Matthew Derby’s story “Full Metal Jhacket” appears in the October 2009 issue of The Collagist. He is the author of Super Flat Times: Stories (2003 Back Bay Books). His writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Fence, and The Believer, where he served as an editor for several years.

1. Can you talk about the inspiration for “Full Metal Jhacket”? What was on your mind while you were writing this story?

Sometime earlier this year, I realized I had almost enough stories to pull off a second collection.  I started to think about how the stories worked together as a group, and I realized that almost everything I’d written in the past few years had some sort of weapon at its center.  In many of the stories, the main character has a gun, and is trying, often unsuccessfully, to kill someone.  I didn’t plan it this way.  I didn’t have this moment where I decided to start writing assassination narratives.  They just came out that way, one after another.  So I had this bunch of stories that featured guns and other handheld weapons, and the first title that came to mind when I made this realization was ‘Full Metal Jacket.’  And I thought, ‘man, it would be hilarious to call the collection ‘Full Metal Jacket.’  Then, almost immediately after, I said to myself, ‘Oh, if I ever find a publisher for this book, they’ll make me change the title for copyright reasons.’ I decided to rename the collection Full Metal Jhacket to avoid this presumptive controversy.

So I had this really stupid title, but it made me laugh, so I kept thinking about it, and it continued to feel right as a sort of rallying point for the stories in the book.  And this, of course, got me thinking about the film Full Metal Jacket, which I first saw on VHS when I was in middle school.  At that time in my life, I was a huge Kubrick fan. 2001 was, to me, the greatest expression of art that humankind was capable of producing.  I devoured any information I could find about Kubrick.  I grew up in a college town, and I would go to the college library after school and read this book called The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, which had tons of nerdy facts about the film. There was an image in the book of a letter that Kubrick had personally written to a young fan while 2001 was in post-production.  The fan was this high school kid who was into special effects, and he had written Kubrick a letter asking about the effects techniques he was using in 2001 – which, remember, was not even out at the time.  Kubrick was really impressed by the kid’s tenacity, and he wrote a three paragraph letter encouraging the kid to keep going, to follow his dreams, etc.  I thought this was the coolest thing in the world.  There were also some stills from a home-made sequel to 2001 that some guys had done with a Super 8 camera.  Just some guys in their garage in the early 70s – they’d made sets and models and everything.  That really got me thinking that I could make a film, one that Stanley Kubrick might eventually see.  So my friend and I started making stop motion films using clay and action figures.  We spent hours making sets and props and then animating them.  It was a really great time in my life.

Meanwhile, Kubrick was over in England shooting Full Metal Jacket.  I remember reading about it in Rolling Stone and getting tremendously excited.  I was going to get to see a brand new Kubrick film – he was stirring the same air that I breathed.  We were both making films at the exact same moment in history.  I really had this sense that I was going to eventually meet him and maybe work with him somehow.  It just seemed inevitable.  Looking back, it was pretty stupid. But it felt so real.

Right around this time, the Lay Chaplain at our church took in some Vietnamese boat people – a mother and a son who taken an impossibly dangerous journey across the world to flee their country.  It was as far from my insulated world as possible.  The homily that the priest gives in the story is pretty close to how the Chaplain introduced the community to the boy and his mother.  I remember especially the part about how, in Vietnam, it was immediately clear to anyone who saw the boy that his father was an American.  I had no idea why this might be a source of shame, or why it might make his life difficult in his home country.  He was my age, and I took it upon myself to befriend him, partially out of a sense of generosity but also, honestly, because I felt like I might be able to save him.

At this point, I had enough elemental spheres to start creating a story.  It came out pretty quickly and effortlessly – I just sort of linked everything up.  It’s probably the most conservative story I’ve ever written, but it had to be that way.  It was just something that, once I started, I had to finish.  When I was done, I realized that it would probably come as a disappointment to the three or four people who made it all the way through Super Flat Times.  But in fact it was incredibly challenging – terrifying, even – to write the passage in the church, because I had to void the airspace of authorial asides and let the priest speak.  The ‘real life’ version of that passage was such a pivotal point in my development as a person that I felt an obligation to try to render it without affect.  And this is why I wrote the story, I think.  Because I had to see if I could.

2. Something I’ve noticed about the last two stories of yours I’ve read—”Full Metal Jhacket” and “January in December” (published in Guernica and then reprinted in Dzanc’s Best of the Web)—is that both are set in the recent past of the 1980s, and both have an explicit pop culture center that I don’t recall being an element in your earlier stories, at least the ones in Super Flat Times. Has there been an overall shift in your work, or are these part of a specific project?

Well, after I wrote Super Flat Times, I found that I couldn’t stop writing stories of a certain type – fabulist SF with a domestic bent – and they were starting to get sort of brittle.  I’d exhausted all of my ideas on that front.  And the last thing I wanted to do was to establish myself as the guy that does crazy stupid SF.  I was also entering a sort of long-term commitment to a career on the internet, which isolated me from the writing community I’d been a tangential part of in graduate school.  I was taking my lunch breaks alone at a Subway sandwich shop attached to a liquor store down the highway from my office building.  I ate standing up.  I felt like I was drifting away from the world.  And I started to think about Mark David Chapman.  I don’t want to say I identified with him, but it became easy to understand how someone living in isolation from the world could develop an astronomically inflated sense of self, and interpret all manner of coincidental events as messages from an omniscient force guiding them along an inevitable path to some terminal act.  So I tried to write a story about Chapman, but I couldn’t pull it off.  So I thought, ‘what if there was someone else in New York City at the same time, planning to do the same thing on the same night, but this person couldn’t even get there on time?’  Because that’s what would happen to me if I tried to kill someone famous.  I’m sure I would mess it up completely.

