Vietnam War & Past Lives: Inside Ellen Birkett Morris's Gripping Tale! | Episode 144

Ellen Burkett Morris, welcome to the Bookaholic podcast. >> Oh, thank you for having me. >> Yes, I am so glad you're here. You have got to be one of my most decorated authors that I've had on the podcast to date. We'll get in to some of your wonderful accolades in a little bit, but first we're going to dive in with your latest writing, which is Beware the Tall Grass. I will tell you, I just love the cover. It's just I don't know. It's mystical but yet comforting. Did you have a hand in developing the book cover? I had a hand in approving it. And I think what makes it so special is that it was created by a guy who is both a writer and a graphic designer. And they had me give him pages of the book and this is what he came up with. And I couldn't have been happier. It is just lovely. So maybe we'll circle back to without giving out any spoilers to see what this signifies with the rest of the story. So just give us a brief synopsis of Beware the Tall Grass. Yeah, Beware the Tall Grass is the story of a mother's love and a soldier's courage and the connection between those two. The mother has is lives in modern day and has a child who is experiencing past life memories of serving in the Vietnam War. It's a dual narrative. We hear from Eve the mother and also from Thomas, a Vietnam era soldier actually on the warfront. And so as the as we toggle between those two point of view characters, by the end of the story, we begin to understand what connects them. Wow, that is an amazing. And where did you get such an idea for this book? Yeah, I was in the car with my husband in 2014 listening to NPR as we were doing a road trip and they mentioned this University of Virginia Medical Center program where they actually take young children who have past life memories and they get their stories and then they attempt to corroborate those stories with news accounts of the day. So, if a kid says, "I died on this ship on this date next to my buddy Hal," they'll go and look at news accounts and manifest and see what facts match up. And a surprising number of times the facts do match up. And I thought, I was a short story writer at the time and I thought, "This is too intriguing. I need to write this." wrote it first as a short story and was told this would make a great novel and decided to take that on. It was an eight-year journey from a short story that centered on Eve and her family to a novel that included both Eve and Thomas. And the creation of Thomas was basically a way for me to figure out how to fill out the length of a novel. But once I started, it presented its own challenges and I really had to work hard to find ways for the even Thomas sections to echo one another for there to be resonance and meaning and then finally figure out the puzzle of how the two stories might come together. >> Wow. Okay. So, you said it was an eight-year journey. So, so the one challenge was, if I'm understanding you correctly, is that you had been a short story writer, so you had to get accustomed to making it into a novel, more words, and so that was challenging. How did you overcome that? >> I'll have to say there was a lot of fear in doing that. And so, I wrote very slowly. I jokingly tell people that writing this novel was like chipping away at a mountain with a pair of nail scissors. Just wrote it sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. I let it grow in my mind. I didn't pressure myself to move forward quickly. And then I began to see I begin to both subconsciously and consciously create these echoes between these stories in a way that might add meaning and resonance for the reader. And it was a journey that I used a mentor through the AWP writer to writer program. >> I showed it to various writers groups. I had a literary agent for a year but he was not really doing the work he needed to do. So I moved on from him and then ultimately my final step before finding publication was employing a developmental editor who was able to tell me turn up the volume here. Let's make a little more of a connection there. And that was hugely helpful. Perhaps the best investment I made in the whole journey of writing was getting an expert who knows what published material needs to look like to say, "Okay, do these tweaks." It was nothing. >> Yeah. Nothing huge, but all very meaningful. Yes, absolutely. Because I would think as being a short story writer then you if you're turning it into a novel you don't want to have want to think about I want to make sure my story is authentic for the reader and so I don't want to just fill it with anything. You needed that type of feedback. Definitely. Yeah, it was really helpful. And one of the things they told me, I had a lot of tall grass connection with Thomas. Things happen in the tall grass for him all the time, but they really wanted me to add a situation where Charlie, the young boy with the memories, was also in tall grass. So, that was really brilliant and it helped up the drama and helped me find my way to the conclusion. >> Wow. And now that you're speaking of it, and remember I was saying perhaps we can double back to the visual of the book, it's like your characters are in this tall grass and they're near the bottom. They're in the first third of the grass and the grass is up high and they're just trying to see through this grass. They can see through in parts because you can peel, you can push it back, but they can't see everything. Would you say that's sort of how that we should see that? I think that works. I think that works a lot. And also tall grass as a metaphor for danger, yourself in a dangerous situation. And prior to writing this novel and writing short stories, I wrote poetry. And I've really found that both in the short story and the novel, vivid imagery is works very well. Works very well to bring the reader into the story, but also works really well ultimately to serve as a central metaphor for the thing that you're writing about. So the tall grass really worked that way for me. It was