Today’s special guest is debut UpLit author Nancy Stroer and we’re chatting about her new novel, Playing Army.
During her virtual book tour, Nancy will be giving away a $25 Amazon or Barnes and Noble (winner’s choice) gift card to a lucky randomly drawn winner. To be entered for a chance to win, use the form below. To increase your chances of winning, feel free to visit her other tour stops and enter there, too!
Bio:
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.
Welcome, Nancy. Please tell us about your new release.
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.
Tell us something about your newest release that is NOT in the blurb.
Besides being a story about a woman who desperately wants to connect with a father she never knew, it’s also about how she and her mother begin to repair their own relationship, which has suffered because Minerva’s mother put her on diets as a child and led to a lifetime of feeling terrible about food and her body. So it’s also a story of how Min begins to trust herself around food again.
There are also Mustangs (the muscle cars) and Rambo (Min’s black cat that was found in the motor pool)! And lots of beer (very true to military life) and a smattering of cussing (not nearly as much as happens in real military life).
Excerpt from Playing Army:
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.
How long have you been writing?
Since I was a kid. We didn’t have a lot of money growing up, but we had this big stack of leftover paper packs, stapled together. I think they were from my grandfather’s job at a gas company in St. Louis. There was typing on one side of the paper so my sisters and I would flip them over and use the clean side. Often we just drew or made paper dolls, or our own coloring books because my father is an artist and low-key believes that coloring books stifle creativity. When we pulled a thick pack of paper from the stack, those were the ones to make “real” books out of. We also made tiny books for our dolls, and the first time I visited the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, I was amazed to find that the Brontë siblings made tiny books too! I felt like part of a whole universe of weird, creative little kids out there, a part of something bigger than just my own little constellation.
What advice would you give a new writer just starting out?
Be a weird, creative little kid first? Ha ha! But also—every kid is a weird little genius. I’ve worked with kids on three continents and two islands now, so I know this for a fact. The trick is to let them follow their bliss, to feed their intellectual obsessions for as long as possible before the world intervenes and tries to tell them what’s cool. Allow yourself to follow that golden thread to the core of yourself. Kids are so good at this, but adults have to relearn the skill.
Is your life anything like it was two years ago?
No! I’m working a fulltime day job now to keep my UK visa, whereas two years ago I was writing and book coaching from home. My husband is living on one continent and I’m on another, and we bop back and forth. Everything’s weird but fine but also totally different. And now my first novel is coming out which is massively important to me, so I feel I’m on the verge of even more change and growth.
Do you have any tattoos? Where? When did you get it/them? Where are they on your body?
I don’t, although I’ve seen so many that I think are pretty. At the last gym I worked in Germany, my other trainer friends wanted to get me a tattoo as a going away gift, but I couldn’t think of what I’d want on my skin for the rest of my life. I really love henna tattoos, though (I had some Pakistani friends when we lived in Turkey who taught me how to do them). I should have asked my gym friends to get me a tattoo that looks like a henna tattoo! Maybe I’ll get one for myself one of these years.
Links:
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Thank you so much for the interview, Lisa! I’m happy to answer any other questions readers might have!
Thank you so much for hosting today!
Sonds like a great book.
Thank you, Rita!
Thanks for sharing. This looks like a good book.
Thanks so much, Marcy!
This sounds exactly like my kind of read.
Oh, cool – were you in the military, Sherry?
How did you come up with the title of this book?
This looks like a very interesting novel. Thanks for sharing.