WIPs

Domnica Radulescu is the Edwin A. Morris Professor of French and Italian literature at Washington and Lee University, and is a consultant with the Romanian Studies Association of America. She is the author of two best-selling novels: Black Sea Twilight (Doubleday 2010 & 2011) and Train to Trieste (Knopf 2008 & 2009). Train to Trieste has been published in twelve languages and is the winner of the 2009 Library of Virginia Fiction Award. Her play The Town with Very Nice People: A Strident Operetta has been chosen as a runner up for the 2013 Jane Chambers Playwriting award given by the Association for Theater in Higher Education. Her play Naturalized Woman was produced at the Thespis Theater Festival in New York City in 2012. She has authored, edited and co-edited several scholarly books on theater, exile and representations of women and received the 2011 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. She is also a Fulbright scholar and is presently working on her fourth novel titled My Father’s Orchards and on a new play titled Exile is My Home.

Domnica, as evinced by this chapter (“We’ll Always Have Hollywood”), Country of Red Azeleas packs a powerful punch through beautiful prose, bringing together soul mates Lara and Marija in an LA reunion after many years, ones which included horrific episodes in Marija’s case during the Bosnian War. When in the novel does this chapter appear?

The chapter “We’ll always Have Hollywood” comes towards the end of the novel and is of crucial importance in the development of the story as it reunites the two heroines after a long period of separation. Up to this point in the novel we have traced the destinies of the two protagonists starting from their childhood growing up in the former Yugoslavia, partly in Sarajevo, partly in Belgrade and then separately throughout their different and tumultuous journeys. At the start of the Bosnian war in 1992, Marija and Lara part and go their separate ways: Lara immigrates to the United States by marrying an American literature professor and Marija returns from Belgrade to her native Sarajevo where she works as a wartime journalist until the summer of 1995 when she and her family become the victims of atrocious war crimes by Serbian soldiers. Following the summer of 1995 all communications between Lara and Marija are interrupted, yet the reader follows for some time their separate stories: Marija’s story as she tries to recover from the terrific traumas suffered at the end of the war and her own immigration to the United States and Lara’s story as she becomes a professor of political science in the nation’s capital, as she has her daughter Natalia and as her marriage dissolves into a rollercoaster of adultery, a turbulent divorce and custody litigation.

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Khanh Ha’s debut novel is FLESH (June 2012, Black Heron Press). He graduated from Ohio University with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism. His new novel has earned a 2013 Leapfrog Fiction Award Honorable Mention. His short stories have appeared in Outside in Literary & Travel Magazine, Red Savina Review (RSR), Cigale Literary Magazine, Mobius, DUCTS, Lunch Ticket, The Mascara Literary Review, Taj Mahal Review, Glint Literary Journal, The Literary Yard, and will be forthcoming in the summer issues of Zymbol, Yellow Medicine Review (2013 September Anthology), The Underground Voices (2013 December Anthology), and The Long Story (2014 March Anthology). www.authorkhanhha.com

 Khanh, “Of Bones and Lust” from your novel Once in a Lullaby provides great depth into the narrator’s background. Can you describe how the chapter sets up the greater narrative and what’s to follow?

Once in a Lullaby is narrated by two voices in time parallel. Giang (pronounced Zhang), the narrator seen in “Of Bones and Lust,” is a Vietnam war veteran, a former North Vietnamese soldier who defected to the South, and later a reform-camp prisoner following the fall of South Vietnam in 1975. After spending 10 years in a remote prison camp, as a drifter he finally settles in the Mekong Delta in the U Minh region, working as a caretaker in a roadside inn. Nicola Rossi, a deceased lieutenant in the U.S. army, is the other voice, the voice of a spirit, the omniscient voice. Through his voice we follow a search by an American woman–his mother–for the remains of her son, who went missing-in-action during the Vietnam War, where we come face to face with broken psyche, with barbarity, and with moral correctness. With his mother is her Vietnamese daughter adopted in 1974 when she was five years old. She’s eighteen now when she meets 39-year-old Giang. He arranges for their stay at the inn and gets Miss Rossi a local man, another war veteran, who takes the American lady into the forest every day to look for bones. Whether she could eventually find her son’s remains will be answered within the greater narrative. But it is always the bones. When you hold it in your hands, a fragment of bone, or a morose-looking skull marred with spiderweb cracks, you wouldn’t know if it was a Vietnamese or an American bone or skull.

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Carole Glasser Langille lives in Nova Scotia and teaches poetry in the creative writing program at Dalhousie University. She is the author of four books of poetry and a collection of short stories, as well as two children’s picture books. Her book Church of the Exquisite Panic: The Ophelia Poems, published in 2012, was recently nominated for The Atlantic Poetry Prize. Carole has also been nominated for The Governor General Award and one of her children’s books was selected for “Our Choice Award” from the Canadian Children’s Book Centre. Several of her poems can be found at Canadian Poetry Online.

Carole, “Red” begins with a gripping opening line, and then reveals Rhiannon as a woman stricken by grief and confusion after the death or her fiancé. Does her apparent obliviousness to his drug problem indicate another character trait? Like Jill finally asked: how could she not have known?

Thanks for your question. In this story Rhiannon does seem to be a woman who is self involved and unaware. Several characters in this collection aren’t clued in to the world around them, hence the title of the collection, “You’re Stunned, Girl.” But I have sympathy for Rhiannon as well. Hard as we try, everyone has times in their lives when they’re stunned.

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