There is a story about the 19^th century French author, Balzac, well, really there are many great stories about Balzac but one of my favorites has to do with his testy relationship with his publishers. They would take his manuscript (literally, one written by hand) and laboriously set in print (again, by hand, manually laying out the type and pressing the paper) and when the proofs were ready, they would send it to him for corrections. Balzac, unable to restrain himself would not simply proofread or correct, he would revise, making his notes in the margins (again, by hand) and return to the publishers. They would absorb his many changes, some big, some niggling, print and resend. He would again make changes. And return it to them. After he’d done this several times, so the story goes, the publishers, in a fit of pique and ink, quit sending him proofs.

For myself as a writer, I am constantly revising. Even after I quit writing by chapter and bring the whole book together in one document (a turning point) I rethink everything. And then revise again, pull, tug, move material, move it back. Even once I have a publisher, I find it very hard to part with a script. Each book, as it is about to go out into the world, becomes a sort of actor in the wings, awaiting the cue to go onstage, and I the anxious manager, fussing over everything, touch ups, makeup refreshed, costume tidied, in short, nonstop revision applied at every turn. With Undesirable: The Vietnam War and a Father’s Battle for Justice, that’s exactly what I’ve just done. I finished the book. Again. Actually, again and again.

I turned a finished ms into University of New Mexico Press in late August. In October it went to the copyeditor. In November she sent it to me. In December I returned it to her. In January she sent it back with some few suggestions, but mostly just for my OK. (Once the copyeditor turns the book into the publisher, that’s supposed to be the last stop before the printer.) Only… I had a glimmer, a flash of insight that I could do a lot more to strengthen themes and images. However the copyeditor’s deadline loomed and she was in no mood for me to alter the book. Thus she turned it into the managing editor who at my request returned it to me yet again. She gave me a week. That’s all. I once again submerged myself—mind, heart, time, effort, energy—in the book and in nothing else. On Monday, January 26^th, I returned it to the University of New Mexico Press.

Instead of enjoying a great jolt of accomplishment, I felt a sense of sadness, a letdown: I had returned this final draft of the book just about two years to the day to when I first brought these documents up out of the basement safe. I remembered the date because January 2024 was such a fraught moment for me and those closest to me as we reeled through two deaths.

My mother, Peggy Johnson, had died just before Christmas 2023. After New Year’s I went down to So Cal to be with my sister, my sons and their families, and while there, we heard that Sean Meyer had died of a cancer that managed to eat him up in mere few months. Sean Meyer had grown up in our house. Late in January many of Sean’s friends came to Bellingham from all over to grieve together. One place they grieved was here, in this house. I fed everyone, meals, snacks, lunches, breakfast for visitors from Vancouver. I laughed and cried with everyone, laughed and cried some more, and then they left and I wrote the blogpost A Son of This House about Sean.

After I cried my way through that, I went down into the basement and contemplated the safe. Opened it. Months before I had stumbled on papers there relating to my father’s long struggle, fifty years ago, to get my brother Doug’s discharge changed. When I had originally found these documents a glance was all I could give them. My mother absorbed all my energies: At 101 years old, she was living in a nursing home, wheelchair bound, deaf, nearly blind. Her organs were failing and her fears escalating. Dementia had totally altered her sunny personality. But now? Now my house was empty and I was alone. The winter days were dank and short.

On the bottom shelf I found, stuffed in haphazardly, perhaps forty big manila envelopes, pounds of paper relating to my father’s battle on Doug’s behalf. I put the whole in boxes and hauled them upstairs, laid the envelopes out across the dining room table. Everything smelled of damp, disuse, and darkness; the staples were rusted and the paper clips crumbled when I removed them. To pull the actual UNDESIRABLE Discharge paper from its envelope—to stare at its shocking, ALL-CAPS one-word indictment—brought visceral shame. . . I began to understand the extent of my parents’ despair and marveled at their sheer, unflagging perseverance. I recycled the envelopes and put the contents into new folders marked for my own recognition. As I sifted through this sea of paper, reading and rereading, a chorus of voices rose up, most of them from the grave.

I had once promised my mom that I would one day write about Dad’s struggle with the Army on behalf of Douglas, but I had envisioned an elegiac piece, a long essay perhaps. As I went though these documents, I knew this was a book. I wondered if I had the strength to write it, to live with these events. I wondered that for months until the project began to pick up both momentum and depth. Every time I revisited these documents, they spoke to me anew; I found insight that I had not fully comprehended.

And so, moving deeper into what this material had to tell me, my pulling and tugging and revising, adding, cutting, moving stuff around went on for two years, right up till the end, past the end, in fact. Like Balzac I could have gone on fussing with this manuscript, but I didn’t. At the very end of that week the editor gave me, I changed a paragraph that brought themes and images into what felt like cosmic alignment. I said out loud, “Aha!” I hit Save. I sent it.

*****

Undesirable: The Vietnam War and a Father’s Battle for Justice will be published by the University of New Mexico Press on July 7 2026. It is available for pre-order now.