Phil Klay
Phil Klay
Phil Klayis an American writer and United States Marine officer who won the National Book Award for fiction in 2014 for his first book-length publication, a collection of short stories, Redeployment...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
armor donald doubt puncture
I doubt there's anything you could say to Donald Rumsfeld that would puncture the armor of his narcissism.
genuinely interested perspective
It's often difficult to get perspective on your own stories, on your own experiences, without talking them through with someone who is genuinely interested in thinking about them. And that's the key.
graham school writers
Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.
served war
I'm not anti-war. I served in a war, and I served proudly. But just or not, necessary or not, war is the industrial-scale slaughter of other humans.
boys family joined peace public service three tradition
There's a tradition of public service in my family. I'm one of three boys that joined the military. My father was in the Peace Corps.
mild though
I don't want to act as though my deployment was particularly rough, because it wasn't. I had a very mild deployment; I was a staff officer.
junior marine officer school
I ended up going to Dartmouth, and I did Marine Officer Candidate School during my junior summer.
highly
I have friends with post-traumatic stress - friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people.
admirer huge love time whose work
I have, for a very long time, been a huge admirer of Marilynne Robinson, whose work I just love.
experience radically saw versions
I saw so many radically different versions of Iraq. It would have been difficult for me to come back and think, 'This is the Iraq experience.'
deal treating war
Treating war as farce is one way soldiers deal with it.
beginnings continue fear owed stories though
Though I continue to tell stories about Iraq, I sometimes fear this makes me a fraud. I feel guilty about the sorrow I feel because I know it is manufactured, and I feel guilty about the sorrow I do not feel because it is owed, it is the barest beginnings of what is owed to the fallen.
fiction troubled
Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.
compare experience open readers tendency using war
We have a tendency to think of war as this quasi-mystical thing, and that interpretation flattens the experience - by using different perspectives, I wanted to open a place for readers to compare and contrast, to make judgments, to engage.