Multi-award winning author, Khanh Ha is the author of Flesh, The Demon Who Peddled Longing, and Mrs. Rossi’s Dream. He is a seven-time Pushcart nominee, finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize, Many Voices Project, Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and The University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize.

He is the recipient of the Sand Hills Prize for Best Fiction, the Robert Watson Literary Prize in Fiction, and the Orison Anthology Award for Fiction. 

Mrs. Rossi’s Dream, was named Best New Book by Booklist and a 2019 Foreword Reviews INDIES Silver Winner and Bronze Winner.  

A Mother’s Tale & Other Stories has already won the C&R Press Fiction Prize. Visit Khanh on his website at http://www.authorkhanhha.com/

Bee: Please tell us something about the book that is not in the summary.  (About the book, character you particularly enjoyed writing etc.)

Khanh: The cast of characters in this collection are diversified. They come from all walks of life, each with a unique background, and yet all having a connection to the Vietnam war and its traumatic effects on their lives. What you have in this collection is the damned, the unfit, the brave who, despite their fates, never lose their humanity. In this collection the characters are flawed in the sense of physical deprivation, or having a piece of their lives missing. This collection shares a common theme of love and loneliness, longing and compassion. It is a great journey to inhabit this world where redemption of human goodness arises out of violence and beauty to become part of its essential mercy.

I have no particular preference for any character. I love them all. When I write, I am the Maker who gives birth to his characters and they are his children. 

Bee: I always enjoy looking at the names that authors choose to give their characters. Where do you derive the names of your characters?  Are they based on real people you knew or now know in real life? How do you create names for your characters?

Khanh: The names come naturally with the characters, based on their characteristics and personalities. The names are then filtered through my head and I would listen to the sound of names; I would listen to their cadence and pick those I would feel most comfortable with.

Bee:  Which character do you love to hate?

Khanh: As I mentioned earlier, I don’t favor one character over the others, or have biases towards any of my characters.

Bee: It was nice to come across Mrs. Rossi’ again.  She was in your novel,  Mrs. Rossi’s Dream and now in the title short story, ‘A Mother’s Tale’. Which came first, the short story or the novel? Do you think we will hear from Mrs. Rossi again?

Khanh: The short stories in this collection go back as far as 2013-2014. Over a span of eight years. I have written about thirty stories, all published and several of them having won fiction awards. Then a few years ago I had envisioned expanding some of them into a novel. I took time to review the stories and found a number of them sharing something in common—a motif. The mother-and-son love and its heartbreaking loss. I decided to use those stories as the mainstay of my novel for their common thread. And that’s the genesis of “Mrs. Rossi’s Dream” as a novel. It ends there. I never have desires of writing a sequel.

Bee: What is your favorite story in the book? Why?

Khanh: It has to be the titular story A Mother’s Tale. I liked the challenge of writing a deeply moving story, and the challenging scene in  A Mother’s Tale story came when Mrs. Rossi received news of her son’s remains. It took me longer to write, because I had to weigh and choose words with utmost care. Those words must be imaginable because I write with cinematic visuals in my head. Words then must flow like a river, fast, slow at times. Cadenced words exhale emotions and breathe scents and therefore create moods.

Bee: Tell us about your cover. Did you design it yourself?

Khanh: An artist designed it with me as consultant.

Bee: What words do you use over and over that drive your editor crazy?

Khanh: I don’t recall any particular words that raised my editor’s eyebrows. I am very careful with diction. I avoid repetition in word choice as much as clichés. However, if there is one word that most writers like myself overuse, it’s the verb “look”. Some editors consider it a peeve that annoys them the most.

Bee: When did you first have a desire to write?  How did this desire manifest itself?

Khanh: I write because I was born with a desire to work with words. That desire had matured in me and become an extension of myself in the form of words. There was no plan and there was no ‘why.’ I write because the urge to write has always been within me since I was a young boy. Then when I had enough vocabulary and my thoughts have become more refined, I was then driven to put them down in words.

But actually, it began with reading when I was between seven or eight. It must have started with The Count of Monte Cristo. Fifty some volumes of it in Vietnamese translation, pocket-sized, my mother bought for me. I would devour each volume and grow hungry for more. Outlandish worlds. They would ebb and flow in my mind, leaving the fecund silt on its bottom, and one day in my adulthood I wanted to become a writer.

Bee: What are you currently working on?

Khanh: My second story collection just won a fiction award in August this year. It’s slated to come out in the spring next year. I’ve also just completed editing my next novel and am ready to shop it around. The novel is about the siege of Dien Bien Phu, one of most talked-about battles of the Vietnam conflict against the French Union. And nested in it is a love story. 

Khanh: I let my hair down. LOL. Kidding aside, I spend more time with my family and I go back to my favorite pastime: reading. The spending time with family is valuable, which I miss whenever I work on a novel for a long stretch. Reading, on the other hand, nourishes writing. It’s like watering a plant. It rejuvenates you as a writer.

Bee: Thanks again and good luck with ‘A Mothers Tale and Other Stories!

A Mothers Tale and Other Stories!

Khanh: It’s been my pleasure and thank you for having me.

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