, that you don’t understand. Then normally when I transfer over to computer I don’t look at the handwritten draft – it’s a mess, it’s terrible. But it’s me figuring out what I’m actually writing about.

I almost like the way it feels physically to write by hand. It feels different to me. I’ll say things out loud to myself. You don’t look back and try to make the sentence perfect or revise. It all helps you get to it at different ways. And then there’s the process of rewriting the stories and putting emphases on things.

How much do you rewrite?

I spent four years writing this book – so it’s a long process. But I think you need the time to process these subjects, right? It’s like anything – the more time and effort you spend thinking about something, the more depth and insight you’ll have into it.

Do you base your work on real people and events?

There are no characters who are real people – but there are a lot of things based on real events. I did a lot of research and tried to be as accurate as possible where I could. Some things were ridiculous – like one of the stories was about a water treatment plant where the pipes were built too big, and there was an incident where marines came upon a group in a torture house where the guys had set up in front of a video camera – and that really happened.

A lot of the process was reading and talking to people and doing as much research as I could, filling my head with as many ideas and facts and just information about the subject matter to be able to talk about it in a coherent way that was based on more than just my opinions.

Do you feel your work provides a new perspective on the wars?

It’s a way for people to enter into military experiences, so it’s invaluable both for veterans and civilians. I think that writing these stories, my hope is people will engage with them, and perhaps be troubled by the same things that troubled me, or moved by the same things or have different takes that I wouldn’t have thought of but are useful and add to the conversation.

Any last words of advice for the aspiring writers out there?

Put your butt in the chair and write. Keep your humility - and be open to any way you can improve.