Rewrite Interview with Brian Turner

By Elaine Riot

Rewrite: When you were commissioned to write poems jumping off from the theme “We Could Be Heroes,” did you know what you would write about?

Not really. At first—I had a recent experience of being in Uganda, in Africa. And I really wanted to write about a gentleman I met there named Mele. That was my first impulse because he seemed kind of heroic. His brother has been missing for four years after an ambush by rebels and he hadn't done the funeral rites that you're supposed to do when your brother dies. But he didn't want to give up on the idea that his brother [was] still alive. He told me much of his story. So that's what I was thinking of writing about, and I ended up writing about it, but it was more of an essay, so that was used for The New York Times.

I kept struggling with “We Could Be Heroes.” I mean, what am I going to do for this? And I don't know, the word “heroic” is a kind of a difficult word. But eventually—at the same time I was thinking about writing about Mele, for example, I was resisting writing about Iraq again. I wanted to write other things.

But then a lot of e-mails started coming in from guys that I'd worked with before that were in Iraq still on their second deployment. So it was sort of like Iraq was percolating up into everyday life and it seemed like these poems were insisting that they be written. So it seemed that maybe I should be aware of Iraq in my own life and it didn't seem like I was. I think that's a problem for a lot of people here, not being able to feel a connection to the fact that we're at war.

Rewrite: You were in Iraq?

Yes. I was in Iraq for one year, 2003–2004. And the sad thing is that now we can say “years,” and we can track it down to what year someone was there, how many years we've been there, and how many years we'll remain.

So I started writing a series of poems, trying to create a sort of bridgework from America to Iraq. Really creating sort of a surreal kind of mood, bringing Iraqi people in the poems into the streets and homes of America, and vice versa.

Rewrite: I think you really accomplished that with the poem you wrote when you were in Lowe's or Home Depot and the things you saw on the shelves reminded you of artillery and equipment of war. And then suddenly there was Iraq, in the hardware store.

Yeah, and that's what I was trying to do. And I think some heroic stuff started there, but Marla Ruzicka, she was the one who really started inspiring people here. Out of anyone connected to the Iraq war from America, she really seems to fit the bill for me. (Note: Marla Ruzicka, a U.S. humanitarian killed by a suicide bomb in Baghdad while advocating for war victims in Iraq, founded Washington D.C.-based CIVIC, the campaign for innocent victims in conflict.)

I wanted to bring her work a little bit to life in the poem. The only thing was I had to try and find a way not to make it romantic. Because she's such a classic hero, you know, and I had to be careful not to romanticize the moment.

So I did some research on her—mainly did a bunch of Internet research trying to find out as much as I could about her life. And I spent time just thinking about her, and I wanted to connect it somehow. How she went from house to house trying to get people's names. And at the same time I was thinking about Ted Koppel, how a lot of people thought it was great when he went on the air and started reading the names of the Americans who had fallen, who had died.

And I thought how much more cool would it be if he would also read off the Iraqi names. And that's what she was doing—I was trying to show a little piece of what she was doing.

Rewrite: I thought it was really cool when you had the audience read the names of the Iraqi dead out loud. It was like a prayer or incantation. It was special.

I'd never done anything like that and I really didn't know—at first it was like, er, this is not working at all. And then people fell into a rhythm, and I didn't actually expect that. This idea, I thought of it a couple days before—I had all these sheets of paper and wasn't sure how it would work. But then [Hugo House's program director] Alix Wilber suggested that I just hand out one sheet of names, and that seemed to work well. It was sort of prayer-like.

Rewrite: Obviously, you have great sympathy for those on the other side of the war, the “enemy” so to speak. Did you develop that over time? You were also in Bosnia?

I was in northern Bosnia from 1999–2000, at the turn of the millennium. Which wasn't really fun. That was more of a tour—from 1999–2000, we were drawing down forces. So America initially sent 60,000 soldiers, around 95-ish, but by the time I got there, there were about 12,000 left. So I was driving around unloading trucks—we were tearing down one base, and consolidating it into a bigger base. We were able to go into villages and walk around, have lunch, talk to the people there. It was nothing like Iraq.

Rewrite: So in Iraq, was it really hard being a soldier and having empathy for the people who lived there? Or did that come later?

