{"id":318,"date":"2017-02-25T16:11:40","date_gmt":"2017-02-25T21:11:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/?p=318"},"modified":"2022-11-23T10:24:37","modified_gmt":"2022-11-23T15:24:37","slug":"alum-matt-young-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/2017\/02\/alum-matt-young-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Alum Matt Young Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Thursday, February 16th, 2017, Miami University Master\u2019s in Creative Writing graduate Matt Young sat down with students in TaraShea Nesbit\u2019s Intermediate Nonfiction Writing course (ENG 323), to talk about his forthcoming memoir, <\/span>Eat the Apple<\/span> (Bloomsbury, 2018). The memoir explores the time in his life when he made a rash decision to join the military and the subsequent events that befell him. In this interview, Young discusses how he wrote the memoir, his use of unexpected point of views and images in the memoir, the ethics of writing about living people and real events, and the publishing process from query letters to working with a publisher. This interview was edited for cohesion and conciseness.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Q: (TaraShea) When we first met, you were writing fiction and resistant to writing about your time in the military. How did you overcome that?<\/span><\/p>\n

A: (Young) There was a lot of resistance, mostly because I didn\u2019t want to be a clich\u00e9. I didn\u2019t want to be the type of person that experienced something traumatic and then writes to capitalize on that traumatic experience and doesn\u2019t do it in a thoughtful way. I was super-worried about it because I started writing about it as an undergrad at Oregon State and the stories I wrote were just bad. The fiction I tried to write was bad, the nonfiction I tried to write was worse. I put it aside for a while, and then I got into Miami as a grad student in fiction. I was going to write speculative fiction stories about the Midwest because I grew up in Indiana and I thought alright, I can make the Midwest weird\u2014that can be my gimmick, that can be cool.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then, halfway through the year Oxford Student Magazine <\/span><\/i>had a grad student reading, and the people in charge at that time asked me to do a reading like all the other grad students. I wanted to do something different than what I had already written because all of the fiction I\u2019d already written was crap. I wrote a couple nonfiction pieces. I sat down over the course of a day and a half\u2014I gave myself a super short timeframe\u2014I had a super short time constraint, so I pumped them out. It ended up being okay, I got a good response, people laughed. People thought they were funny and sad, and people were quiet\u2014concerned about me, and then I put them aside again because I said that\u2019s not a thing, I\u2019m here to write fiction, that\u2019s what I came here to do. And then over the summer, I locked myself in my office. I realized that this was the time I had to write this thesis because it\u2019s due at the end of next year, and I\u2019m not going to have time to write it next year because of coursework and all this other stuff, and so I had to get the bulk of it done over the summer, so I sat down and tried to write fiction, but it didn\u2019t come.<\/span><\/p>\n

And then these stories just started pouring forth, which were bar stories that I used to tell people to get a laugh a lot of the time, and then I moved them into a space that wasn\u2019t just bar stories. These were things I would do to just entertain people. That turned into well what\u2019s the actual story, why did I use them to entertain people<\/span><\/i>? Is it really a funny story? Can it maintain humor and also keep the seriousness and keep a conversation about any one of the other things I write about with trauma, or love, or sexuality\u2014can I do something with that? Then they just started pouring forth\u2014I wrote 75 to 100 pages over the summer, which felt good to me at that time. And then I just kept going and writing from there.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q: (TaraShea) I was just listening to a podcast this morning, of an interview with George Saunders from about 10 years ago and he was similarly talking about how he feels that people reject the thing that is actually most clear, the closest to them. He kept trying to get rid of his funny, and that was his real voice so when he stopped trying to do that, it was more natural. The writing was better.<\/span><\/p>\n

A: (Young) Absolutely, it\u2019s like, this is my personality, I\u2019m sick of writing about it. Why would I write about myself if I\u2019m sick of myself? I realized that I had to take a different approach in how to apply that, or how to apply that part of me to something that is different. It\u2019s kind of where the weird genre switching came from.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q: (John) When writing in nonfiction, do you find that there are things you just cannot talk about?<\/span><\/p>\n

A: (Young) Yeah, if you\u2019re writing nonfiction it\u2019s important to find that line that you\u2019re not willing to cross, because if you write nonfiction about yourself, then people are going to know it\u2019s about you, and if you\u2019re not comfortable with people knowing that about you, then you shouldn\u2019t write about it. <\/span><\/p>\n

Q: (TaraShea) It also seems like one strategy you use it to anonymize the speaker\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

A: (Young) Absolutely\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Q: (TaraShea) The story gets to happen but it\u2019s \u201cone of us did this,\u201d or it\u2019s blurry. Many people in the class talked about the way things get blurry at times which feels like a strategy of telling and not telling.<\/span><\/p>\n

A: (Young) It was a strategy of me being a complete coward. <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Alum Matt Young reads during the “War Stories” event in Williams Hall<\/p><\/div>\n

Q: (David) What was the purpose of the POV shifts between sections?<\/span><\/p>\n

A: (Young) In the military if you use the first person, you are punished. The purpose was to think about the whole. In the sections that use the second person and third person, this was to emphasize the collective thought and also the idea of family. The shift between the first and third person in the last section of the book was done to demonstrate the process of returning to individual life. Returning to \u201cI\u201d was frightening. <\/span><\/p>\n

