Matthew Eck is a natural novelist and a war novelist by accident. His book is ghostly, lyrical and strange in the style of the young Tim O’Brien, but with a difference: Eck’s . . . wandering soldiers are even further from home, like Beckett characters stranded in coastal Africa. This is the first novel that I’ve read to capture today’s postmodern political warfare, waged in the inexplicable locales for even more inexplicable reasons and with rules of engagement that make no sense. —Walter Kirn

Cara Seitchek: I was amazed to realize that this book is almost entirely “showing” instead of “telling” – one of those “writing rules” that teachers try so hard to engrain in their students. Did you have to work at achieving this or did it just happen?

Matthew Eck: I think like all writers I just write to write so that after awhile the story just starts to happen. Because I definitely don’t sit around and repeat rules about writing as I write. It’d be hard to get anywhere. But, when I edit, I do keep an eye out for certain things that I like to see in writing. Essentially though, there was always enough action and enough description in the novel to keep the immediacy of the situation in the front of my mind.

I like to remind my students that you have to be able to find those moments where the writers you admire the most show and where they tell—and then try and figure out why. Each writer has to learn to see where “rules” work and where they don’t. Then they have to take those skills of recognition and understanding back to their own work to give it the help and inspiration it needs.

It’s funny because I hardly ever bring the “show don’t tell” line out in a workshop these days. But when I do it’s because I want students to focus on showing an event that leads a reader toward the understanding of a character’s choices and the action that arises out of the consequences of their choices. We like to see that actions have consequences. Also, for a reader it’s far more rewarding to witness a character being clever than it is just to hear the narrator say he or she was clever.

But, all that said, there are times when writing calls for compression and economy so that the line, they were sad, might carry far more weight and move us more quickly toward the true heart of the story a few pages away. I think this is especially the case in a short story where you need to move the character through all the seasons of emotions before settling them back on sadness or such. I think like all advice though it is given to young writers to help them learn to discover and write interesting details.

CS: I read one interview where you said you “joined the army to get some stories. I joined the army for life experience.” How much of this book is autobiographical and how much is based on the experiences of people you met while in the service?

ME: Unlike Joshua Stantz, I was never really lost or alone in the middle of a war. But I often felt that way. I think the journey out of a war, the journey out of sadness and the hope for a safe journey home is a metaphor that rings true in all of us. A friend of mine from the Army called me a few days after reading the book and said that he saw a lot of me in Stantz. He said it was the most apparent to him in those moments where Stantz is longing for love. I wanted to be loved desperately at that point in my life. Stantz is a lot like me because he realizes that love might be all we have in this world. My friend said he remembered sitting around for hours talking about love with me while we pulled guard duty or stared at the ocean from our little railroad car that served as shelter.

The section with the shark is pretty much straight out of the war. That’s the closest thing to autobiography in the piece—outside the emotions. At least that’s what I’m saying today. Talk to me next week. Anyway, the shark was in one of the first war stories I ever wrote. I always recognized that moment as a defining metaphor for any war. Over time the shark became one of many metaphors for what I call the “Everywar.” The war that we’re always fighting. Some are fighting the war for real in Afghanistan and Iraq. Others are fighting a metaphorical war back home with depression or the loss of a loved one.

Most of the stories, most of the details, most of what seems true in the book is what I’ve learned to build out of all of the books and all of the stories I’ve ever heard. My writing has always been informed by what I’ve read and what I’m reading. Writing is a dialogue with all the great books on my shelves.

Joshua is also my brother’s name. In short stories I’d always just referred to the narrator as Stantz, then within the first thirty pages of the novel it just happened, another character called him by his first name in a moment of kindness and it just clicked. There was an instant connection of fear and sorrow and pity for everything that this character was about to witness, and for all the trouble that I was going to visit upon him. His choices and his actions weighed so much by the end. And all of the characters’ choices became wrapped up in his voice and his future. All the life and all the death he witnesses in that book. The wreckage. The spiritual wasteland he leaves behind and the spiritual wasteland he sees in front of him. All of that just hopefully moves a reader. In the end the emotions are true. I guess that’s all that really matters.

CS: Did you write while in the service? Keep a diary to record your impressions?

ME: I did keep a journal while I was over there—records of my apprentice days we’ll call it. What I was reading, along with my letters, always felt more important than a journal. We had a packing list of all the items we were supposed to take with us when we deployed to Somalia. I left my raingear out so that I could take more books. I was reading Kerouac, Salinger, Dostoevsky, and others. I left my raingear out because according to all of the briefings, and the evening news, Somalia was a desert. A week after we got there it rained for a month.
I hadn’t looked at that journal in years. Actually, after reading your question I realized it was in a box in the basement, so I ran down to get it before any mice might—not that we have mice. “I’m covered with the goodness of life,” runs the first line. “I take it all for granted.” That’s the Kerouac infused with the Rimbaud I’d been reading. The next line runs, “Ryan wants me to keep a journal so I might just try. My journal is in my letters. I’m sharpening my skills in them. I guess he wants me to keep my stories so I won’t forget. Like I’m some old man. But I am a forgetful sort.”

That’s weird. I haven’t looked at that thing in years. It’s like having a conversation with the ghost of my youth. Thirty-three-year-old Matthew, meet nineteen-year-old Matthew. I still feel young. And we still have a lot in common. I’m still reading Dostoevsky.

