A Conversation Between Sara Novic and Julia Glass Julia Glass is the author of the novels And the Dark Sacred Night, The Widower''s Tale, The Whole World Over, and the National Book Award-­winning Three Junes, as well as the Kindle Single "Chairs in the Rafters." Her third book, I See You Everywhere, a collection of linked stories, won the 2009 John Gardner Fiction Book Award from the State University of New York at Binghamton. She has also won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Harvard University''s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her essays have been widely anthologized, most recently in Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book, edited by Sean Manning, and in Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today''s Best Women Writers, edited by Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon. She is a co-­founder and literary director of the arts festival Twenty Summers, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and has taught writing workshops at programs ranging from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown to the MFA program at Brooklyn College. Glass lives with her two sons and their father on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Julia Glass: It is electrifying to see the words girl and war together in a title--­and terrifying, too, of course. Equally chilling is the heroine''s statement that "there''s no such thing as a child soldier in Croatia.

There is only a child with a gun." That made such an impact on me. Because Ana''s point of view is so intimate and her everyday life, first as a child and then as a young woman, is so palpable, I''m sure that every reader''s first question is this: How autobio­graphical is Girl at War ? Did Sara Novic live a version of Ana''s nightmare herself? Of her escape and recovery? If not--­and I note from your biography in the book that you were half Ana''s age when that war began--­was your family living in Zagreb? What are your earliest memories of the war or its effects on your daily life? The details of day-­to-­day living are so poignant and vivid in the book''s earliest chapters: the way school and jobs and even the rituals of children at play persist despite the threat of sudden violence, the way parents try to maintain a sense of normalcy. Where did those details come from, if not your own experience? Sara Novic: First, thank you, Julia, for reading the book and asking me these interesting questions. Having grown up in the United States myself, the short answer is that Girl at War isn''t autobiographical. Ana''s story isn''t my experience, or any one person''s. The genesis of the novel came about when I went to live with some family and friends in Zagreb after I graduated high school. I think because I represented a kind of "middleman" to them--­American, but still family--­they were eager to share their experiences with me.

This was in 2005, so the war had been over for a few years, and people were feeling disillusioned by the lack of intervention and aid from the West, and by the new democratic government that was shaping up to be corrupted, just as the old one had been. There was a sense of urgency in these stories, and a feeling that people wanted their voices heard. I''ve always been an avid journaler, so I recorded a lot of the anecdotes people told me right away. The opening scene with the cigarettes, for example, was an experience that happened to a friend of mine pretty much exactly as Ana experiences it. Later, when I went back to the United States and started college, I was shocked to find that most of my peers didn''t know where Croatia was, never mind what had happened there. So I started writing a short story about the war for a creative writing class in which I had accidentally enrolled. My professor encouraged me to expand on the topic, so I kept writing out in all directions, and that story lies pretty much intact at the end of Part I of the novel now. Along the way I continued to ask a lot of questions of my friends and family back in Croatia--­two of them were very good readers for me throughout the process of writing this book--­and that, along with a lot of more "traditional" research, was how I made sure the details were accurate, which, even though the book is fiction, was important to me, given the gravity of the conflict.

JG: During the years of the Yugoslavian Civil War, I was in my mid-­thirties, and news coverage of the atrocities against Muslims and other civilians was prominent in The New York Times and other Western papers. As an American, I felt a sense of futile rage over the lack of intervention by European and American powers--­but I also felt confused. I did not feel I could fully grasp the complex hostilities and ethnic biases fueling the war, which was clearly about more than disputed territory. Do you think most Westerners understood the war? What might surprise us most to learn about that conflict? What misconceptions do we have? SN: I don''t think most Westerners understood the war in Yugoslavia--­the conflict was really complex and to grasp it fully would require a nuance that the mainstream media rarely provides. One of the big misconceptions about the conflict is the idea that it was an entirely ethnicity-­fueled war. On the one hand, it was about ethnicity, because there were territories that contained ethnic majorities; however, like any war, this one was mainly about power and money. For example, one big point of contention was road construction--­the capital of Yugoslavia was in Belgrade, Serbia, so most of the country''s money went toward building roads horizontally so Serbs could get to the Adriatic Sea, while travel vertically within Croatia and Bosnia was very difficult and nothing was being done about it. It sounds mundane, but I think that kind of thing was at least as much of a factor in the split as the ethnic tensions were, though the media only focused on the latter part because it made an easier and more sensational story.

JG: In Girl at War, there is a clear before and after--­with devastating heartbreak and danger in the middle. Some readers would call it a loss-­of-­innocence story as much as a war story. (Or maybe that''s true of all war stories.) Certainly, I would call it a story about how human beings endure, even find a way to thrive, in the face of inconsolable loss; that''s what all the best fiction shows us. Do you still have family in Croatia or elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia? Do you return there now, and how do people say their lives have changed? Is it ever possible to feel safe in a place where ­formerly peaceful neighbors turned against one another so violently? SN: I still have family and friends there and I try to go back in the summers, though I''ve missed this year. Croatia is now a very popular hot spot for tourists from around the world, particularly because of the Game of Thrones craze (they film some of the show there). The coast of the Adriatic Sea is so beautiful; it''s sometimes hard to believe that a war took place there so recently. Overall, I don''t think people really feel unsafe in the sense that they fear their neighbors--­you probably couldn''t get on with your daily life if you thought about that too much.

But there are times when tensions flare up--­for example, when Russia recently vetoed the United Nations resolution to commemorate the murder of more than eight thousand civilians at Srebrenica as a genocide. In many respects, it''s still a time of transition. They''re still counting and documenting the names of the missing and the dead. They''re still de-­mining the more rural areas, removing undetonated cluster bombs. I think the way in which these wars are written about in the history books for the upcoming generation will really dictate a lot about the future of all the ex-­Yugoslavian countries. JG: Along with her reluctant testimonial at the United Nations, Ana''s experience of living in the aftermath of 9/11 in New York takes her back to her war experiences, and it seems as if she feels even more estranged from her adoptive country as a result. I love the passage where she reflects, "The country was at war, but for most people the war was more an idea than an experience, and I felt something between anger and shame that Americans--­that I--­could sometimes ignore its impact for days at a time. In Croatia, life in wartime had meant a loss of control, war holding sway over every thought and movement, even while you slept.

" Can you talk about what it means to you to be an American at this moment in time? Do you feel a sense of obligation to write about that? SN: Americans have the privilege of distancing themselves from war, which is of course due in large part to our physical distance from everybody else. Because of that, I think the natural tendency of a lot of people is to actively avoid talking about wars "over there"--­it seems like the average American feels like it doesn''t concern him or her. But that wouldn''t make sense for a character like Ana, not when war is on her mind constantly, and the differences between experiencing war in Croatia and experiencing it in America are so striking. When I workshopped a draft of this manuscript during my MFA program, I remember someone questioning whether I was "allowed" to write about 9/11. That floored me--­wouldn''t it be way worse to have a character who had experienced a war in childhood, and was then in New York City on September 11, and say nothing about it? I think I do feel a sense of obligation to write about these things, in this case for the purpose of making Ana a full and com.