In both “January in December” and “Full Metal Jhacket,” it’s true, I went back in time.  Lennon’s murder and my early love of Kubrick are two very clear and transformative moments from my childhood, and I drew from the power of those memories to finish the stories.  But these are the only two ‘period pieces’ I’ve written.  And I’m not sure I’ll go back again soon.

3. One of my favorite details in the story is how Apple is reading A Clockwork Orange throughout the story. Kubrick’s movie version of the novel had been out for a decade and a half by the time Full Metal Jacket came out, but Apple and Fingers seem unaware of it. Is that just another sign of the boys’ ignorance of the wider world beyond their individual concerns, or is there some other kind of intent to their lack of knowledge?

I think they are aware of the film version, but I don’t mention it in the story.  Maybe I should have?  But I love what you said about their ignorance of the wider world, because I did want to portray that small town hubris – a sense of isolation from things that are happening elsewhere combined with a sort of ridiculous conviction that fame and recognition are right around the corner – as if there is a roving cadre of A&R reps scouring small towns across America for the next big thing.  Maybe this is less true nowadays, with the internet, etc.  Fingers, in the story, is convinced that he’s going to be discovered, though.  He fully believes that when he finishes his film, it will be featured at Cannes.

Incidentally, that bit about Apple reading A Clockwork Orange on Good Friday came directly from my experience.  At that time in history, in small towns in Western New York, it was really difficult to get ahold of many of Kubrick’s films.  The video store in our town only had a few titles, and I, of course, wasn’t allowed to rent A Clockwork Orange myself, so I fed my obsessive interest by listening to the soundtrack, reading the novel, and tracking down reviews of the film in the College Library.  Also by drawing pictures and comics of the droogs and their escapades.  I filled in all the gaps in my life with Kubrick.

4. Apple’s church brings the Truongs, an orphaned family of Vietnamese refugees, to live in the town. The Truongs become a crucial part of Apple’s life, spending Easter with his family, and eventually putting him in conflict with Fingers, seemingly his only other friend. What interests me is that because the Truong girls don’t speak English, they don’t get any lines of dialogue in the story, and so seem only to communicate in the quieter moments of the story, like the board game scene on Easter Sunday. In other, louder scenes—the church service where they’re introduced, or the climactic scene toward the end—their presence is easier overwhelmed by the more vocal American characters. That seems an interesting effect to have threaded throughout the story, but also an incredibly challenging one to pull of. Did the silence of the Truongs cause you any particular difficulties in the writing of the story? What did their lack of English add for you that would have been lost if Diep and her sisters were given their own voices throughout?

The silence was really important, maybe the most important thing in the story.  Going back to what I said before about the boy I befriended, the refugee – I went to visit him at the Chaplain’s house.  He knew no English and I, of course, didn’t know how to talk to him, so we were limited in what we could do.  There was a chess set there, and that was something we could both do.  So I frequently went over to his house and we played, and it was a totally silent game.  There was only the sound of the pawns sliding across the paper surface of the chessboard.  I wanted, more than anything, to capture that moment in all its awkwardness and beauty.

Also, apart from the aesthetic imperative, I wanted to convey the utter vulnerability of these girls and, I guess, by extension, the Vietnamese boat people in general.  They escaped their country by incredible means, risking their lives in ways we can’t imagine, to end up in a completely alien environment, none of the customs of which matched their own experience in any way.  Because of all this, I didn’t find it especially difficult to keep them silent.  But it was, as you point out, a vital component of the story.

5. You and I were both in Caketrain’s fourth issue together, and I remember being incredibly excited to be published in the same magazine as writers like yourself and Brian Evenson (and now, looking at the table of contents for that issue, I’m struck by how amazing the entire roster is—I just didn’t know many of the writers at the time). I remember reading the excerpt of your novel-in-progress (called Movement of the People) that appeared there, hungry for clues to what your next book would be about. If you don’t mind me asking, what happened to that novel? Is it something you’re still writing?

Movement of the People was a novel I struggled for the better part of three years to write.  I wrote four end-to-end revisions before deciding that it was beyond salvage.  I write on the train on my way to and from work – this is the only time I’m able to write – which works relatively well when I’m writing stories because I can read and edit an entire manuscript in one sitting.  Working on a novel in this way, though, is like herding cats.  It’s impossible to keep all of the plates spinning with convincing force.  I’m still fond of the ideas behind Movement of the People, but it’s nothing I’ll ever return to.  I have a few other ideas for novels as well, but I don’t foresee having the sort of sustained, focused time to work them out.

6. What other writing projects are you currently working on?

I’m nearly done with this collection I’ve been alluding to, which I’m still calling Full Metal Jhacket.  I wrote the first two parts of a three-part story, but I can’t finish the third part, and the collection won’t work without all three.  I am beginning to suspect that I am subconsciously sabotaging myself, preventing myself from finishing this thing, because I keep scrapping what I’ve written for this third part and starting from scratch.  Maybe some part of me knows that this is all I’ve got left in me, and it’s fighting to draw it all out.