both in the story. It was also a larger image that gave you an overall sense of what the major themes of the story were and really then provided this beautiful cover. >> Yeah. So if you can get an image or images central images going in your work that may really serve as a guidepost for you in writing and also as a guidepost for readers as they're making sense of the book. >> Absolutely. Now, why did you want to use the Vietnam War as part of your story for the childl to have that memory? >> Yeah, I and actually I spent 10 years working writing a newsletter for the Patent Museum Foundation in Fort Knox here in Kentucky. I easily could have picked World War II and had a really deep knowledge of what went on there. But there were a couple of men in my life, my husband's cousin and my uncle who served in Vietnam. And I was intrigued by the way in which their experiences affected them, affected their lives, in some ways maybe changed them. And I wanted to do it in honor of them. in particular in honor of my uncle Larry, my father's brother, who is just the one of the best people I know who went through this traumatic difficult experience and managed to come back and build this beautiful family life, became a firefighter, used all the adrenaline he had in battle, helping people here back at home. And so I thought I really wanted to go there. >> And on Yeah. And once I started writing, there was a book called We Were Soldiers Once and Young. That is the account, first person account of a commander and a soldier under his command that really guided me in writing the difficult vivid details about the Vietnam War. >> Wow. >> Yeah. Oh man. Yes. That's it sounds phenomenal. And it makes me think too, did this have a little bit to do with the story as well? I remember Vietnam Vietnam veterans came back when I was to the States when I was a little girl and they did not have the best welcome home whereas the soldiers of World War II had a great welcome home. Does that play in any part of the memories in this story? >> I don't address that directly. and have really noticed as I've been bringing this book into the world that here we are 60 years out and people are finally able to really write about and talk about the war in a way that fully realizes the experience of the soldiers and the sacrifices they made. One of the things I found in my research was that men, young men were taken out of factories, off of farms, and just sent to the jungle to fight a war they didn't understand with the only the only reference point for them was World War II, this noble war where the lines were really clear. And so they had to feel their way and it was such a predicament and that again provided a lot of inherent drama in the book. Here we man of integrity who has to figure his way through. A young man who loves people and animals and doesn't want to kill and yet is put in a situation where he has very little choice. Yeah, that was a big part of it for me. And I do think it serves to honor the experience not only of the soldiers but also the Vietnam Vietnamese people whose lives were so greatly affected by that. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. We've been talking a little bit more towards Charlie. Let's talk a little bit towards Eve. And so, what did you discover about family belief and skepticism while writing Eve's search for the truth? >> Yeah. Yeah. I I created Eve specifically as a very as a perfectionist, as a character who wants to give her child a perfect childhood and then created this situation in which she absolutely wasn't going to get what she wanted. I created her husband Dan as a really good person, but somebody whose past life whose personal life experience pushed against this idea. his mother had been addicted to psychics, lost the family's money was very traumatic for him. So when his wife comes to him and says, "I think our son has these past life memories, he just simply can't believe, you know, what she's saying." And so I think it's similar to families that have children who have issues and one parent wants to address it one way and the other parent really is in denial. And that that also creates great tension. >> Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely it does. Now, did this book shift any of your own beliefs about say reincarnation? And I've always been a skeptic, but since writing the book, I meet people who will tell me stories. I was sitting next to uh the writer Dane John's at the Louisville Book Festival, and he tells me about his son. They were in a They were in the car on a road trip and his son pointed to a factory and said, "That's the factory where I worked when I crashed my red truck and died." So, yeah, it was amazing. So, I'm hearing all these stories. Ultimately, I came to believe that there's so much we don't understand and that that's okay. Yeah. And as I wrote the book, I really reassured myself that I didn't have to explain reincarnation. I only had to show Eve's experience of puzzling through what was happening to her son. And that took a lot of pressure off me and allowed me to move forward without fear. So remembering as a writer that we don't have to explain every phenomenon, we only have to give the reader sort of a pinpoint sense of a character's experience of it. And that was huge for me. And so whenever I do interviews, I talk about that because I think that could help preiters up not to feel encumbered like they have to explain the world. That is a great point because and like you said, part of your thing was fear and you probably were fearing the ostracization of writing about reincarnation here in the United States. You've got people who are great sets of Christian believers and they wouldn't approach your book if you were shoving [snorts] reincarnation down their throat. That might have brought up a fear and you did not have to do that. Like you said, you don't have to explain the whole world. But the beauty of that to bring this other thought to people was just to simply demonstrate the child's past observation and bring that to light instead