Lazarus, Home from the War is out!

So first off, today is the day that Lazarus, Home from the War comes out! I’m very excited. You can find the book on all the main sites here, on itch.io here, or on my website here. It’s on Goodreads here. For those looking to order the paperback through your local stores, that should be available to order now or very shortly using the ISBN, which is 979-8988394433.

Second off, today is Hmong-Lao Veterans Day in Wisconsin. I just found this out yesterday! The Hmong were deeply involved in the Vietnam War and came here as refugees afterward, so I wanted to commemorate this, given the topic of the book.

Now, for those with longer attention spans or nothing better to do, a little essay.

LHftW is a very personal book in a lot of ways. I lived in Vietnam for a year and I have a master’s degree in Southeast Asian studies, so I have a weird and probably outsized attachment to the whole region. But my connection to VN goes farther back than an impulsive decision I made in college. 

(What, you didn’t decide on impulse to move to Ho Chi Minh City?)

When I was in college as an undergrad, I lived for several years at the corner of Bassett Street and Dayton, a block from the Mifflin Street Co-op. Mifflin Street was the originating location, in 1969, of the Mifflin Street Block Party, a political protest cum bacchanal that was where former three-time Madison mayor Paul Soglin got beaten by the cops and arrested. Or a place. These things as facts are all very well and good—and living in the area, I was relatively aware of them—but why choose Mifflin Street for the party?

Basically, this area was the heart of the hippie student neighborhood during the 60s/70s, and thus the heart of the antiwar movement in Madison. At some point, and I can’t quite work out the timing (except that it was before 1975), Bassett was nicknamed Ho Chi Minh Trail. I have no idea if this was a self-given title, or a bit of anti-anti war-movement vitriol; nevertheless, the locals embraced it, and put up a street sign.

Before I knew this was a real, actual street sign, my editor and I discussed whether the nickname was a dog whistle, and I removed a reference to it from the final version of Dionysus in Wisconsin because it was too difficult to explain all of this in passing. But I’ve since had it confirmed, not just by the photographs, but by long-time Madisonians as well.

In June 1975, following the fall of Saigon, the city council rejected an attempt to rename the street permanently “in a spirit of reconciliation,” and the sign came down.

(Click here to view a photo of the street sign and a newspaper article on Facebook.)

I still find the whole thing fascinating. But it’s also emblematic of how the US’s relationship with Vietnam has for many years been mediated by the war. I went to HCMC more than a decade after Clinton normalized relations with the country, and it was still such a part of the collective memory in the US that this fact—”Bassett used to be called Ho Chi Minh Trail”—was the main thing I heard from my peers when I announced I was going. (Maybe that says something about who I was hanging out with, too.)

Interestingly, learning about the war for the first time mostly from the Vietnamese side of things, where it’s often referred to as the Resistance War Against America, gave me a view that I now often see echoed in online discourse about it–that it was really a war fought between the United States and Vietnam. This was not, on the whole, a common view at the time–if anything, it was perceived to be not a war between South and North Vietnam that was not the US’s war to fight. It was also not the view of the South Vietnamese who came to the US as refugees. It’s interesting how the rhetoric has shifted.

That said, Vietnam is an amazing country. And so is Thailand, my other love, where Laz has also spent time. A few years later, after I’d been back in Madison for a while, I went back to school for library science and wound up also getting an MA from what was then called the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, wherein I mostly studied Thai.

So because of my own, uh, checkered past, Laz spent some time hanging around at Than Son Nhut (a base on the edge of Saigon, actually not far from where I used to live) flying Jolly Green Giants (search and rescue helicopters) before getting sent to a base in Northern Thailand, where he flew other things (the RF-4C Phantom, mostly) and also did some light espionage hung out with a monk he met.

And then he comes home, which is really where the novel begins. I can’t say anymore, because of spoilers. But I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

I’ll catch you at the beginning of June with my normal newsletter!

May Newsletter: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon

When I noticed the date, I decided to send out the newsletter early. Probably I’ve been thinking about Viet Nam too much. (April 27th was also the 50th anniversary of the release of the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, so…take your pick what to commemorate this week.)