Q<\/b>: (Paige) At times, the tone sounds angry. Is that something you\u2019re trying to portray and if so, is that anger more directed at yourself or at the military?<\/span><\/p>\n

A<\/b>: (Young) I\u2019m angry at a lot of things; I was angry at everything. I\u2019m less angry now. But, I think that I was angry a lot at myself. <\/span>When I got the edits from my editor, his biggest criticisms were in the sections where I talk to my past self. In this one section I just berate my 18-year-old self which is like, who yells at an 18 year old? It\u2019s like the jerkiest thing to do in the world. He was like you gotta back off yourself a little bit because you\u2019re being kind of a jerk. And I was like yeah, that\u2019s the point. I was an idiot. And he\u2019s like, yeah, but you didn\u2019t know that, and also you\u2019re fine now, relatively speaking\u2026. He said you gotta let people know that you\u2019re okay, and you have to let yourself know that you\u2019re going to be okay, because if you don\u2019t show empathy to your characters you\u2019re just gonna sound angry and \u2018yelly\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hopefully at some points in the book that empathy comes out. You have to tell yourself \u2018Alright, this happened, but you\u2019re gonna be alright, and you\u2019re going to move past it.\u2019 But yes, anger was a driving force.<\/p>\n

Q<\/b>: As far as the point of view, we were on that earlier, I noticed that you split up sections of these diagrams of the body, could you explain your choice in putting them where they were and why you chose to demonstrate the physical body instead of your disembodied voice?<\/span><\/p>\n

A<\/b>: (Young) Yeah, so, the body diagrams\u2026 well, one of them is an accurate recounting of my medical record– like the \u201cOuch\u201d section is from my medical record. In one of the iterations of the book they were a complete story. There were 7 of them and I was like, this is too much, it\u2019s too busy. And so I was thinking a lot about how to separate the book. I was gonna write this book in seven sections–like basic training, deployment one, home, deployment two, home, deployment three…it was too many, it was too busy. So I had to think about how I could separate it by time, and think about how my mindset changed. Those changes in the body are representative of how my mindset was changing a lot of the time–as with the phantom knee pain one. That\u2019s not real, but it was representative of an emotion.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q<\/b>: (Sam) We talked about the more corporate idea of target audience. We stereotyped the sort of people who would read military memoirs as more conservative and we stereotyped military memoirs as very mass-market, very <\/span>American Sniper<\/span><\/i>, and then we stereotyped the kind of people who would read a book of creative nonfiction essays as very liberal, Brooklyn-hipster. This book has a lot of both, so did you think about that at all and if you did, how do you reconcile these two ideas?<\/span><\/p>\n

A<\/b>: (Young) My biggest fear is being put in a niche where the only people who they send my book out to are white military men. God, the world has too many voices there. I tried to background the war. I tried to overlay these kind of human experiences on top of that thing, so the war works to move the narrative forward while I\u2019m talking about a love story. I have these ideas about masculinity, and these ideas about sexuality, and these ideas about race that kind of criss-cross throughout that narrative and kind of ride it like a wave. I\u2019m hoping those take the forefront. Hopefully military dudes pick up the novel and maybe that can help them. <\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m hoping that people can use it to form empathy with people they don\u2019t know about. I have a meeting with my marketing and publicity folks next week, and I\u2019m like, what am I going to say to them? Because that\u2019s who they’re going to send that to. They\u2019re going to send it to [military writers] which is fine. They\u2019re doing great work, but I don\u2019t want to have a \u2018hot take\u2019 about what\u2019s happening socio-politically in the Middle East, because I\u2019m not super smart, and I don\u2019t have a \u2018hot take\u2019 on it. So I think that it\u2019s a hard space to navigate and I hope that maybe that has to do with the cover. Maybe the cover art will be some part of that conversation and that maybe–trying to go after and get authors of color and women to read it who have non-military backgrounds, that would be awesome.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q<\/b>: (Chaze) What went into creating your query letter? What relationship do you have with your editor? What influence, if any, did you have on the physical format of the book?<\/span><\/p>\n

A<\/b>: (Young) The query letter was a page long word document, single spaced. It was a really uncomfortable space for me to be in because you have to sell yourself, which is super weird if you\u2019re not comfortable with it. For me, because I have a self-deprecating sense of humor–I\u2019m super-self conscious–[Being here] this is kind of my nightmare. But I gave it to a couple of people for edits, and it got to the point where I said, \u201cScrew it I\u2019m going to send it out to 10 agents and I\u2019m going to see what happens.\u201d A friend said, \u201csend it to Bill Clegg, of the Clegg Agency.\u201d She sent me a new edit, which was a better than what I wrote because it sells me more. She managed to hit my voice better than I hit my voice somehow. To have someone who knows you–knows your voice, your writing–tell you, \u201cThis is how to be natural,\u201d I looked back on it thinking, \u201cWould I have been more successful if I had talked to her first?\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