of talking directly about reincarnation. >> Yeah, absolutely. Everything is filtered through the characters and the characters experience. And then ultimately at the end of the book, Eve gives her own thoughts on what she thinks it's all about. And I found that was super hard to write, but also very compelling. >> Well, I not only see this as I can easily see this as a movie. [laughter] I can easily see this as a movie. Let's put that out in the universe because I think that's another that would be another opportunity to tell the story and without still having to shove that reincarnation as it were down people's throats. I think that even just hearing it from this point of view, a lot of people are not going to think of it as reincarnation as it were as just a memory, a mystical memory. >> Exactly. And a memory that carries a certain amount of intergenerational trauma. Um, yeah. Which echoes through time. Now, let's go back to the the your fellow writer that was telling you that his son said, "That's the factory where I used to work and I crashed my truck and died." So, did that friend, that author friend, did he follow up with you about any type of other stories that the child may have told? Did was there any followup to that? He as a parent did. He didn't tell me about other stories, but he did tell me, and this is typical based on the research I've done, he did tell me that when the child grew older, around the time the kid started to form his own memories, these past life memories faded. And that's researchers will say these kids have these strong memories. They can even know how to do things like put a gun together, which they shouldn't know how to do. about the time they get memories. So these are really young kids just like Charlie in the book. About the time they get memories then the other memories fade which is fascinating. It's almost like their own memories take the place of those other memories. You know what? I can see that. I can see that and I can understand that because I do believe very young children also have to use a word mystical encounters and then as they get older all that they can't remember that kind of fades away. I can see how that can happen. Wow. This is certainly an intriguing book. But now let's talk about some of your wonderful accolades. So is there any award or moment of recognition that felt especially validating in your career and why that particular accolade? Yeah, I would say it's the Donald L. Jordan Prize that I got for this book for Beware of the Tall Grass. And the reason it felt so significant to me was that was that the judge for the contest was Lance Samantha Chang who heads up the Iowa Writer Workshop. Yeah, >> if I applied for the Iowa Writer Workshop, I probably couldn't get in. For her to read my work and say, "This is good. This is the one I pick." Felt hugely validating. And I have to say, when I started out as a writer, it's all a very slow build and it really is about fear and confidence. And I started as a poet and I got one of my poems nominated for a push cart prize and that made me feel more confident. And so it's been a long road of both study and studying writing and reading and entering things to contest and for submission and then building that confidence. And so I think you see reflected in my bio how exactly hard I've worked at getting my work into the hands of other people and trying to perfect it and trying to reach the next level with all of that. But really, it's the accumulated effort of 25, 30 years of concerted focus on the writing. But definitely the Jordan Prize was huge for me in terms of feeling like I was doing with the book what I needed to do. And it made me think that that eight years was time well spent. And I interview authors for a site called Author Link. And a lot of those people will talk about their 10year book, their 15-year book, >> their yearbook. Yeah. So to those writers out there, don't lose heart. And to those readers, this is a gift to you. This is a gift of enormous time and effort. Absolutely. And I will concur that I've had other authors on this podcast where that I've interviewed and and sometimes it takes years. Most writers don't have the James Patterson machine or the Colleen Hoover machine behind them, but yes. Yeah. Don't give up hope. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, what do you have coming up next? You've done poetry, you've done short stories, you've done a novel. What do you think will be your next term? >> I'll tell you, I've got a couple things in the works. I have a short story collection called Home Repair Manual that I'm sending to small presses in hopes of finding a home. And I've got a novel that I'm sending to agents that is much lighter than this book. It's called Mapping the Sky and it's a little bit of a romance and there's celestial discovery. There's a love triangle. There's a lot going on in that book. I do think for me the final frontier would be something like memoir and I'm not sure I'll get there. I do find that most of my fiction filters experiences and things I care about and I'm very comfortable doing that through fiction. I'm not sure that I'll find the confidence to actually write my own story, but that would be the final frontier for me. Absolutely. Ellen, I pray that you get to write all that is in your mind and in your heart. I feel like you have so much to give and I really appreciate you being on the show today and we're just going to talk show Beware the Tall Grass once again. Where can we find Beware the Tall Grass? Oh, you can find it at all major outlets. It's on Amazon. It's an independent bookstore. Some of those places will have it on the shelf. Some you'll need to order through their website. It's also available through UG Press, University of Georgia Press on their website. Yeah, it's pretty much everywhere. Absolutely. And we will certainly have a link to Beware the Tall Grass in the podcast podcast show notes and on the YouTube description box. Ellen Brooett Morris, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you. It was a pleasure.