It was always there, but sometimes when I was doing a job and on a mission, I kind of had to be a persona—Sergeant Turner. I had to really focus on the job and not think too much about those things.

But, I mean, even if we were doing a raid on a house, and we basically busted into somebody's house at 2 o'clock in the morning. We did this a lot. I remember there were no women or children in this one house, a telltale sign that they might be some people we were trying to catch. And there were nine guys there, and we had them line up facing the wall and we were cataloguing who we had there and having interpreters figure out who they were. Sort of an arresting procedure, you know? But it was very hot. So we were trying to remember to give them enough water, because they must be thirsty, and just to show sort of a kind gesture. Kind of to be a human being to these people at the hardest point of their lives, being arrested in their own home. It's hard. And it's hard not to notice humanity, that these are people.

I do remember sort of an unrecorded moment of history. I'm just going down the tracks and there's an old man sitting by the side of the road. And he's just looking at me, and I had on the full gear—you know, helmet and glasses—looking kind of anonymous. And he was looking at me and just shook his head slowly from side to side. He just looked really disappointed. It was frustrating.

Rewrite: How is your work received by other soldiers? Do you go to vet centers and meet with other soldiers in your capacity as a writer?

I do meet veterans and we talk online through e-mail. I am working with the National Endowment for the Arts to create writing workshops in VA Medical Centers. Right now they're putting together a workbook. In January it looks like I'll be going to a couple VA centers here on the West Coast and then we'll do the same thing on the East Coast. And we'll practice using the workbook and then we'll evaluate it and fix it here and there, fine tuning it. Then I guess they're going to launch it in every VA center in the country. Initially they're going to print 10,000 copies to give to each wounded vet, and that's wounded physically or psychologically.

Rewrite: What's that program called?

It's through the National Endowment for the Arts. I don't know if it's actually got an official name yet. It's in conjunction with the VA—it's sort of the next phase of the National Homecoming Anthology.

Rewrite: So, you haven't had any negative reactions to your work from any fellow soldiers or veterans?

I've had some soldiers deeply question whether I should be talking about what I talk about. For example, one soldier, I think he was deeply troubled by his own stories, and he was afraid that people would take his words and use them for some political end that he didn't have any use for. I believe the work finishes with the reader, and people will do with it what they will.

Rewrite: You can't control that.

Right. I feel a little more freedom looking at it that way. But I think what I really got from him underneath it all, is that the soldier was reflecting an old school of thought, that you should basically suck it up and drive on. Don't complain—you signed up for it. Go back home and do your life. Put it in a box and bury it.

I think that old school of thought stresses people out as individuals—it creates some psychological trouble that I see in my grandfather to this day. It perpetuates problems. It's weird, because on a physical level, if a soldier is injured, it seems everyone understands that he needs to do physical therapy in order to get well. It's like, get fixed up and go back to work—good job. That same kind of thinking isn't true with your head. You don't have the same kind of support for fixing things in your head that you do with your body.

Rewrite: Knowing that you were writing these poems specifically to be read to an audience, before publication—did that add to the experience of writing at all? Did it change the process for you?

And also before I kind of sounded them off to anybody else. I often send my work off to a couple different people that serve as readers. Like Stacy Brown, I usually send stuff to her; she sort of gives me the green light or, you know, says that it needs more work. And I really value her opinions and she helps me shape my work a lot of the time.

So it was a little bumpy in my head. I'm thinking, am I gonna get up there, and people will just kind of be staring at me, blinking a lot? Sort of crickets in the hallway, you know? But it was a very kind audience, so it seemed to work.

Rewrite: Is there anything else about the process you'd like to share?

One thing is that this [literary series] thing at Hugo House, it's the only one I know of in the entire country that's like that. I've had journals commission new work, but never before have I been commissioned to create new work to publicly share for the first time in this kind of forum. I've never experienced anything before that was quite like that thing they've got going at Hugo House. And if the people there in Seattle don't treasure it, they should go down and check it out for themselves. Because whether a piece falls on its face or doesn't, it's a rare opportunity to see something really fresh, that hasn't been practiced over and over again with different audiences and isn't canned. And I think it's a special thing. And anytime you have three different authors, with different backgrounds, working on a similar theme, it's a truly unique experience.

It may have come across as polished, but I've got to tell you, I wrote one of the poems the night before. I tried to force myself to let this be raw, fresh material.