So Is Yours: Steven Moore

My novel, My Grandfather's an Immigrant, and So Is Yours came out Tuesday, September 14! You can buy it here!

To commemorate the book's release, I'm sharing the "So Is Yours" interview series in which I share insights from other authors about their creative work as well as the role of family in their own stories.

Steven Moore earned a BA in English from the University of Iowa in 2010 and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Oregon State University in 2016. His debut book The Longer We Were There: A Memoir of a Part-Time Soldier (University of Georgia Press, 2019) won the 2018 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and tells the story of the author’s seven years of service as an infantryman in the Iowa Army National Guard, from enlisting at seventeen, to training during college, to deploying on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

His nonfiction has appeared in Kenyon Review online; The Georgia Review; Ninth Letter; Entropy; War, Literature, and the Arts; North American Review; Southeast Review; DIAGRAM; and is forthcoming in the anthology Why We Write: Craft Essays on Writing War (Middle West Press). He is a contributing editor at Moss: A Journal of the Pacific Northwest and currently resides in Corvallis, Oregon.

MICHAEL CHIN: You and I first met when we attended the MFA program in creative writing at Oregon State University, which we both graduated from a little over five years ago. Could you tell me a little about how your experience with this program impacted your writing and your creative life to follow? There’s also an ongoing conversation in the literary community about the value of the MFA, and I’m curious as to what you think about it coming out of your own experience?

STEVEN MOORE: The MFA was really important for me. First, because I met peers. The writers at Oregon State are all really smart, thoughtful, engaged, generous people, and it’s amazingly helpful to share writing back and forth and grow together in your work, especially in a small cohort. Having that consistent group of readers was the main thing. It’s such a wonderful responsibility to be connected to people that way, offering the best feedback you can about what their work is aiming to accomplish then listening to their considerations of the thing you’ve made and where it could be stronger. MFAs are super well-positioned to create those relationships.

At a technical level, the MFA basically taught me how to problem-solve. Before, I wrote mostly on intuition. I wrote a little, cut what seemed bad, wrote some more, cut the bad stuff, arranged the writing into whatever order seemed most coherent, and that was the thing I made. Either it worked and I tried publishing it, or it failed and I threw it away. Workshop sort of taught me how to do a diagnostics, how to ask questions and figure out how to fix something. What length should the essay be? What tone best serves the content? What’s the right balance of scene, research, and commentary? Is there a way for the essay to perform its idea to the reader rather than just explain its idea? I didn’t have those tools before.

The larger conversation about MFAs, as far as I can tell, boils down to money. It’s about value in a literal sense. The Oregon State program waived tuition and offered a small stipend for teaching, and I spent some savings to get along in Corvallis, but generally the expense was low-impact. If someone is asking the question about whether it’s worth it, the stakes are about that literal worth. If you can afford to go, and you get accepted, I think it’s a great opportunity. The only other advice I have is to be extremely cautious taking financial advice from writers.

MICHAEL CHIN: Your book, The Longer We Were There, concerns itself with the role of the “part-time soldier.” One of the aspects I most admire about the essays is not only how much I learned about the modern military experience and your experience in Afghanistan, but how accessible the collection was. You don’t romanticize your experience, and it seems to me that you consistently keep one foot in your civilian life, which felt very inviting to someone like me who does not have any military background. I’d be interested to hear about your intentions going into this collection and the process of crafting these essays.

STEVEN MOORE: I really appreciate that. It was definitely on my mind. Basically, what a lot of military stories do is include a basic training sequence, so the writer can indoctrinate the reader. They bring you into the world by letting you watch over their shoulder as they get brought into the world. The problem I had with that structure is that it’s so binary. It creates a before and after. Like once you’re in, you’re all the way in. That wasn’t my experience. I went to basic training, then flew back for my senior of high school, then went to infantry school the next summer, then flew back for college. The thing I wanted to figure out how to talk about was that dual sense of self – how you can’t strip away, in this case at least, a civilian self and replace it with a soldier self.

I tried to approach that problem at the scene level but also structurally, so some essays in the middle of the book move backward in time to Iowa or forward to California. I tried to make the military scenes accountable on the page to the civilians scenes. I needed the reader to never be fully immersed in a soldier character or soldier mentality. So here’s me in college. Here’s me working at a gas station. Here’s me listening to a Cubs game in my parents’ living room.

Maybe another way of putting it is, the army thinks they tear people down and build them back up, but that’s bullshit. I went to basic training as a teenager who knew trigonometry, and I left basic training as a teenager who knew trigonometry and also the principles of close-quarters combat. You can’t throw away the old self, in a National Guard perspective especially, because you still need that self for the rest of your life. It’s additive. You add this new more violent self to the previous one. I was in high school. I still had to go back and keep doing trigonometry. But they never tell you that. Which is the thing about essay writing—you have to come to the understanding on the page, and get there yourself, then figure out how to get someone else there without them having the actual experience.

