I’m happy to welcome author Nancy Stroer. Today, Nancy shares interesting facts about her creative journey and her debut novel, Playing Army.

Interview

What is something you’ve lied about?

Hmmm, sometimes I leave out the bald-faced truth to spare people’s feelings, just like any other well-socialized person, but it is rare for me to tell a straight-up lie. Once I told a senior officer that I thought another cadet would make a good officer someday, when I absolutely thought she was a slacker. As I remember it, it was to close ranks around the women in our training unit. It seems like the right thing to do even as I’m thinking about it now. Men protect each other all the time in the military; this was one time I lied to protect another woman, even though she wasn’t all that great.

What are you reading now?

I always have several books on the go, but I’m reading a Banana Yoshimoto book (The Premonition) that isn’t really doing it for me. We lived in Japan for three years and loved every bit of it, and I like to read Japanese authors to remind me of the otherworldly, often melancholy but beautiful and special country that it is. Maybe it’s just the translation of this one, because although the mood is right, the language feels stilted and I’m not understanding where the story is going. I might go back and re-read Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being for the millionth time! Or maybe I prefer Asian authors who are also Western? I think I need to interrogate myself about this a little…

How do you come up with the titles to your books?

Usually they come to me in a flash (the title of the novel I’m working on was the first thing I knew for sure about the story), but sometimes they take work and patience! Playing Army was called Everyday Athena for a long, long time. That does still sort of tell you what it’s about – the lives of ordinary women in the Army – but I was so glad when the flash for “playing Army” arrived in my brain. That is much more the core of what I wanted to say about faking it until you make it, and feeling like you have to, or can get away with, acting a certain part rather than being authentic.

Share your dream cast for your book.

I can picture my characters very clearly but don’t know actors who look like Min or Logan or Shumacher or the Old Man or Washburn or Storey. If a movie or miniseries were ever made, though, I would positively throw myself at Samira Wiley (from “Orange is the New Black”) to play First Sergeant. Her parents were even in the Army! She’d be perfect.

Blurb

It’s 1995 and the Army units of Fort Stewart, Georgia are gearing up to deploy to Bosnia, but Lieutenant Minerva Mills has no intention of going to war-torn eastern Europe. Her father disappeared in Vietnam and, desperate for some kind of connection to him, she’s determined to go on a long-promised tour to Asia. But the Colonel will only release her on two conditions—that she reform the rag-tag Headquarters Company so they’re ready for the peacekeeping mission, and that she get her weight within Army regs, whichever comes second. Min only has one summer to kick everyone’s butts into shape but the harder she plays Army, the more the soldiers—and her body—rebel. If she can’t even get the other women on her side, much less lose those eight lousy pounds, she’ll never have another chance to stand where her father once stood in Vietnam, feeling what he felt. The Colonel may sweep her along to Bosnia or throw her out of the Army altogether. Can you fake it until you make it? Min is about to find out.

Excerpt

My heart raced, not in a good way, as a helicopter thudded overhead toward Hunter Army Airfield twenty miles away. Had my father died in a helicopter assault? The notification only said he’d gone missing in a fire fight, but he’d been assigned to the air cavalry. He hadn’t been a movie star like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, though—just another Air Cav soldier who disappeared in the Mekong Delta in April of 1969. I imagined myself crouched backward over the skids of a Huey. Terrified, with the sound of AK-47s firing below and nothing to connect me to safety but a nylon rope. Nothing but the empty black maw of my ignorance waiting to swallow me whole. You would think, if my father had been liked and respected, the soldiers from his platoon would have responded to the letters I’d written but no one ever had, leaving me only questions so corrosive my insides burned.

It was strange how the absence of a person could occupy so much mental real estate, but the Army—all of America, really—was obsessed with the bodies of the soldiers left behind. The dead were probably at peace—I had to believe that—but those who remained were not. For me, nothing but boots on the ground in Vietnam would satisfy my relentless drive to understand, and Korea was the closest place to Vietnam the Army would send me.

Author Bio and Links

Nancy Stroer grew up in a very big family in a very small house in Athens, Georgia and served in the beer-soaked trenches of post-Cold War Germany. She holds degrees from Cornell and Boston University, and her work has appeared in the Stars and Stripes, Soldiers magazine, Hallaren Lit Mag, Wrath-Bearing Tree, and Things We Carry Still, an anthology of military writing from Middle West Press.

She’s a teacher and a trainer, and an adjunct faculty member of the Ellyn Satter Institute, a 503(c) not-for-profit that helps individuals and families develop a more joyful relationship to food and their bodies. Playing Army is her first novel.

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Giveaway

A randomly drawn winner will be awarded a $25 Amazon/Barnes & Noble gift card. Find out more here.

Follow the author on the rest of her Goddess Fish tour here.