- [Narrator] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(upbeat music) This program brought to you in part by SELCO.

(light music) - Hello and welcome to Reading for Life.

My name is Julie Clinefelter, library Director in Austin, Minnesota.

And I have three very special guests with me today.

Our Reading for Life presenter is Michael Verde.

Michael graduated with honors from the University of Texas's Plan II Honors program, earned a master's degree in literary studies from the University of Iowa, and an MA in theology from the University of Durham, England.

He's taught for 15 years at the university and college prep school levels most recently at Indiana University and is currently completing his PhD with a focus on literature and religion.

Michael founded Reading for Life in 2005.

Steve Harsin is the public library consultant for Southeastern Libraries Cooperating, past director of the Grand Marais Public Library in Grand Marais, Minnesota.

And the past director of the Minnesota Library Association and has been regular contributor with us on Reading for Life.

And last but not least, we're very honored to have the author Tim O'Brien with us here today.

Tim is an American novelist whose writings on the Vietnam War and post-war lives of its veterans have resonated with many.

Among other accolades, "The Things They Carried" was added to the Library of Congress's list of the 65 most influential books in US history.

And to top it off, he was born right here in Austin, Minnesota.

So welcome everyone.

Michael, I'll turn it over to you to get us started.

- Everybody's great to see you.

It's been, before today it's been 18 years since I last saw Tim.

It was at the, around 2004 I was teaching at Lake Forest Academy.

And the city of Chicago was choosing, at that time, once a year, they would choose a work of literature that everyone in the city would read and then get together at the end of the year and celebrate the collective experience by having the author on hand.

And this particular year, "The Things They Carried" was the book that Chicago selected.

And so there was everyone in the Harold Washington Library, Tim O'Brien was there a lot of excitement.

And for the first 45 minutes or so, all of the questions, and sometimes they were really comments disguise a question.

All of the questions concerned the Vietnam War.

And Tim was listening thoughtfully and responded politely to the comments or the questions that were filled.

And then someone in the audience at about the 45, 46 minute mark, someone in the audience mentioned the teacher, an elementary school teacher, and I think it may have been his mother who had a influence on his life because of their love of words, including right down to punctuation.

And as soon as this was mentioned to Tim, you could see something start to almost vibrate.

This starts in the seeming truth of my imagination, but you could tell that something was quickening his interest.

And the next time he spoke, he was speaking from a different place of engagement.

That public persona relaxed a bit.

And we were hearing another voice in Tim O'Brien.

And I made a mental note of that.

And it struck me that the difference between Tim's engagement had to do with what we were talking about.

And when we move from the conversation about the war over to writing and to words, there was again a kind of an excitement that you could see that came across his imagination.

And so what I want to do today is I want to talk about the words, I wanna talk about the writing that makes this book.

As Julie just mentioned, according to the Library of Congress, one of the most, 65 most influential books in US history, of the history of literature, which is an absolutely incredible thing if you think about that.

What in the writing, what in the words explains that.

Now, real quickly, everybody knows this much about writing, that you write some words down and what makes those words meaningful for most writers?

What makes those words meaningful is they point to something off the page, something in the real world that's true?

This is how we read the newspaper.

This is how historians write.

This is how philosophers write.

The words are meaningful if they point to something that's more true than the words.

But writers of fiction, those who work with the art of literature, that's not how words are true for writers.

For writers the words mean in relationship to other words.

The words themselves are where the truth happens.

In other words, a writer is not making these words point to something else.

The writer's trying to make these words come together and start to speak in another language and that language of symbols or images.

And so that's what we're gonna do today.

We're gonna get together and try to channel the way this book is communicating without saying something like a journalist or a historian or a philosopher, but rather showing us something more like perhaps a producer of a film would do.

I wanna begin with Mary Anne Bell.

She appears in the middle of the story.

The other two female figures, one appears in the first chapter, that's Martha.

One appears in the last chapter, that's Linda.

And somewhere in the middle is Mary Anne Bell.

And what's interesting about Mary Anne Bell is that, well, there's quite a few things interesting, but she is described, first of all, a soldier named Mark Fossie, he sent a letter home after Eddie Diamond mentioned this kind of crazy idea that you could bring your girlfriend over to Nam.

And this idea is sort of quick in Mark Fossie's imagination.

And he sent a letter.

Now I'm mention that he sent a letter because there's a lot of letters being sent in this novel.

In fact, the very first sentence in the novel says that Lieutenant Jimmy Cross is carrying letters.

Now we can think of that as meaning that he has envelopes with messages inside on a piece of paper.

That's one way that the word letter means.

But another way the word letter means is A, B, C, D. In other words, there might be that Jimmy Cross is carrying letters and needs to put those letters in a certain configuration in order for something to happen.

