W.D. Ehrhart in Conversation

W. D. Ehrhart, named by Studs Terkel as “the poet of the Vietnam War,” has written and lectured on a wide variety of topics and has been a preëminent voice on the Vietnam War for decades. Revered in academia, he has been the subject of many master’s theses, doctoral dissertations, journals and books for which he was interviewed. Yet only two major interviews have been published to date. This complete collection of unpublished interviews from 1991 through 2016 presents Ehrhart’s developing views on a range of subjects over three decades.

Jean-Jacques Malo studied at the Université de Nantes, France and Birmingham University, England. He taught at the University of Wales in Cardiff, and the University of Washington in Seattle and has been teaching at the IUT de l’Université de Nantes since 2001. His research on Vietnam encompasses films as well as published translations of Vietnam War poetry into French.

Edited by Jean-Jacques Malo
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 236
Bibliographic Info: bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2017
pISBN: 978-1-4766-7040-9
eISBN: 978-1-4766-3004-5
Imprint: McFarland

Table of Contents

Editor’s Introduction 1
In the Beginning Was the Deed (Adi Wimmer) 5
I Couldn’t Just Walk Away (Kristian Grey Chickey) 14
However Imperfect the Representation (Subarno Chattarji) 16
I Myself Was the Evil (Yousra Hassan Rashad) 61
A Bowl of Alphabet Soup (Tom Chen) 66
Every Day I’m Always on Patrol (Annalisa Bova) 75
Something Inside of Me (Amelia Moriarty) 81
Lessons Learned and Not Learned (Luong Nguyen An Dien) 86
Institutionalized “Sour Grapes” (Jon Dillingham) 90
Long Time to Wait (Thanh Nien News Special Report) 95
Writing as Therapy (Katherine McGuire) 98
Coming Home (Andrew Herm) 102
A Collective Effort (Nicholas Obradovich) 104
Three Poems and Three Questions (Emily Kunisch) 110
The Writer as Straight Shooter (Jean-Jacques Malo) 112
Politics, Polemics and Poetry (Meggan McGuire) 164
We Shouldn’t Have Been There (Adam Gilbert) 168
Going Back and Coming Back (Mia Martin Hobbs) 196
Three Unusual Questions (Miriam Sagan) 216
Military History of W.D. Ehrhart 219
An Ehrhart Bibliography 221
Selected Works About Ehrhart 223
Index 225

“All of Ehrhart’s works are indeed exceptional. This book may enlighten the reader, as it has me, about aspects of life that might not other wise be discovered”—The Veteran