My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I finished this slender book last weekend after having met the author at the San Miguel Writers Conference. Through a series of brilliantly political, interconnected short stories, the novel is a tragic epitaph for a fictional Southeast Asian island nation that Westernized during Kennedy’s presidency, and through a strangling forty-year relationship with the US, found itself on the wrong end of the military-industrial complex.

The novel’s final moments represent the very worst of cynical American foreign policy, perhaps to a degree that betrays the writer’s political bias. My own sympathy for some of these views aside, the fictive dream wavers in a critical moment. It’s the only heavyhanded portion of the book, committing what Virginia Woolf once criticized in Emily Bronte’s writing–the error of putting one’s own convictions on the page so strongly that the story must step aside for a moment.

Yet the book is lyrical, beautiful, and sharply researched and imagined. Vida Hamburg has a journalism background, and her exactitude and broad knowledge combine with a cast of well-drawn characters. The characters are secondary to the social and political life of Chomumbhar during its relationship with the US, yet even the reader who shies from politics will enjoy the novel’s foreign flavor.

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My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Constructed around a mysterious narrator’s appearance in Southern Iraqi town during the Iraq War, the novel uses an almost military pattern of repetition to peel back the layers on the narrator’s role in the town’s politics. We learn he is an aristocratic-born, Western-educated doctor in hiding, and only a few of the townspeople share his secret–but the faerie-like Leila, a young female visitor, threatens to upset his plan.

I wanted to love this book, and may return to it later this year. I set it aside in early January after encountering a disturbing scene of animal cruelty (sorry, often one of my dealbreakers for a book’s sensibility), and though the scene served its part in the book, I had a hard time picking it back up again and continuing. Once you lose momentum, it’s tough to get it back–even when there is a good mystery in the making.

Buchholz is otherwise a deft writer with a surprisingly lyrical style. He writes from his experience as a US soldier in the world and maintains an interesting blog of Middle Eastern contradictions, Not Quite Right.

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Let me clarify exactly how good this is. There have always been lots of freelance editors. I am one. In my ten years of full-time freelancing, I have had to work very hard to distinguish my website from the sites of unscrupulous people who say they know how to edit, but don’t know the difference between an em-dash and an M&M.

The editors that Kathleen Anderson is talking about, on the other hand, are hard to find on the web. They have little websites that are as plain as vanilla pudding. But buried on those HTML-coded dinosaurs is a list of successful authors that scrolls, and scrolls, and (remember, these aren’t high-tech websites) keeps on scrolling.

You’ll find some of them on Facebook here and here.

You’ll pay a lot for these editors’ services. You’ll get unvarnished honesty, and a frank opinion of how salable your manuscript is. The advice is worth it. I have sat through hundreds of workshops in my writing career, and edited hundreds of manuscripts since I left the Carnegie Mellon University Press to start my own business. I don’t trust editors easily. I may not have hired one had my mentor, Jane McCafferty (First You Try Everything, One Heart), not personally recommended her now-freelance editor, Marjorie Braman, to me.

And let me say, Kathleen Anderson’s tip is right on. Marjorie is now probably the only person in the world who can tell me to change everything, and I’ll listen. I am sixty pages into a revision of a novel I never thought I would rewrite, and I love what the advice is doing for the story.

Being an editor gives me some advantages as a writer, but I still need outside help. If I didn’t love my characters enough to overlook a few of their shortcomings, I wouldn’t have felt compelled to tell their stories in the first place. As my wife’s academic advisor once told her about medicine, “You don’t have to know everything. You just can’t be stupid.”

And it would be foolish indeed to ignore the wealth of editorial talent out there right now.

Honestly, I’m not sure how many people read this blog often or at all. But amid the flurry of reporting on sexual violence in the military (here and here, for instance), I too notice a bizarre dual reality in the military’s treatment of women. As the wife of a female officer candidate at Fort Sam Houston and as a thinking human being, I’ve made a few observations.

1. I am not talkative. I talk about politics even less. But if I make even a passing mention of the fact that the military’s unequal treatment of same-sex partners is unfair, I get shushed. The implication is that we’ve won the right to not get fired, now shut up about it.

2. Despite complaints, soldiers with a history of harassing women or abusing a position of power are slow to face consequences. Almost any servicemember has a story about this.

3. As one friend pointed out, women who report an incident are moved elsewhere–not the offender. This makes little practical sense because the survivor must reestablish social connections in a new location at a time when existing connections are the most important.

4. A few months ago, the base conducted a mandatory training on sexual violence. Most of the soldiers cracked jokes or studied throughout the talk, but to the few who listened, the presenter confidently announced, “In a few years we will have eradicated sexual violence in the military.” No wonder no one took him seriously.

As a survivor of sexual assault and harassment, I understand context. Specifically, that there is never a convenient or safe time to tell the truth. Also that a pervasive blame-the-victim attitude makes it frightening to come forward, because almost inevitably, more scrutiny falls on the woman’s behavior than the man’s. The perverse result is that the survivor feels more ashamed of the truth than her rapist.

That’s why the military needs to be serious about its protection of whistleblowers; for instance, setting aside the automatic punishment of officer-enlistee fraternization, guaranteeing a serious review of every case, and putting the decision in the hands of people sensitive to the nuances of sexual violence. Some of these measures are already in process, but if the naive, we-can-eradicate-it! attitude prevails while women are still regularly being assaulted, those measures aren’t worth a dime.

Culturally, the military resists change because it sees itself as different from civil society–tougher, manlier, more stoic, cabalistic, whatever. I don’t buy it. A warrior myth will help you on the battlefield, but the rest of the time, we’re Americans–our soldiers aren’t Spartans, Romans, or Janissaries, but men and women from down the street who make a living doing almost everything civilians do; from cooking food, to treating patients, to fixing boat engines, to payroll. The people who fill these jobs are contiguous with the society they protect, and they don’t deserve to be treated like the spoils of war behind their own lines.

As an employer of probably the widest cross-section of American society, the military needs to listen. It’s simple: If you serve to protect life, liberty, and happiness, tolerating rape and discrimination is indefensible. Values and issues outside the military have a place inside it, too. A better process for taking care of servicemembers is essential, and just as important is an unwillingness to tolerate violence and bigotry among peers–and perhaps the argument can be made that the latter is even better, because intervention by peers happens more often and more effectively than a chain-of-command response. Either way, until women who choose to wear the uniform are entitled to the same civil justice as everyone else, no, we won’t shut up about it. Why should we?

First let me say: I love this woman. She has an enormous amount of raw energy. She moved back and forth across the stage and into the front of the aisle, as if we were standing in a big town square instead of a packed lecture hall. And she’s a lively and organized thinker, too, moving her talk from the intellectual atmosphere of her childhood, to the sexual harassment scandals at Yale and Cambridge, to the necessity of finding one’s true voice.

So, for a seminar about political writing, she walks the talk. The talk was about shedding the invisible rules we’ve grown up with. (I felt the message was addressed to women, especially, but it was inclusive.) And the “walk” is powerful, persuasive writing that comes from questioning and/or rejecting those rules, speaking your truth, and using it to create change in the world.

She offer six pointers for finding your true voice, and some tips for good activist writing.

1. Get used to being weird.

2. Don’t seek approval, because approval is stifling.

3. Practice the belief daily that you are entitled to your own opinion. Seek to know what you think.

4. Divest yourself of anyone who trivializes you. 

5. Avoid jargon, complications, Latinates, and hiding. 

6. Use clear structure. Logic is your friend.