I just want us to keep an eye on that possibility because there's a lot of letters being sent here in a novel about learning how to write or to tell a true war story.

Okay, any case.

So Mark Fossie sends a letter away.

Mary Anne Bell shows up and one of the first things we learned is that she is from Cleveland Heights.

Now I'm paying attention 'cause I know these are weird words.

I look up the word Cleveland and it says it's a hilly place.

So that's something up.

And then I see Cleveland Heights.

It could have been, it could have been any number of places in Cleveland, but she comes from Cleveland Heights.

So I've got two images of things that are up, could be nothing, but I'm paying attention that it could be something.

And pretty soon I learned that Mary Anne Bell is not content staying there in the base up in the mountains.

She has a longing to go down into the deep of the jungle.

So I'm seeing now something that is up, going down into the jungle.

I'm listening to these words.

I'm not trying to read into the words.

I'm not trying to analyze them.

I'm not trying to extract a moral.

And this is a very important part of the novel.

If you try to say what a novel means and translate that into prose of some kind, you're speaking a different language the novel doesn't talk like that.

If you try to say, for instance, as the novel does, war is hell.

That may or may not be true.

But it's a generalization.

And no one experiences it as a generalization.

They experience it in absolute particularity.

And I wanna stress though, so what I'm doing now, so I'm not trying to analyze the novel.

I'm trying to listen to the words of the novel so that they can get a word in edgewise.

And I'm using my imagination now and not only my intellect.

So what I see is Mary Anne Bell starts high, she goes to the deep of the jungle and at some point she hits into the river that's called the Song Tra Bong.

I know the title of the chapter is the "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong."

I know that her last name is Bell.

I know that the river's named Song.

So I'm listening to something with sounds.

I know she strips down to her underwear.

I know this is making Mark Fossie feel very uncomfortable because Mary Anne Bell is going to a place that Mark Fossie doesn't really understand.

Mark Fossie is also from back home in the up ordinary world.

And Mary Anne Bell is starting to leave that world because she is curious maybe as much as George behind your right shoulder.

Mary Anne Bell is, and not only is she curious, she wants to get a feel.

This is the novels word, not mine.

She wants to get a feel of the Vietnamese people who live down in the village.

She wants to understand their language.

She is curious about them, not in an abstract way, in a personal way.

She wants to be as close to them as possible.

And when she gets into the river, the Song Tra Bong, she's as close as she can be to that river because she's in the river.

And to that extent, she's intimate with the river.

Okay, all of this to say, and I'll move ahead just a little bit here, but we don't wanna move too fast or we'll miss.

Well miss, Mary Anne Bell begins to merge in some way with Nam.

She begins to become part of the land and she finds it, well, she finds it exciting, she finds it ecstatic in the sense that ecstasy means to get outta oneself.

She's getting out of the Mary Anne Bell that arrive there with a pink sweater and the culottes with a, she was associated with the color white.

She's getting out of that and she's getting into some new colors.

I mean, she's getting into the land, which is not white and pink.

She's getting into brown, she's getting into the water.

And one way I'm tracking these colors is because the novel is a big on colors.

There's color.

This novel is multi chromatic.

And these colors are speaking because, why are they speaking?

Because the novel tells me she arrives there with blue eyes and at some point she comes back and her eyes are green.

Now this can't happen in the real world, but it's happening on this page.

So I'm paying attention to colors because the novel has just tapped me on the imagination and said, man, can you believe she had blue eyes and now she has green eyes?

In any case, what I'm trying to say is that Mary Anne Bell goes through a movement from a, let's say, on a vertical axis.

Or she comes from a high place, goes into the land, into the land itself, and then comes back up a different person.

Not only her eyes are green, she starts to wear a green bandana and she starts hanging out with Greenies.

In other words, if I'm not paying attention to the green, I'm missing the chapter.

- This is what every writer craves what Michael is doing right now and we never get.

We get summary of plot.

We always get relations and we get a, we get a relationship between the novel and the real world.

But the relationship really is with the words in the novel, words like green and blue, words like the word letter.

And that's what a writer wants desperately, but almost never guess.

So my thought is Michael was talking, was I can't wait for him to review my next novel coming out in October.

(all laugh) I wish every reviewer had his sensibilities.

- Your novel is really powerful and it's a metaphor piled on a metaphor, piled on a metaphor.

There's layers in there.

And that it's looking at, it's looking at those individual words that really fuel those metaphors.

And I appreciate that so much.

And I can totally understand how, as a writer, that would be important to you because you chose those words very purposefully.

And that's what Michael is saying.

These words are chosen for reasons and helping us understand what those words mean, help us understand those metaphors.