In eleven days, I am running Ice Age 50k, which is held in Kettle Moraine State Park (the southern unit) outside of La Grange, Wisconsin. I registered for the race in December. In the time since then, I have run somewhere in the neighborhood of seven hundred miles, had a brief bout of COVID that left me with a chronic cough, and got hit by a car once (non-fatally; don’t worry about it). There were days when the temperature was about 10°F. There were days when it was lower. There were mysterious aches and pains in calves and hamstrings that I worried would blossom into injuries. And there were times when the days were very dark and I thought perhaps I should pack it in altogether.

Nevertheless, here we are.

Running is a lot like writing. (Haruki Murakami wrote a whole book about this—What I Talk About When I Talk About Running—so I won’t belabor the comparison.) Both because when it’s going badly, you can always crawl into a nearby bush and wait for the end…or because it doesn’t help to get ahead of yourself. Standing on the starting line with 31 miles to go is intimidating. Staring at a blank page with eighty thousand words in front of you is terrifying. But I can run one mile (some days, I can run to the next mailbox). And then I can run another one. I can write a word, or a page, or a couple hundred words.

All of which is to say, we’re fifteen days away from the release of Lazarus, Home from the War, and I’m very excited. I’ve spent so long doing research and tightening the screws and buffing out the dents, that I’ve hardly let myself look up and see that this day was coming. I’ve spent many weeks dragging myself through edits by saying I could do one chapter, or one page, or one sentence, and then repeat and repeat and repeat.

And somehow, we’ve made it.

A watercolor sketch of a mountain in Tasmania with some pink and purple clouds behind it.
Original photo by @antongorlin@mastodon.art

Publicity and Appearances

Rebecca Crunden, who runs the Indie Book Spotlight blog/account on Bluesky, interviewed me for her blog here.

I’ll be at WisCon the weekend of May 23–26. It’s being held online, and you can get tickets here. Disappointingly, they don’t seem to be doing readings this year, but I’ll be participating in a panel on writing about religion in sci-fi and fantasy at 4pm CT on Friday, May 23rd. 

For those in Janesville, Wisconsin, I’ll be at the Hedberg Public Library’s Book Fest on June 21, selling books and tarot decks from 2:30-4:30pm. Their website is here. Fun fact: the Hedberg Public Library was originally a Carnegie Library, and it cost $35,000 in 1902 dollars.

Podcast News

We put out two episodes on medieval memes: “Ask a Memevalist” and “The Field Where I Grow My [D]ucks” (thanks to autocorrect for inspiring the episode title). Both episodes examine some medieval memes we collected from across the web, all of which can be found in the episode notes (we also describe them in the episode). We also put out “An Emergency Popecast” on Pope Francis and the upcoming conclave. (Has it started yet? Hmm.)

Things I’ve Been Reading

I read We Bombed in New Haven, a play by Joseph Heller. Was it Catch-22: The Play? No. Did it send me down a rabbit hole during which I read some guy’s PhD thesis on performances of masculinity in WWII novels? Yes. (Playing a Terrible Game of Pretend: Masculine Performance and Gender Humor in the WWII Novels of Heller, Vonnegut, Pynchon, and Weaver, by Tomas Glover Pollard.)

I listened to an (abridged) audiobook of Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), by Jerome K. Jerome. It was short, funny, and narrated by Hugh Laurie, which made it even better. If you enjoyed Jeeves and Wooster, this is just the ticket. Honestly, my only complaint is how far abridged it was. 

I listened to the audiobook of The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson. I read it years ago (it’s referenced in “Dous,” at least partly because it is where the word/concept of “planchette” entered my vocabulary, which later became a central component of a delightful set piece in Dionysus in Wisconsin), but the narrator’s performance really brings out some of the humor I’d either missed when I read it with my eyeballs or forgotten about. The work as a whole is so well-written. It’s taut with tension and spare, but the details that are there really sing. As a story, it knows exactly where it is going from the very first moments. What an impressive achievement.

Further Administratrivia

Starting with this edition, all newsletters will be publicly archived on my blog, so if you delete this and then want to refer to the information contained herein, you can find them at http://ehlupton.com/blog/.

If you signed up to be an ARC reader and did not receive a copy of the book, let me know! I sent everything out fifteen days ago, but fear some may have been caught in spam filters.

That’s all for now. I’ll send out another message when the book’s out, so talk to you all in two weeks.