MWSA Interview with Travis Klempan

Date of Interview: 7 October 2020

Travis Klempan served in the Navy for twelve years, deploying three times. He earned a degree in English literature from the US Naval Academy and master's degrees in creative writing from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and ethics from the University of Colorado Law School. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Ash & Bones, Windmill, and Bombay Gin, among others, and his short stories have received recognition from the Veterans Writing Project, Line of Advance, and Flyway Journal.

MWSA: What do you think are the main benefits of being an MWSA member?

One of the most common answers to "What was your favorite part of being in the military" is "The people I served with." Now, having been out of uniform, I'm always looking for ways to stay connected with a community of like-minded but diverse people. MWSA seems like an organization with a common mission and a broad base of support. Knowing that other military writers face the same troubles and celebrate the same triumphs means that I'm not doing this alone.

MWSA: What do you hope readers "take away" from your novel Have Snakes, Need Birds?

Everyone is going to come to my book with their own life experiences and for their own reasons. I would love for people - especially military readers - to walk away from it with a sense of seeing something of themselves in it. HSNB has a huge cast of characters (and that's even after editing many storylines out or combining characters), so hopefully, they get a sense of how quirky men and women in the military can be, and how hard it should be to stereotype them. I also want people to respond in a deeper way since this isn't the "typical" war story. Sure, there are firefights and convoys, but there's a spiritual and mystical element at work that should unnerve people and make them think after they've put the book down. My biggest hope, though, is that they enjoy reading it and recommend it to a friend.

MWSA: What was the hardest part of writing Have Snakes, Need Birds?

More than the mechanics of getting a story onto the page, and editing it and cleaning it up so that it's sharp and tight and fluid and all those things, one of the hardest things to do - and still makes me pause each time I reread it - was to say goodbye to any character. It's a war story, but there's so much loss that it's hard to end a storyline or know that two characters will never get to reunite or meet and that people, even with fictional lives, have such an impact on everyone they meet.

MWSA: What's your next writing adventure?

Without giving away too much of the plot of HSNB, the main character Mack falls in love with a woman Sera (that much you can learn from the back cover). He loses Sera, though, in a way that he'll never get her back. However, Sera's best friend Mo - whose life continues on outside the events of HSNB - re-encounters Mack after he's left the military. Mo becomes the main character of her own story, and Mack is an important part of her journey. It's been tough to write and I really want to "get it right," but I hope to have a "follow-on" book (not a sequel) out next year or the year after, with a third and final follow-on after that.

MWSA: Any advice for new writers, or those who want to try their hand at writing?

Figure out who you're writing for and why. If you're writing for yourself, that's absolutely legitimate and no one should say otherwise. If you're writing for others, there are additional demands on what you write and how you broadcast it. Once you've released your writing into the world, it's not totally yours any longer. More practical advice: read, a lot. Join a writing group (even a virtual one) or take writing classes (Lighthouse Writers in Denver is just one example). Read some more. Don't be afraid to edit, edit, edit, and while you should take your work and your craft seriously, try not to take yourself too seriously.

MWSA: How has your military experience influenced you as a writer, and how did it influence your book Have Snakes, Need Birds?

I'll answer that second question first. To start, HSNB follows an Army sergeant deployed to a combat zone. I was an officer in the Navy, and while I was enlisted before that and while I deployed to Iraq, Mack's experiences were, by definition, very different from mine. However, I used the "improvise, adapt, and overcome" mentality that seems so useful and ubiquitous in the military to figure out what parts I needed to get "right" (language, ranks, dialogue), what parts I could "fudge" (the battalion Mack deploys with, the 33rd Infantry Regiment, hasn't been activated since the Korean War, which allowed me some latitude and flexibility), and what was the "most" important (the feel, the heat, the grit, the day-to-day and the big picture, along with the impending but delayed sense of doom). Generally speaking, I'm not quite as disciplined now in my personal life as I was in the military, but I still try to write or think about writing every day. I keep notes on my phone and computer and in a notebook, and I'm not joking when I say I do a lot of my writing in my head...it's just a gamble if I can get it out of there before I lose it.