And those metaphors help us understand the stories, which is a way to explain the experience of being in Vietnam that's very different than a history of Vietnam would be.

So I think that's really, really wonderful that as a writer, you appreciate that.

- I think it's what makes some of these books so lasting and enduring is because you can get into those things and there's so much depth there.

And I think as a reader, if you're not aware of that and how it's happening, it makes it, it just brings the depth to the book that you might not reach otherwise.

- Picking up on what Steve just said and on what Michael had to say, one can imagine color.

If a painter were to do color.

he could have, he has a palette in front of him, and there are all kinds of shades of blue, thousands of shades of blue from midnight blue to the light pastel blue, all kinds of shades of yellow and of white and of black from, you know, pitch black to a sort of black.

But a writer is consigned to 26 letters picking up on Michael's word in the English alphabet, it's all we have.

There aren't shades of the letter A or shades of the letter D. So we've got 26 letters and punctuation marks picking up again on what Michael had to say.

That's all we have to work with.

And one hopes that by putting those letters in the proper order, in an order that will do something to the reader's imagination within the book, not outside the book, but within the book, we're creating a kind of world through 26 letters and a bunch of punctuation marks hoping that these letters and punctuation marks will make images or spirits in the reader's head.

People moving, people thinking, people crying, people joyful and full of, you know, an elation that say being alive in this world of ours.

But it's all done with those 26 letters, which is why what Michael had to say in these first 10 minutes hits a reader's hearts and I hope a writer's, most writer's hearts as well, where it ought to be hit.

Not in the real world, but in the world of a book, of a story or of a novel.

I can't wait to hear more of what Michael has to say.

- Thank you Tim.

Well, you know, often when people hear what Tim just said, that the reality of the experience is taking place in the story itself and not off the page.

Often understandable reaction could be, well, you know what?

That's why I don't read fiction.

That's why I read non-fiction, because I'm interested in things that happen in the real world.

Now, if there was ever two words that were begging the question, it would be real world.

In other words, what constitutes the real world?

This is one of the things that the novel is raising the question.

And so there's a possibility that if these 26 letters come into the right combination over the entire verbal body, and that's how I'll imagine it, a verbal body, if they come together in the right combination, something will happen in which one is elevated, lifted up, let's say not just off the page, but in some imaginative crucial sense above the real world, outside of the real world.

And why does that matter?

Because you have a perspective on the real world.

Otherwise, you're so embedded in it, you don't understand or know where you are.

You don't have a way to orient yourself to say, this is right, this is wrong because you're too much in it.

But if you can step outside of it in an alternative world, and for the first time, see it, you know, as they say, if you travel, you'll see your own country and you'll understand your own country for the first time.

Well, this is why these novels, even though they're not real and happening truth or in some sense, our only way to know what the real world is because they give us advantage.

And there's another point here, and this is, I'm stealing from Shakespeare.

Shakespeare says, the lover, the lunatic, and the poet are of imagination all compact.

And what Shakespeare is saying is, you know, people who are in love and people who are crazy and people who play around with words, they've got something in common and that has to do with their imaginations.

And what that imagination does for those three people and those three conditions is they start to think that two things can become one.

When you're in love, you imagine that two people, I'm stealing this again from the novel because Timmy wants Linda inside him.

And at a certain point, this is what Mary Anne Bell wants with all of Nam, she wants to eat it like dirt.

She wants to eat it like death.

She wants to consume.

Okay, because here the imagination is not convinced that we live in a subject/object world where all things are together but separate.

I'm stealing that from Martha, the lover and the lunatic and the poet.

Imagine that two bodies can come together and become one body.

And that can't happen in the real world.

Or if it does happen, you're at the carnival because it's a monstrosity.

So what I'm trying to say is there may be a sense in which the real world's not real enough for our deepest desires.

If our deepest desires is to become one with the other, and the real world doesn't permit that, then the real world is simply not real enough for our imagination.

And we have no other alternative, but to create a world that is as real as we are.

So what I want to say, stealing this from the novel is that reality doesn't completely become real.

In fact, one doesn't complete the experience until one participates in it imaginatively.

One doesn't even out of Nam until one begins to write about Nam.

And then another, the imagination is the ingredient that makes something real.

And if you abstract the imagination from it, you're not getting to the real world.

So all the nonfiction is not necessarily getting to the real world.

I hate to say that to, I hear this often from men that they just don't read fiction.

it said some kind of female thing, but when I hear that, I think, you know, you've never been to the listening post.

You've never heard something more real than what you're hearing.

- It's interesting that when we talk about that war, in America we rarely talk about the Vietnamese, especially soldiers who were there.

They're so invested in their own experiences, their own pain, their own terror, all the stuff you, all the baggage you carry out out of the war, that you think very little about the 3 million, you know, dead Vietnamese and their moms and dads.