MICHAEL CHIN: I work primarily in the genre of fiction, but I have to assume a degree of similarity in crafting a collection of short stories and a collection of essays or memoir. Some of the concerns might include trying to impose a degree of cohesion between the individual pieces included, and ultimately having to cut pieces that don’t fit the identity or thematic concerns of the book as well, or that, in revision and retrospect, reveal themselves not to be as strong as the other pieces. Conversely, I can imagine an impulse or even a pressure to write more pieces, even after you think you’re done. In any event, I’m interested to get a sense of your process in moving from individual essays to the book form.

STEVEN MOORE: I was so surprised to discover how much the arrangement, the sequence, changed the project. Originally, the first essay, “Ripping In,” was in the middle. A different essay was first that I ended up cutting because the beginning was the only place it could go and I didn’t need it there anymore. Every time I changed the sequence, it changed what essays were required. The essay’s position in the book reframes what the essay is about, what it means. “Ripping In” means something different at the beginning than what it meant in the middle. One person in workshop had recommended putting “The Trouble with Ceremony” at the beginning, as a kind of introduction to the stakes of storytelling, so you see all the stories through that critical lens. Which was really interesting, but it would’ve changed the scope of the project.

I didn’t have a strong, deliberate sense for theme. A lot of that felt built in—things that happened to me during the time in my life when I was enlisted. It was less about what does or doesn’t fit the book’s identity, and more like every arrangement creates a different identity and a different book, so which one do I want to keep? Which is the most interesting? It’s like writing the same sentence a bunch of ways to figure out which sentence best expresses the idea. There wasn’t one platonic version of the book I aspired to – there were just different versions and it was a matter of figuring out which one to stick with.

MICHAEL CHIN: One of my favorite pieces from The Longer We Were There is the opener, “Ripping In.” I so enjoy the way in which Home Alone 2 factors in in unexpectedly profound ways and the very practical concern of how to get set up for Internet access and ultimately ordering an Ethernet cord from Amazon. I think this essay is not only successful at helping the reader “rip in” to your experience in ways that parallel what you’re remembering about more literally ripping in, but also teaching the reader how to read and what to expect from the rest of the book in terms of demystifying the military and connecting it to elements of civilian life. I wondered if you could tell me a little about the crafting of this specific piece and what you were aiming for.

STEVEN MOORE: I wrote that essay with notecards. I'd started by writing scenes that featured this sense of the uncanny. I didn't have that language for it yet, but I intuited that something important about the deployment was the simultaneous experience of the familiar and unfamiliar. Like watching Home Alone 2 while waiting for a suicide attack. I imagined that the familiar would help people get inside the experience a little, give them some footing, and from there they might be able to understand the tension between familiarity and strangeness, or boredom and violence, so I wrote scenes that tried to introduce people to the tension in those ideas.

But that's not really a plot. I just had scenes. So I put each scene on a notecard. It wasn’t something I’d tried before, but the word count was getting high and I didn’t know how to organize everything. So each notecard had the scene’s word count, the characters involved, the scene location - if it happened at Torkham Gate or on the FOB. Basic things like that. And I started arranging the cards on the floor of my apartment. I alternated them based on place. A scene at Torkham Gate followed by one at the FOB, to toggle between work and rest. The awful routine of it. Then I tried to find other patterns. I wanted the scenes to be recursive, so the reader would start feeling like they’ve been here before, so the strangeness starts to feel ordinary and vice versa.

MICHAEL CHIN: “The Case for Zakir” feels to me as though it crosses a boundary for the book as a piece of art that, for lack of a better way of phrasing it, stands on its own and encapsulates your experience, to reaching across the divide to inform the reader of an issue that demands activism and has a sense of urgency to it. I’d be interested to learn a little more about how you envision this piece, how it fits in the collection, and perhaps why you chose to end there?

STEVEN MOORE: I wanted to end the book away from myself. I wanted my story to lead beyond me. I hope the essays do that individually, but I also hoped for the book to do that in total. The hard thing, though—and it took me awhile to realize this—was that the stress of writing during the MFA program made it difficult to write beyond my own memories, because you have so many deadlines and pressures that I felt I didn’t have time for research. It barely occurred to me to do any. But after the MFA, my schedule changed. I just had a regular job with regular hours, so when I decided to write about Zakir it was feasible to spend time with him on the phone, talk to other sources, do a lot of reading about immigration policy. The weird thing is that I couldn’t have written that essay during the MFA, but I also couldn’t have written it without the skills I gathered during the program.

That essay is also the only essay from the book that I wrote entirely after the 2016 election. A lot of things were falling apart, and it raised this kind of existential question: Why should anyone care about this war? Obviously it’s an extremely serious problem, but the United States has a lot of extremely serious problems, and what if war isn’t one people should be paying attention to right now? Why does it matter for a person who didn’t go there? I didn’t write the essay as a conscious response to those questions, but my framework started to shift. And it became more intuitive to end that way, to show how the war continues to affect Afghan lives and communities. How war affects American veterans is really just a beginning.