As far as my editor relationship, we have very little contact. He is this ethereal creature that does his thing and sends me stuff when he needs to. I have more contact with my agent [Chris Clemans], and he is fantastic because he treats me very nicely, like a delicate flower. I can\u2019t take criticism, and he knows I can\u2019t take criticism, so he treads very lightly. He has this \u201chow do you feel about this\u201d approach. He went through the manuscript page by page with me. It was an eight-hour phone conversation over two days. He really sat down and told me, \u201cThis is the stuff you need to keep, take out, talk more about this experience.\u201d There was a poem in it at one point in time and he told me, \u201cYou can\u2019t do that.\u201d I had to ask myself, \u201cIs this adding to what I\u2019m doing? How is it adding to it?\u201d I asked myself that a lot.<\/p>\n

As far as the physical aspect, they gave me a questionnaire, which is very strange, which was like \u201cDescribe your book in five sentences, who are six authors you\u2019d like us to send the book to,\u201d so I gave them 15 authors. They asked me what I like in terms of jacket covers, what I don\u2019t like, what\u2019s an image I think that would work on it. I\u2019m like \u201cI like abstract art covers,\u201d which they\u2019re thinking, \u201cThat\u2019s <\/span>probably<\/span><\/i> not gonna work on a war memori…\u201d But my fear is that they come back with an M-16 or something, or date palms, or an M-16 planted with date palms. Those were all horrifying moments of my life.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q:<\/b> (Paige) Were the other people you mentioned in your memoir, specifically your ex, included in the process and were you worried about their reactions when the book gets published?<\/span><\/p>\n

A: <\/b>(Young) Yeah, pretty constantly. I kind of have a hypocritical relationship with that because at one point in time I do care, but mostly I don\u2019t think a lot about audience at all when I\u2019m writing.  If you try to write for everybody, you end up writing for nobody, as cliche as that sounds.  The ex–she doesn\u2019t know the book is coming out. In my defense, I have tried to contact her and she wants nothing to do with me.  In her defense, fair. She isn\u2019t mentioned by name, but she is still definitely recognizable, especially to herself and her family. If I could get ahold of her and let her know it\u2019s happening, I would love to. As far as the Marines that are mentioned, there are four or five that don\u2019t have their names changed: Charlie, Adam, John, Keene. The three dead don\u2019t have their names changed.  The rest of the names are changed.  Some of them asked me to and some of them I couldn\u2019t get ahold of. <\/span><\/p>\n

Q: <\/b>(Sam) If you don\u2019t mind sharing, what five authors did you send your book to?<\/span><\/p>\n

A: <\/b>(Young) I gave them six war writers \u2014 Matt Gallagher, Phil Klay, Tim O\u2019Brien, Tobias Wolff, and Elliot Ackerman. And then for my goal writers, it was Claire Vaye Watkins, Roxane Gay, and I don\u2019t remember the rest of them. The other ones were women and writers of color because I was all like \u2018no white men.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Q:<\/b> (TaraShea) When is the book coming out? When can we look for it?<\/span><\/p>\n

A: <\/b>(Young) Next year, and you all will have totally forgotten me by the time this comes out. March or February of 2018. Bloomsbury, <\/span>Eat the Apple.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Q: <\/b>(TaraShea) Are you working on something else or are you working on revisions?<\/span><\/p>\n

A: <\/b>(Young) I\u2019m done with revisions, the edits are accepted. I am having so much trouble writing. So, I\u2019ve been weirdly writing twitter assemblage poems. I\u2019ve found myself completely inundated by the news, and I get my news from pundits that I follow on Twitter. I\u2019m using that thing I\u2019m addicted to and can\u2019t put down into writing, taking those things, combining them, and I\u2019m thinking of turning them into a chapbook. We\u2019ll see where that goes. <\/span><\/p>\n

Q:<\/b> (TaraShea) Are you back in the West now?<\/span><\/p>\n

A: <\/b>(Young) Yeah, Olympia, Washington. I\u2019m living that Pacific Northwest life, amongst the cougars and pine trees.<\/span><\/p>\n

(TaraShea) Well thank you so much for coming.<\/span><\/p>\n

(Young) Thank you so much, you guys were awesome!
\n<\/span>
\nInterview conducted and\/or edited by: Paige Burcheit, Chaze Copeland, John Meade, Angela Day, Scout Ellam, Audrey Fanshaw, David Farley, Charlie Fordon, Jake Grace, Megan Haase, James Harris, Sam Hunter, Jenni Jenkins, Tori Levy, Ashley Losher, Kelly Murray, Maddie Passarella, Jake Pickard, Caitlin Roth, Zach Sharb, Tori Taylor, Blake Wysocki, and TaraShea Nesbit.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Thursday, February 16th, 2017, Miami University Master\u2019s in Creative Writing graduate Matt Young sat down with students in TaraShea Nesbit\u2019s Intermediate Nonfiction Writing course (ENG 323), to talk about his forthcoming memoir, Eat the Apple (Bloomsbury, 2018). The memoir explores the time in his life when he made a rash decision to join the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1551,"featured_media":315,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207,209,201,210,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-alumni-2","category-events-readings","category-interviews","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1551"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1030,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions\/1030"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}