It's a insular way of doing it.

So when Mary Anne Bell goes into that jungle, she's absorbing darkness.

Her eyes do change color, it was totally intentional.

I pictured a jungle as a dark green in my memory and her eyes go from blue to green in the course of swallowing Vietnam.

She's electrified by it.

She's electrified by the deep jungle or in the ghosts in that jungle.

She electrified by the history of a place she knows nothing about, feels ancient and primitive and old.

And the jungle does feel that way.

And when there's a war going on in the midst of the jungle, it feels all the more savage and all the more primitive.

There's a feel to it, which is the picture that the things they carry presents.

Now, if a botanist were to have written the book, you'd get a totally different story.

If you got somebody interested in the biology of the tiger, you get a different story.

From each person you'll get a different story.

So the purpose of my writing this book was to present imagery that, and through language, that captures my individual take on the experience I had, which ultimately was a spiritual take.

It was what that war did to my spirit.

It darkened it.

I grew up in Austin, Minnesota, moved to Worthington, Minnesota, went to school in St. Paul, Minnesota, the college.

And I go to a war where this kind of lily-white America is suddenly darkened by the horrors of a war.

People dying all around me, not just Americans, but lots of Vietnamese too, a lot more Vietnamese.

And you come home and you have a darkened spirit, much as Mary Anne Bell is darkened by her own experience in Vietnam.

- I wanna contrast of Mary Anne Bell.

I've mentioned that there are three female figures, and that in some sense, unless you understand the role that these three female characters play, you're haven't understood the book entirely.

And I'm gonna suggest later why I think that is the case.

But in any case, I wanna contrast Mary Anne Bell with Martha.

Martha is also from up high.

She went to Mount Sebastian College, mount.

Lieutenant Jimmy Cross fantasizes them taking trips into the white mountains.

There's white again.

Tim mentioned lily white.

Martha is always associated with white in the same way that Mary Anne Bell is associated first with blue and then with green.

Martha, interestingly enough, she is, well she is a, she studies poetry and she relates to words as a kind of, well, she's into it as a smart person is into it.

But there's, she's not involved like Mary Anne Bell.

This is the key phrase I think for Martha, is that she was uninvolved.

We see that in her eyes, they're gray, her eyes are gray, they're uninvolved.

She has an academic, an abstract relationship to language.

This is an analogy I'm making that Mary Anne Bell is not studying writing.

She's becoming one with language.

This is very different than having some favorite poets and being able to quote some poetry.

So Martha in some ways is the opposite.

We're looking at symmetries here.

Martha constitutes one kind of way of being in the world.

And it is very different than Mary Anne Bell's way of being in the world.

And I don't wanna get too weird on us, okay?

But I just can't help as a reader.

I can't help but notice those combination of ladies' names Martha and Mary.

Anybody who grew up on the Bible as I did will know that Martha and Mary are charged.

Now, I'm not implying that Tim O'Brien was attempting to interpolate some secret biblical codes.

I don't know what Tim O'Brien intended, but I do know what the images in this book are because I can see 'em.

And that's what I'm tuned into.

And I see that there's a Martha and a Mary.

Now I'm just gonna, for fun, I'm gonna hypothesize that there's something to that.

In other words, I'm gonna test this intimation.

And I'm gonna ask, is there any reason to think there's a parallel between this Martha and the Martha in the New Testament and this Mary and the Mary in the New Testament?

And weirdly enough, there seems to be a lot in common.

One of the things in common is that when Jesus comes to meet these two ladies, Martha chastises Mary, because Mary quits doing the chores, and she sits at Jesus's foot, she experiences his presence.

And when Martha chastises Mary, Jesus in a nice reproof says to Martha, that Mary chosen the one thing needed.

Now, I don't know that there is any intention here, but this Mary Anne Bell has chosen the one thing that is needed.

In other words, she's experiencing the presence of Nam.

I'm talking about now Mary in the New Testament experience of presence of Christ.

And I'm not talking that this is secretly a religious book, but I am suggesting that at some level, the archetypes, the symbols in which Tim O'Brien grew up and everyone who grows up in Western civilization is imbibing.

Whether or not they're conscious of it or not, they're imbibing the mythological framework.

In fact, all works of literature are growing up out of that mythological framework.

So just as you have a word in this book that can serve as a symbol, some of these words also are symbols, but they're working as art types.

When they work together in the book, they're images, you can call 'em motifs.

When they work together in this book with other books and particularly the mythological framework from which they come, then they become archetypes.

Now, it would be reading into this, if however, there weren't other places all over this novel in which you get some interesting art types.

For instance, Mary Anne Bell is first, when she gets down into the river Song Tra Bong, Mark Fossie starts to warn her about ambushes and snipers.