MICHAEL CHIN: On a final question about the book, I wanted to ask about “The Trouble With Ceremony,” which in my estimation was one of the most artful reckonings with our culture’s tendency to put military service on a pedestal. This essay didn’t feel at all disrespectful to anyone’s service, but did feel as though it grappled with questions of what ceremonies actually represent or whom they’re for. I’d love to hear a little about how you navigated these potentially dicey waters to emerge with an essay so insightful and balanced in its perspective.

STEVEN MOORE: That’s really kind, and I appreciate that you saw the essay in those terms. One of the advantages of a personal essay, in particular, is that framing your question as a personal question helps ease the blow. I’m not trying to solve everything for everyone. This is my angle on it, from where I’m standing in the room, and your angle is probably different from where you’re standing. The first person perspective helps emphasize that. You can let people into the way you see something without totally foreclosing on the way they see it.

I do think veterans have an extra responsibility to call bullshit on problematic portrayals of war. Non-veteran writers and thinkers sometimes—sometimes sometimes—seem reluctant to criticize representations of personal military experience, because of the absurd way military service is sanctified in the United States. It’s hard to be critical of a story about the worst thing that ever happened to someone, but if something similar happened to you, you’re a little better positioned to have a conversation about it. The pain stops being novel, and you can talk about it a little more critically.

MICHAEL CHIN: Your essay “Where I Was From” won the Bradley & Stucky-French Prize, associated with The Normal School. This one opens on a comparison to war but quickly shifts to a greater focus on your youth, hometown, and the surrounding culture. I wondered if you could share a bit about how you crafted this essay. The early mention of war feels almost like a transition from your earlier essays as you cast forward, and I wonder if that were a conscious choice or how it otherwise came to be.

STEVEN MOORE: It was sort of conscious, yeah. Something that’s stuck with me is a friend who described a lot of military writing as a “pissing match of suffering.” Writers always staking claim to the most hurt, the most trauma, the closest proximity to the most violence. And as I started moving away from writing about military experience directly, that framework stuck with me. Midwesterners are like that too, as in the cliché about when I was a kid we had to walk to school six miles through snow uphill both ways. But I also think there’s a political lens to that thinking now, where people, including me, deploy their hardship for a specific reasons in specific contexts. And the only way I knew how to write about that was obliquely. I can imagine a reader coming away from the essay thinking, Yeah that’s not what I got from it at all. Which is fine. But that’s where I was coming from.

MICHAEL CHIN: My new book is called My Grandfather’s an Immigrant, and So is Yours and as a tie-in to that project, I’m asking other authors about their relationships with family. I’d like to start with grandparents—what kind of relationship you had with yours and how that may have influenced you as a person, or even as a writer? I’d also be interested to hear about ways in which other family (be it biological, adoptive, chosen, etc.) may have impacted your identity and your work.

STEVEN MOORE: Growing up, the grandparents I knew best were on my mom’s side. They lived in the same county but farther out in the country. They both had a really strong commitment to work ethic. It was important to be a worker, to whatever degree you were capable. They owned a service station on the corner of town, so Grandpa sort of gave me my first job when I was little. I’d go out on the drive and scrub people’s windshields, and wipe down cars as they came out of the car wash. I don’t remember at what point I started getting paid. I just remember being there generally, on weekends scrubbing windshields, and at some point when I was sixteen or whatever I started wearing a work shirt with the gas company logo instead of being some kid walking around in a Minnesota Timberwolves t-shirt, and it was like okay I am really an employee and I have a job. The gas station was just very much part of our family identity, which meant that work was also really central.

I’m not sure how directly my grandparents influenced my writing, except to say they were both readers. Grandpa especially enjoyed military history. He read a lot of Stephen E. Ambrose—Band of Brothers and D-Day and Citizen Soldiers, that sort of thing. He’d served in the National Guard, too, and I had this general sense if I wrote a book about this, he’d be especially interested, which gave me this kind of anxiety about audience. Who is my writing going to be for? Who is going to be able to understand it, and who’s it going to leave behind? But those are really hard questions, because they imply so many assumptions, largely about education and class. I have no idea what my Grandpa’s brain was like as he moved through a paragraph. I don’t know what would be too difficult or weird or confusing. Maybe he’s not going to like the part about the epistemology of place, or maybe he’s going to skip one pretentious vocabulary word and he’ll understand the rest of the passage. Basically, I don’t really know how to think about audience at all, even though it’s pretty irresponsible not to. But I do like how humbling it is, to know you’ll have to be in a room with someone eventually and answer for what you wrote. And if you’re full of shit, they’re probably going to tell you. But also, “Am I full of shit right now?” is still a difficult question to ask in the moment of writing. It’s hard to get ahead of what other people think, but sometimes it’s good to wonder about it anyway.