August 17, 2010
Not long after the new year I finally sat down to begin work on Dear Karen, a book about my father, the Vietnam War, and my relationship to both. One part memoir, one part biography, and one part artist's book, Dear Karen tells the story of my father in Vietnam, my parent's love for one another in the face of such adversity, and what it means to grow up the son of a Vietnam veteran. To this end, I intend that the majority of the book will consist of colored prints of the actual letters that my father wrote my mother over the course of his thirteen-month tour of duty. My goal is to have a first draft finished by the spring and to start introducing the book to publishers soon after. Here is a short excerpt:
Not long after the new year I finally sat down to begin work on Dear Karen, a book about my father, the Vietnam War, and my relationship to both. One part memoir, one part biography, and one part artist's book, Dear Karen tells the story of my father in Vietnam, my parent's love for one another in the face of such adversity, and what it means to grow up the son of a Vietnam veteran. To this end, I intend that the majority of the book will consist of colored prints of the actual letters that my father wrote my mother over the course of his thirteen-month tour of duty. My goal is to have a first draft finished by the spring and to start introducing the book to publishers soon after. Here is a short excerpt:
All the physical qualities of the letters, when combined with the few fragments of language that my father repeated time and again, that were punctuated only by his chilling accounts of thirst and sleeplessness, heat and booby traps, boredom and the monsoons, create a sorrowful cry that survives today as a meditation on loneliness, separation, longing, fear, and death. And it's in these passages, the ones wherein my father wrestles with death--the death of a buddy, the death of an enemy, his own death just narrowly escaped--that his letters reach their unsettling climax and arrive at a kind of poignancy that can only be achieved by the account of someone who was actually there. As I studied each one, it became increasingly clear that for me, these letters were about more than just my mother and father or tracing one man's experience of the Vietnam War and his struggle to survive it. Rather, they trace one man's desperate struggle just to communicate, to put into words and make sense of what he was thinking and feeling, all his competing dreams and suspicions, his fears and disappointments, his doubts, desires, and obsessions, one man's desperate struggle to negotiate the very depths of human emotion with the clumsy stuff of language itself. And yet somehow these letters are in fact able to communicate, and in many cases, far beyond the essential meaning of the words they contain.If you'd like to find out more e-mail me at cbozif@gmail.com