And throughout the rest of this chapter, and of course throughout the novel, there are ambushes.

The word in this novel, and this particular chapter, keeps being repeated about going out on ambush.

And she's out there on ambush.

So again, I'm paying attention to words that don't go away.

And for the longest time I thought, what in the words going on with this ambush?

There's gotta be something going on.

And it had dawned on man ambush.

I heard it as two words.

I heard it as am as a being verb.

And then I heard it as bush.

And I thought, well that's weird because bush is used in this novel to describe when you go out in the bush and ambush, if you start to play around with it, that starts to sound like, well, there was a bush in the Genesis, maybe Exodus, that where Moses goes to this bush and this bush, when he talks to the bush, we said in this novel, that rocks could talk.

Well, in this old book, a bush is talking and this bush is on fire, but it's not, the fire's not consuming the bush.

And when Moses ask this God that has called him to lead people out of Egypt, when Moses says, what's your name?

Because I'm gonna want to tell these people your name.

And now this bush is talking to him and the bush says, I am that I am, there's a ambush.

In other words, God will not tell Moses his name because God's not a noun.

It's a being verb.

You could think of it in that way.

I'm not saying that's a definitive interpretation, but I'm starting to tune in to why that mountain was on fire and it didn't burn up.

And why when Mark Fossie goes with Rat Kiley to the hutch or wherever those Greenies are, why there's fire around the window pane and why when they walk in there's candles and why the red and yellow starts to be used as colors.

Because we're getting into a kind of fire that you could associate with the spiritual world.

And in the spiritual world, the fire does not consume.

The fire feeds.

In the real world fire just eats things up.

But in the spiritual world, the fire consummate their reality.

So now again, I don't know if Tim O'Brien, when he wrote ambush intended that or not.

I have no way of ever knowing that.

But I do know that the word ambush comes up a lot and it starts to resonate with what else is going on in the text, okay?

Related to how could Mary Anne Bell become one with Nam if she's only a physical thing, that's not possible.

But if Mary Anne Bell is partly a verb, in other words, if partly who she is is I am, well then she could be one with life.

So that's why I think I'm, in other words, if you pay attention to these words, they may lead you into the entire mythological structure that your imagination has grown up with.

Now again, I want to stress that this book is not saying it's secretly Christian.

I'm saying in fact, we know for instance, that Kyle had the New Testament and that Kyle was not getting the last word in on this novel either.

In some ways, Kyle, Kyle comes close to going as far as Mary Anne Bell goes.

In some ways I suppose he does because he goes down into the field.

But this, I'm saying that the New Testament is not given a privileged place in that way, in this novel.

I wanna stress that.

But nevertheless, this book has been listening to the books that came before it too.

'Cause not only has Tim O'Brien gone to Nam, Tim O'Brien has been a lifetime reader, and he's been at the listening post of other books and he's, and those books have been getting a word in edgewise in his imagining.

And this is what we can mean by the tradition, how it is carrying on.

There are people who are communicating in tongues.

I say that I stole it from Mary Anne Bell because if you go all the way down and come up, you can speak in tongues.

This is why she's got a neck, I don't know if it's wash, I'm just saying she's got a necklace of tongues and they seem to be ending in one sense, like she's on a vow, a shrill vow.

That's a am There.

She's why is she got green eyes and tongues?

Well, here is what the novel, let me use the word everness.

Then the word is everness.

She's got everness.

That's pretty close to eternal.

And if you can speak in tongues, there's a chance that all, although all of us have different Nams and all of us can imagine the world in different ways, there may be moments in which despite the diversity, or perhaps because of the diversity, we experience a unity.

In other words, maybe in just one moment, a transient moment, maybe in now, the moment that never is like the man that never was.

Maybe in now, all of a sudden all of us come together into one body.

Now I'm stealing this from that chapter because here I think is one of the most pregnant sentences in the novel.

The sentence is, "Mary Anne Bell joined the missing".

When I read that sentence, it hit me right between the eyes, because on the surface you could just say she became another person missing.

But that's not what the sentence says, the sentence says she joined the missing.

That is to say, these missing people were dismembered and she joined them, which means they were re-membered, re hyphen membered.

All of a sudden the missing now were one body.

She became nobody, but then became the spirit of everybody.

I'm stealing this from the novel.

You know, if you learn how to read, you don't have to be smart, you just have to learn how to hear what the novel is teaching you.

So I want to stress that what I don't imagine I'm doing is analyzing the novel.

I'm, in fact, trying to askew to run away from any generalizations.

I'm trying to hear the words and let them come up with each other into certain combinations and patterns.

And then I'm trying to see.

- I can say a couple of words about what Michael just spoke about.

