The Sleepy Reader » Guest Posts

imagedb-3cgi After reading The Secret Keeper I was very interested in the journalistic aspect of covering an area of conflict. Author Paul Harris was kind enough to write a guest post sharing his experiences:

The thing that most people want to know about covering a conflict is simple
enough: what is it like? There is no easy answer. It depends on the
journalist, the sort of conflict it is and the sort of medium they work in.
For example, a photographer or cameraman has an intense need to get action
pictures right from the frontline. A print journalist does not. As a result
it is the photographers and TV crews who often experience the most danger
as their job forces them to seek it out.
For me, conflict journalism was something I always wanted to do and I ended
up dipping in and out of it. I am glad I did it. Despite some very
stressful and unpleasant moments I came out of it okay. I enjoyed the
amazing cameraderie of fellow journalists. I believed, at times, that I was
doing a good thing by shining a light on some forgotten and benighted parts
of the world. At other times, if I am honest, I was chasing a
thrill-seeking high.
It all, pretty much, came to an end, not in Africa, but in Iraq. I was
embedded with the British army on a two month assignment in 2003 that
spanned the invasion of Iraq by America and Britain. In the first few weeks
of the war the British unit I was with ended up as part of the ring of
forces surrounding the southern city of Basra. For a while, on most days,
myself, some other journalists and a TV crew from Sky News would drive in a
couple of cars to the front lines to interview any refugees we could find
who might have escaped the city which was still controlled by the Iraqi
army. On one day we headed to the front lines and passed British army
checkpoint after checkpoint. We were waved through them all. We quickly
found ourselves on a road heading towards the city outskirts, looking for
the last line of British troops where we planned to stop. We seemed to
drive for quite a while. The city border seemed strangely close. But we
were in a hurry to reach the front line and start some interviews so we
drove on. Eventually we reached a huge flaming oil trench, billowing out
thick black smoke. The Sky team wanted to stop and do some filming of the
fire. I, and other print journalists, did not as we felt in a rush. After a
“discussion” the Sky team won out. We stopped and tapped our feet
impatiently waiting for the Sky team to finish filming. We were eager to
resume driving forwards. At that moment, we heard a roar. A British tank
has coming down the road behind us. It stopped and a soldier popped his
head out and asked us in no uncertain terms where we were going. “The front
lines,” we replied, gesturing ahead of us. The soldier shook his head and
pointed back the way we came. “The front line is about a mile behind you,”
he said.
It suddenly dawned on us. The last British checkpoint we had driven through
had for some reason waved us on. Yet they had been the front line. The next
checkpoint we would have run into would not have been British. It would
have been Iraqi. Faced with two strange vehicles approaching from British
lines, it would have been hard to imagine the frightened Iraqi soldiers
doing anything but opening fire on us. Only the Sky crew’s need for a quick
film shoot had stopped us from that fate. It had been a simple moment of
sheer luck that had prevented a disaster. We turned tail and drove back at
high speed. Later that night, though not a shot had been fired, I realized
it had been a very close brush with danger, perhaps even death. I had begun
to realize I did not want to put myself in those situations anymore. After
I left Iraq, and returned to England, I never did.

Thanks Paul for taking the time to share your fascinating experiences.

41-1yfbjmdl_sl160_ Author Kirk Curnutt has graciously agreed to do a guest post about his book, Breathing Out the Ghost. It is very thought-provoking and offers a lot of insight into his characters. Here are his thoughts:

Sometimes I’m asked which of the four major characters in Ghost was hardest to write about. People are usually surprised by the answer. Each was difficult in his or her own way, but the hardest by far was St. Claire.
People assume that Sis would be the toughie because she’s a woman and male writers don’t necessarily have a great history of creating realistic female characters. I was fortunate, though, in that I grew up knowing a lot of women like Sis: I had a whole family of them to draw from. These were women of my mother and aunts’ generation, and in a weird way, they were caught between two worlds when I was growing up. They inherited that very stoic, Midwestern don’t-talk-about-your-woes attitude, but they were also living in a 1970s era that stressed self-discovery and self-awareness … self-help even. For thirty years I’ve watched these women struggle to come to grips with their emotions, to accept that they have them, but also to forgive the parents’ and previous generations for not having them. I saw Sis as somebody whose personal grief has created a kind of prison for her: she’s been through support groups, has done positive things out of her tragedy, and has remained loyal to her family, but after nearly twenty years she’s tired of the duty of caretaking her lost daughter’s memory. She sort of looks nostalgically to her grandmother—one of those old-timey women who were too busy to feel bad—and she wishes she were that unfeeling. Of course, what Sis has to discover is a way of making her emotions selfless.
Heim the detective was probably the most fun to write about if only because he’s sort of a classic character drawn out of mysteries: he’s the fallen crime solver who can’t let go. It was his style that really helped me figure out who he was. The chapters about him are very cadenced and staccato in their rhythms in the way that noir usually is, all the way from Dashiell Hammett to James Ellory. One of the tricks to writing in that genre is repetition: you take a certain word or a phrase and over the course of a paragraph you drum it into your sentences to create tension. In Heim’s case I kept doing that with the various lists he keeps in his mind and the beliefs he keeps reiterating to make them real. There’s a moment midway in the book where he escapes a predicament over the course of several hours only to have the sickening realization that he has to go back for something he left behind. That’s probably the best example of what I’m talking about. I came up with a sentence that shows him mentally retracing every single step he will have to go back through thanks to this “long slingshot of a day.” I’ll readily admit it was a mouthful of a sentence, and I had to fight a little to keep it all in one sentence during the editorial process, but it felt appropriate to his person. This is a guy who believes in forms and shapes and patterns instead of accidents and coincidences, so it seemed natural to his character that he would think in an almost martial syntax.
The villain, Dickie-Bird, was pretty easy, too, because I based a lot of him on a real-life predator named Jose Antonio Ramos, who about five years ago was found legally responsible for the 1979 disappearance of Etan Patz, the first and probably still most famous missing child in modern history. Sometimes readers worry a little how you can get in the head of such a repulsive character. I think that has to do more with the way writers have glamorized serial killers these past forty years. I’ll be old-fashioned and say straight up that I’m not a big fan of books about Hannibal Lector, etc., however entertaining they may. For one thing, that type of character has been stylized to death, so you see him in every bad movie and TV show. (He’s there every week, just with a different face, on Criminal Minds). The rise of the anti-hero in fiction is a relatively recent thing: there are the nutcases in Edgar Allan Poe, of course, but they don’t seem real after a century and a half. I’m thinking more of the Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” or, more recently, Dexter Morgan in Jeff Linday’s books. These characters represent a sort of unrepentant individuality that rebels against the perceived conformity of society. Their amorality is supposed to expose us to the blind obedience of our ethics, the fact that we cling to a sense of right and wrong that we don’t really discover firsthand. My own personal feeling—and it’s an opinion, so it’s worth the two-ply it’s printed on—is that this sort of celebration of individuality ultimately damages our moral sensibilities. It clogs up our empathy with excuses and self-justifications. That’s what has always intrigued me about real-life sexual predators. They have an amazing capacity for rationalization: What I feel is only illegal because you’ve chosen to make it illegal. If you felt what I felt you’d call it natural. There’s no effort or even ability to understand what a victim of crime feels. That’s what I wanted to convey for the chapter I wrote in Dickie’s voice: that the flipside of unrepentant individuality is pure solipsism.
So the hardest character was St. Claire. Part of that had to do with style, too. St. Claire thinks in a very literary style—dense, allusive, lots of big words—and it’s just plain hard to write like that. I think I wasted a lot of years trying to find his voice. But the difficulty was also in the effect I wanted him to have. I really wanted the reader to walk away from his part of the story feeling ambivalent. I wanted people on the one hand to imagine that they would go to similar ends to find a missing child, to risk everything, because that’s our definition of the classic hero. But I always wanted people to recognize the costs of that heroism and its destructive side. For every hero out saving the world, there’s somebody left back at home, abandoned and disappointed. Probably the hardest part of St. Claire’s character to clarify was his literariness, why he lives in a world of words and print. A lot of that was simply my own autobiographical dilemma. I was always the most bookish person in my family, and I’ve spent a lot of my life searching for something real and tactile in my life so I didn’t feel like I was slipping off into the ethereal. But it also had to do with the relationship between books or any kind of fiction and its influence on our identity. What I really wanted was St. Claire to realize that by going on the road as a modern-day Ahab he was living out a fantasy that had very little to do with his child and family and everything with his desire to be a hero. It’s not that his quest isn’t noble—it’s that his desire for nobility has consequences for other people. That said, I didn’t want readers feeling superior to him. My big hope was that people would walk away from the story confused about what they would do in a similar situation: do I stay home, or do I try to solve this myself? Hopefully, it’s a question none of us will ever have to answer.

I highly recommend this book. Though it’s dark and uncomfortable, it offers excellent insight into human behavior.

To find out more about the author, visit his website at kirkcurnutt.com.

Check out the other tour stops for this book:

Monday, January 5th: Diary of an Eccentric

Tuesday, January 6th: Ramya’s Bookshelf

Thursday, January 8th: Crime Ne.ws, formerly Trenchcoat Chronicles

Monday, January 12th: Savvy Verse and Wit

Tuesday, January 13th: Educating Petunia

Wednesday, January 14th: Michele- Only One ‘L’

Thursday, January 15th: Book Nut

Friday, January 16th: Anniegirl1138

Monday, January 19th: Caribou’s Mom