Read the Full Interview (.PDF)
Return to Author Interviews

Larry Heinemann never expected to be a writer. In Black Virgin Mountain, his most recent publication (2005), he tells us, “I came to writing...because I had a story to tell—a story that simply would not be denied and wasn't going away anytime soon.” That story began publicly in 1977 with Close Quarters, a novel in which readers go “in country” for a year as they follow the life of Philip Dosier and witness the Vietnam War from the front lines. That story continued in 1986 with Paco's Story, Heinemann's second novel and winner of the 1987 National Book Award. Paco's Story appears to take up where Close Quarters left off. Philip Dosier is now Paco Sullivan, a wounded vet just back from Vietnam, trying to reclaim agency after the trauma of war and in the midst of alienation at home. Setting these two novels side by side, one might think that Heinemann had finished telling that story. He had, after all, captured the Vietnam veteran's experience, from combat to homecoming. And Heinemann's third book, a comic novel set in his hometown of Chicago, seemed to confirm this. Cooler by the Lake (1992) has nothing to do with Vietnam. But apparently, for all the power of writing, one thing it cannot do is neatly wrap up our lives with a beginning, middle, and end. Heinemann, it turned out, was not done with that story, or perhaps that story was not done with him. And so in Black Virgin Mountain, Heinemann's first book of nonfiction, he returns to Vietnam because, as he asserts, “it is clear that there is much, still, to talk about.” Larry Heinemann was interviewed at the Fairfield Inn, in Valparaiso, Indiana.