I'm kind of a Tim O'Brien expert because I'm Tim O'Brien.

And so when Michael says he doesn't know if this was my intent or not to imbue the novel with, I won't say Christianity per se, I'll say the mythologies and the stories and the language of the Bible.

In Austin, Minnesota and later in Worthington, I sat in a Methodist church, went to Sunday school, and though I didn't care for it much, through a kind of a language osmosis, I absorbed the stories and the language.

The novel is intentionally organized around those stories and that language.

It's intentional.

So all that Michael had to say makes my heart lightening because Michael got it, maybe, I think partly through Michael's intelligence.

But he was paying attention to what a writer wants paid attention to.

Between the Mary and the Martha, for example, is a guy named Jimmy Cross, C-R-O-S-S. That was intentional between these two women.

There's a man bearing the name Cross and bearing the cross also of leadership in Vietnam.

He's a lieutenant, he's in charge of the lives of these people.

Pretty conspicuously, I would hope, intentional.

The spirits that are conjured up through a story, the spirits in the head we were talking about later, the word spirits is used intentionally in the book.

It has to do with something beyond reality, beyond the here and now that which we hope universally we're all seeking.

So just a moment ago when Michael mentioned that, yeah, not all Vietnam veterans, not all mothers of Vietnam veterans, not all mothers or fathers or people in general look at the war the same way, a writer hopes somehow to bring everyone together in some kind of universal.

And for me it's the universal of storytelling, of mythology.

You know, mostly of language, the language within stories to bring us together, to feel in your toes, as Michael said it.

Then moving up through your body and your liver and your heart and your lungs and in your head to feel the darkness of being surrounded by death, murderous death.

I mean, war is sanctioned homicide.

It's legal homicide.

It's legal murder.

But it's still in the end, man killing man.

Intentionally, not by accident, but intentionally.

You go out on the word ambush occurs, as Michael said, throughout the book, the intent of an ambush in the, in the military sense is to kill people.

Hope they go by and kill them.

Among the people who go by sometimes are 16 year olds.

There's a story about that in the things they carried and the guilt that the character who bears my name, the Tim O'Brien character in the book has to live with for the rest of his life.

A dead 16 year old boy.

The character in the book, like this guy, the real guy has no idea whether it was his bullet that hit that kid and killed him.

How come you know?

35 people were firing away, grenades were being thrown, machine guns going off.

You have no idea if you're the cause of that death, but we all know universally what it is to bear guilt in our lives.

That little fib you told back in third grade can haunt you until the day you die.

Or what you should have said to your mother on her deathbed, but never said, we'll live with you until you die.

We all know what that fuel of guilt is.

That's a universal.

And one of the objects of the book is Michael, again, articulated better than I am, was to make us feel something of what others feel and have felt, not just in a war, but in life in general.

And not just life in general, but life for as long as humans have been humans.

Going way back to the biblical times and beyond that as well, is to try to approach something beyond the here and now.

Something that lives ultimately in our imaginations of what others might feel and might have felt.

What were the last thoughts of that dead 16 year old kid?

What were the thoughts of his mother and father be for the rest of their lives?

You do try to approach the universal through particulars.

- Tim, I feel like the things that you just said are some really profound thoughts, and particularly the part about feeling, because to me it seems like your book is really about helping people feel what Vietnam was about.

Because every soldier there had a different experience and they had different feelings.

Every one of us who wasn't there also has a different relationship to the things that happen in Vietnam and dealings.

And getting to what Michael was saying about the words and the power of the words and the way the words are used, I think you used that stuff maybe unconsciously, but to help build that sense of feeling about, well, how can you feel what it was like in Vietnam?

How can you understand that?

How can I make you feel what it felt like to experience it for some people?

And you're tapping into with your mythologies, the concepts that really fuel American culture, high and low, light and dark, good and evil, that are really strong and powerful cultural values that we hold.

And you use ways to help people understand Vietnam.

And I feel like your book is really masterful because it does that so well.

- Speaking of things that get divided or dismembered Steve, feelings from intellect.

In other words, we can be separated but together.

We can be separated from our own feelings.

And one of the things that could happen in an experience of a book like this, and again, I'm seeing it from the novel because this is what happens to Tim, the implicit narrator.

He goes to Nam and experiences things that cause a kind of trauma, so such that he cuts himself off from his feelings.

This is moving towards the comics of the novel.

When Tim goes back with those moccasins, at some point, when he finds in the Shetfield, the place where Kyle's rucksack was not Kyle because Kyle was pulled out of the Shetfield, but he finds where his rucksack is and Kathleen is watching and she can't understand why her dad's in eight inches of not even water, just muck.

And he pulls out those moccasins and then he puts the moccasin.