Writing The Farther Shore I had to move away from who I was back then, away from my story, to Joshua Stantz’s story, and the Everywar story underneath. My book and the current war are one. I wrote it as much to help all the men and women coming back survive themselves and their war. I did this because writers like Tim O’Brien, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Tobias Wolff, James Crumley, and Isaac Babel helped me survive myself and my war. I feel I owe those soldiers over there now an accounting they can use to come to some hope of understanding. And I feel I owe those writers I admire the most a thank you note.

CS: I was particularly impressed by the immediacy of the story and how “in the moment” I felt as I read it, something that the first person point of view contributes to. Did you try to write this from another point of view or did it always have this personal touch?

ME: It always had the personal touch. I wanted it to be immediate because I wanted the reader to feel as though they had just gone through this hellish experience with Stantz. First person is highly personal. I wanted the reader to suffer the consequences of a soldier’s actions as well. It’s an age old theme, the war will follow you home. It’s also in his name, Stantz, stance, I wanted people to take a stand with him. I hope that the voice makes that note of optimistic defeat in the end resonate just as hard and dark as war itself. He’s looking forward, but what is he really looking forward to?

Everything in this book was so personal to me that it was hard to separate a sense of my voice and my life from the work. I think we see this in writing all the time. The work is full of hope beyond hope.

CS: Your bio mentions that you served in Somalia, so it’s easy to assume that’s where this book is set, and yet, the ambiguous setting really makes the book timeless and relevant to almost any modern conflict. How difficult was it to keep the setting unidentifiable?

ME: It was a challenge in the first chapter because most readers want to the place to be named immediately. I just did my best to bombard the reader with sensory details to the point where they couldn’t help but move into the story. It’s also the use of in medias res. In early drafts people thought I was doing the novel a disservice by not naming the place or the conflict completely. Daniel Slager, the Editor-in-Chief at Milkweed, realized the importance of such a technique immediately. He realized what I was talking about when I said I wanted it to be the story of the Everywar, much in the same way we talk about the Everyman. He realized that I wanted this novel to speak to a veteran of any war. It’s a wonderful thing to watch as more and more people read the book and recognize why place is never mentioned.

I take your question and your summation as a huge compliment. You’re right. I made this choice early on because while my war was far removed from Vietnam and World War II and the Civil War, my writing and my life were inspired and transformed by the writing and the stories I heard about these other wars. There’s a universality in the stories that veterans tell. Conflict is timeless. I would love to see war fade out of the collective memory, but I know it never will. I hope like The Red Badge of Courage my book still rings true a hundred years from now.

CS: How much time had passed from your service until you wrote this book? How long did it take you to write it?

ME: It’s been a little over ten years since I was discharged. It took me a few years to digest the influences of my youth. I’m one of those writers that the university helped immensely. I have a degree in English literature and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. The Army may have been my Harvard and my Yale, to paraphrase Melville, but I still needed the polish offered by an education. After the army I knew I had a story to tell, but I didn’t have a firm grasp of the tools and techniques necessary for telling such a story. And I always wanted to learn as much about fiction as I possibly could. I always knew I wanted to fictionalize my war. So I needed to learn the art that only fiction offers. It took me time to gain a perspective of what my war had meant to me. It took me time to develop a writing voice as well. I had a lot of practice and a lot of work ahead of me the day I was discharged from the army.

I wrote a solid draft of this book one summer in Missoula, Montana. I was delivering pizzas and I’d listen to Seattle baseball games and NPR on the radio as I drove around. Between deliveries I’d furiously scribble notes about my characters and a situation that might befall them. I’d listen to “Fresh Air” and pretend I was answering Terry Gross’ questions. Believe it or not those imaginary question-answer sessions taught me some very important lessons about the novel. After the initial draft it took another year of writing and rewriting before I really hit upon the draft we mailed out. When we sold the novel to Milkweed there was another year of revising and reworking. All-in-all a good time. I loved the editing process. I wanted to learn as much as I possibly could from Daniel Slager. Like all writers I want to get progressively better, so the editing process was highly interesting to me.

CS: Some reviews have compared you to Tim O’Brien, who is known for his war-focused writings. Do you have more war/military stories to tell or does your work cover other topics and settings?

ME: The comparisons to Tim O’Brien are truly humbling. He is a master of the modern war story and I believe that he will go down as one of the greatest war writers ever. I do have a few war stories that I’m still working on. For the most part I do my best to write as diversely as possible. I’m currently working on a novel about a serial killer. And I work on different short stories now and then. I recently finished up a short story that’s a variation on Chekhov’s “Ward No. 6.” I just like to wake up and write. I like to wake up and take what the day gives me.

CS: The other author I thought of as I read your book is Sebastian Junger, whose books can be classified as creative non-fiction. Do you consider your book to be strictly fiction or does it cross that line into creative non-fiction?

ME: Well thank you for that comparison, and you mentioned the O’Brien one earlier—a friend of mine sarcastically pointed out, “Too bad they keep comparing you to all these hacks.” I liked that one. He was actually my original composition teacher right after I got out of the army.

I would love to say my novel is thinly veiled biography. People love that. Again, I think just in asking that you’ve paid me a huge compliment, which is that the novel feels real. It evokes emotions that are known to be true in all of us. It describes a journey, an arch, and a place that we can imagine as tangible. That’s what I always aim for in my writing. That a story reads like a person’s life. I write to find those moments that define a character, and through that, find those moments that define all of us.

Milkweed Editions
Kansas City Sun's Review
Matthew Eck's website

Mathew Eck enlisted in the Army in 1992 served in Somalia and Haiti. He has a B.A. in English Literature from Wichita State University and received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. He currently teaches Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Central Missouri. He edits fiction for Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.