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Your academic background (Michener Fellow in Poetry at UT/Austin) is mostly in poetry. How does your poetic inclination infuse your fiction? Is the poet within you ever a hindrance?

I'm deeply invested in the power of the image. I know that this is not the exclusive territory of poetry, but it does seem that building toward the right image can be an effective method of conveying emotion. And one of the things that my relationship to poetry has taught me is that these images aren't necessarily dependent on context. In fact, an unexpected image or one that emerges from some place outside of the logical progression of the narrative can be just as powerful as something perfectly coherent, perhaps more so if it's the right one. I also believe that the sonic and rhythmic qualities of language operate in ways we probably don't even understand. If we consider the origins of language, we have to at least entertain the possibility that it evolved from sound as pure expression of emotion; wails of grief, cries of pain or fear or joy, whatever. Communicating information, signaling warnings about predators and so forth, was probably an essential part of it as well. But it just seems like some vestigial trace of that original power is in the sounds we make, and the manner in which we make them. As to your second question, I'm sure that all of the things I said above can be a hindrance to just telling the story, so I do need to get out of my own way sometimes.

One powerful poetic image you create in the debut novel, The Yellow Birds, occurs when the narrator John Bartle notices bird blood and citrus juice mixing on the ground after mortar falls during a battle. This combination of Technicolor details is at once beautiful and terrifying for all that it portends. Can you tell us a bit about your thinking behind this image in particular and also about how you selected particular details to emphasize as you wrote the book?

Well, a lot of my curiosity in the book was directed at John's ability to perceive. He's looking back on the story as it's being told, and it's coming into existence through the telling of it, so I hoped I could create some fluidity in both the intensity and relevance of the things he thinks about, the things he remembers, the things that he notices when he reflects on his experience. To say he doesn't quite have the story all together in his mind would be an understatement. I tried to put in strangeness and surprise and repetition to show the way that this material, be it event or landscape or words he said or heard, stands in different levels of relief in his memory, and that he doesn't get to control the material from which the story of his life is made. It's all dependent on the terribly fragile and unreliable mind he has.

But one of the things about this specific image, and others operating in a similar fashion, including the final image of the book, is that I wanted there to be one thing that could not be destroyed by the war. And though that thing is not necessarily nature, nature is a part of it. I guess one way of describing it would be to call it the larger thing, the world, the sum. The war is made by man, and its destructive powers are awesome, but it can't destroy everything. John is powerless, but capital L life will go on.

You've constructed your novel in such a way where actions deepen and their meaning becomes clearer as the story progresses. What would you say to a reader who, early on in your book, was impatient with its structure? Was the pace of the work ever questioned by your editor?

I don't really know what I'd say. I realize it might ask something of a reader's attention, but with the chapter headings I'd imagine it would be fairly comprehensible after three or four chapters. And by then you're nearly halfway done. It is a short book after all.

Of course there were questions of pace, questions of all kinds really, but I don't think the structure ever came up. I'm not sure how amenable I would have been to changing it anyway. Not that it's perfect or that I arrived at it without challenges. I knew that I wanted to tell it this way, to have the fragmented structure reflect John's process of building the story as well as the fragmented condition of his present life and mind. The ordering of chapters within the structure went through a number of different arrangements, and each arrangement required a certain level of tweaking in the material itself, so that the story would build the way I wanted it to, so details would accrete, and so that I could avoid unnecessary confusion for the reader. By the time I arrived at the final version, I really felt like it was functioning as close to what I envisioned as I could get it to. A number of people read a number of those versions before I settled on the final structure, but that was all before I even had an editor.

It's pretty clear that this book is an Iraq book, but there are some major sections set in other places, primarily the Richmond, Virginia area. While Iraq scenes evoke their particular foreignness and linger in their descriptions, scenes set in Richmond are particularly blunt and moving, bearing the emotional weight of a returned soldier drowning in his memories. Can you talk a bit about any difference you felt in trying to render the two places?

I wanted to show the way that the familiar becomes strange and the strange familiar. Coming home is a terrible disappointment for John. He's had this idea of it as safety and relief, but it is really more like a void. I think it feels to him that the part of him that belonged there, home in Richmond, that made sense there, is dead. Or dormant at best. He's dislocated. He doesn't recognize it and can't recall it in the same way that he can recall Iraq. I tried to write it with a haze over it, so that a reader could recognize all the aspects of it that John can't. I wanted there to be some vibrancy, some hint at life in the quotidian, that John can't see but is evident to the reader.

Your novel has been called an instant war classic, with one critic noted how this individual story becomes a symbol for a national phenomenon. How do you react to this? Does it affect the way you think of your audience?

It's flattering, of course, but strange. When I was writing it I was mostly thinking that there might be one reader out there who would find some value in it. I still think in those terms when I write, hoping I'll find one reader who will close the circuit and make whatever energy there is in what I've written actual rather than potential.

Indeed, critics have compared your book with the likes of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and other enduring wartime novels. How well read are you in such books, and did they influence you while your wrote yours? Did you feel challenged to bring something new to the table?

I would also put those comparisons into the "strange" category. I've read many books that have war as a subject, and many of them have influenced the way I think about war and writing and just being a human being in the world. I didn't necessarily feel challenged to bring something new to the table. It would probably be more accurate to say that some of the questions those books address are as old as war itself, and possibly unanswerable, but I believed that asking them was still essential. I had questions about my experience and writing is the only even moderately satisfying way I've found to ask them.

The scant facts offered in your brief biography at the back of the book make you indistinguishable from your main character--so a reader might assume that you experienced much of what you are giving us through Bartle. In light of this, what can you tell us about the land between fiction and non-fiction and how you think of it working in your novel? How do you feel about publishing marketers, literary critics and/or readers conflating Bartle's story for your own?

I've been completely open with people about my relationship to the main character. He's an invention and his story is not my story. We share geography and questions about the war that we both needed to ask. That's not to say I don't understand the tendency to conflate our stories, but since I can't control what people think, I don't worry about it too much. The book is accurately shelved in the fiction section and I answer honestly when asked about my life. What people do with that information is up to them.

In the span of a decade you have gone from being a soldier, to a student, to an acclaimed author sharing a stage with the literary likes of Dave Eggers, Louise Erdich and Junot Diaz at the National Book Awards. Can you briefly describe what a long strange trip it's been?

It does seem strange looking back on it. But going through it didn't seem any stranger than any other part of my life. One day turns into the next, and like everyone else I'm faced again with all the awe and wonder that the world provides. I'm just trying to find a way to navigate it all. Sometimes I fail and sometimes I don't; the only thing I'm certain of is that I'll do plenty of the former. I'm still trying to figure out the rest.

You've mentioned that you are currently at work on a novel about a murder in Virginia just after the Civil War. How has your novel-writing process differed in working on this new project?

I'm very early in the work on it. So aside from the amount of research I'm doing, which is considerably more than I did for the last one, the main difference is that I recognize the part of the process I'm in. The challenges and decisions are just as difficult, and I struggle with them as much or more than I did with The Yellow Birds, but I recognize them for what they are. It's terrifying, but it's exciting, too, because there's so much possibility ahead.

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