At some point close thereafter, he says something in his heart shut.

And something in his heart opened and he explained or not explain, he shows that when he went to Nam, Tim that went there died in a way, the man he killed.

The reason why it can be true if his daughter asked him if he killed someone, and it can be true if he answers yes, and it can be true if he answers no, is because if he didn't necessarily kill someone who was the enemy, he killed a part of himself or a part of himself was killed.

So either way it's true.

Now, by going back and giving those moccasins, the part of Tim that was separated from Tim, dismembered from Tim can be remembered to Tim.

And the novel shows that with a door opening and a door closing.

Door's important because the doorbell and when Mark Fossie goes to the door to get into where Mary Anne Bell is, and then as you got doorbell, I'm just playing around with the sound that happens when something opens, the sound that you can't see, but you can hear.

When I talk about novels in this way, every single time, at some point when I get most excited about what I'm sharing, because I know that I'm tuned into the what I'm reading, that's why I get excited about it.

'Cause I feel ecstatically related to the language.

So I'm starting to get excited and I start sharing what these words are doing, every single time someone says, but do you really think the author intended that?

It is absolutely an example of evasion.

It is in some ways, like Ted Lavender's dope.

when you start to get too real, somebody is going to divert the conversation into something, we're not talking like that here.

This novel's about that, right?

We don't talk like that.

We tell jokes, we say goo, we say words, and we make a joke out of it.

So all of a sudden you start getting too real.

People don't wanna talk like that.

And every single time I hear that, now I can't say, yes, the author did intend that because they'd say, how do you know?

But what I can say, and the way I deal with that is, I suggest, first of all, you're reading the last draft.

You didn't read the first draft.

And the writer has had a relationship with all of those drafts.

And a writer knows how to get out of the way so that words talk.

So a writer does one draft and then reads what he or she has written.

And all of a sudden the writer sees something that the writer's imagination put in those words.

Writer's imagination's working with the words.

And then the writer sees that.

And then the next draft, the writer is a little bit has more insight into what the writer wants to say because the word's got a word in edgewise.

I try to give a little bit of an explanation like that, but then I finally say, you know, there's one other thing going on here.

We're not writers.

We don't live with words the way writers live.

If you understood that for a writer that words are reality, and if you understood how many hours that they spent in that medium, then you might not think it's so miraculous.

But because you don't spend time in that medium, you can't imagine it.

But that's why you're not a writer.

You can't imagine it because your imagination is not wedded to words the way Mary Anne Bell is wedded to Nam.

That's why you can't imagine it.

But we're not counting on you to imagine it, but we could at least count on you to listen to not be tongues.

But that's hard to do for people.

And this is what the novels shows with all the banner in the battalion.

Not everybody does what Mary Anne Bell did because when they get to death, they start making jokes, they start being flippant, they start tuning out.

So I want, I'm happy to hear, and it's a make believe experience for me, for Tim himself to say that these things were intended.

Because if I said it without Tim saying, no one would believe me.

So I'm grateful for that.

And I wanna throw one more weird thing out there.

All through this novel, there is a reference to the man, the man.

We can think about the man who was, whether the soldiers are joking about the old man that leads him through the minefield.

Follow the dink and stay in the pink.

And then there is Elroy Berdahl, speaking of names, Elroy Berdahl at the Tip Top Lodge.

And then Tim is referring to the man he knew.

Tim is going through these things in his head.

They're out there at some point fishing Elroy Berdahl part, Elroy Berdahl, Elroy that's the king bird, the king of all birds.

Elroy Berdahl, maybe that's a coincidence.

I don't know how we got Elroy Berdahl there.

If it's a complete coincidence.

In other words, it's not a coincidence.

It would be more miraculously if it was a coincidence.

Any case, Elroy Berdahl is fishing, but his name is bird.

At one point he says to Tim, he points up to an owl and he says to Tim, that's Jesus.

Now I'm paying attention to birds and I'm paying attention to this Jesus motif related to birds.

And I have a little better understanding of Elroy Berdahl.

But I also understand that the line, the fishing line, can also be a line in a novel like a sentence.

And so the man has got the line in the water.

He's fishing, he's listening, he's not talking.

Fishing becomes like listening.

You're listening now at the deep in the water.

That's a deep listening.

And you're waiting to feel something on the line.

This is to feel something.

And the man knows what Tim doesn't know yet, because the man can hear what's going on.

And Tim's a man, he can feel it if he can feel it.

Oh, I'm giving an example of the man.

The man appears all throughout the novel.

It ends when Kathleen goes with, when Tim goes with Kathleen, they go to the field.

There's a wonderful passage at the end, if you can read it.

Kathleen says, the first law, she looks back out over the field.

Now, there has been two farmers in this, near this Shetfield, while Tim is bringing back those moccasins and they've been looking on.

And at some point, Tim had made eye contact with those two farmers.

And at one point, one of the farmer lifts a shovel like a flag, which is a wonderful emblem.

If the land had a flag, it would be a shovel.

It's also a great emblem if we're digging deep.

Any case, the man holds up a shovel.

And then this experience is going on, going back and forth from the field to those two men.

When Kathleen looks out over the field, that's the last word you see, she asks, is he mad?

Now, we could read this one or two ways.

You would, if you're just not paying attention, you just read it: are those two men over there mad?

But the word that came before it is field.

So the question could be, is this land mad?

Is this field mad?

And then Tim tells her that that's all finished.

Now he's not mad.

That's over with.

In other words, Nam, if you turn it around, is the word man.

I think this is why the man is always appearing without it being cashed out with a first name.

I think this is why Nam is often referred to, and not Vietnam, but the Nam.

At certain point then you could say that Mary Anne Bell married the man.

She married Nam.

Martha isn't marrying anybody.

She's gonna stay at verge and she's not going to have sex.

Now, Mary Anne Bell may or may not have had sex with the Greenies.

We don't know.

But she lied down.

She lied down with them.

And then all of a sudden, the next time that Rat Kiley sees those Greenies walking across the field, they're both six and seven.

They're six and seven because it, at first he doesn't notice Mary Anne Bell because she's joined the sixth.

In other words, she's the seventh that is invisible that keeps the sixth joined.

What did Mary Anne Bell marry?

The lover, the lunatic and the poet, two things can become one.

What did Mary Anne Bell become one with?

She became one with the man.

And a way to think about that is that something our imagination can become one with words.

Now we're getting into where the novel start is talking at another level where I get excited when the imagination weds words, the imagination is finding a new body.

It's leaving the physical body and finding a verbal body.

And then those words, because of the spirit that's entered in them, start to take on a form.

In other words, the words need the imagination to take a living shape.

And the imagination needs the words to have a body that's gonna have everness.

So when the imagination marries the word, two things are becoming one.

And those two things that became one just so happens to be the book that we're reading.

If now we start over on the first sentence and Lieutenant Jimmy Cross is carrying letters.

- Yeah.

- And then here we are where we began for the first time.

And then you read a book like that, and then you just start, things start happening all over you, man.

Your parents think there's something wrong with you.

Your friends think there's something wrong with you because you're over there kind of vibrating reading this novel.

Well, because you're coming into stuff that's so real and so powerful that you know it's more real than the real world.

And it was done, I wanted to say, by paying attention to the words, starting with say colors.

I'm paying attention.

- Well, thank you to you Julie, and thank you to Steve and to Michael.

I said it before, but I'll say it again.

This is what a writer craves.

If you don't crave the recapitulation of plot and you don't crave having a story connected to the so-called real world.

You crave attention to metaphor, to language, to the accommodations of language and to what it does to your heart.

That's what a writer cares about.

The things that Michael, Steve and I have been talking about.

So many thanks to my hometown, Austin, Minnesota.

]t feels like a gabillion years ago, but it also Austin.

I left Austin when I was in second grade and moved to a town about 120 miles to the west.

Yet my memories of Austin are as clear as my memories of Vietnam in a lot of ways.

I can picture the house I grew up in across from Sumner School.

I can picture the basement of that house with this old coal burning furnace with these tentacles, looked like a big octopus going up to the rest of the house.

I can still see my dad shoveling coal into that furnace.

I can see my sandbox behind the house.

I can see that a turtle named Toby in the sandbox, a kid named Elroy Berdahl stole one day.

When I typed it at words Elroy Berdahl, right away I knew what Elroy meant.

That means the king.

I had to look up Berdahl.

But I saw as Michael did the possibilities of that name and tried to make good on them.

Michael was absolutely right about the multiple drafts that a writer goes through.

A lot of it comes out of your unconscious or your subconscious, but you're revised and these things become conscious.

And then you make good on extending the possibilities of what you've imagined, inserting and deleting and things like that.

And to make a novel draft after draft after draft.

This morning before we started this, I finished reading the first pass on page proofs of a new novel, doing exactly what I'm talking about now.

That's how I spent from 4:30 to 11:30 this morning, revising even in page proofs, trying to make good on the possibilities of a new novel.

So what a great experience for a writer, partly the hometown, but partly the revisiting of the imaginative work of making a book.

So thank you to you all.

- Well, thank you very much.

We appreciate it all.

And Michael, and Steve, thank you so much.

And hopefully we'll have encouraged people to pick up the book again and read it some more.

So thank you and until next time, I appreciate you being here with us.

(bright music) (light music) - [Narrator] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.