David Poyer is one of the most popular American writers of military fiction. As a former naval officer and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Poyer brings a rare sense of veracity to his work. AltDaily talked with Poyer about his Norfolk beginnings, whether after some 30 books being published still excites him, and the disappointment of his publisher cutting a series short.

David Poyer

Welcome back to Norfolk and the Literary Festival at Old Dominion University. You’ve talked about being a starving artist while writing in Norfolk early in your career.  Does coming back rekindle the flame or fill you with dread?

That’s true – I did get my start in a third-floor walkup on Bute Street, where I alternately starved and learned to write by publishing the occasional article in local magazines. My first few novels, also written there, were published as paperback originals – they were no great masterpieces. Coming back to ODU as a much-published writer recalls me to those days, but I’ve worked through most of the angst. It’ll to be fun telling some stories about those days to a new audience, though!

You have quite a following in Norfolk. Who are your biggest fans here? What city in the country buys the most books? Do we, by any chance, buy more books per capita?

Sales figures are very opaque to most writers, especially those who have New York publishers. All you get is a grand total, and even that’s sometimes hard to ferret out. I do know that the Navy Library Program just bought 700 copies of my last novel, The Weapon, for distribution to the Fleet. Probably the public I get the most fan letters from are senior enlisted Navy and Marines – they seem to appreciate my treating them like real people instead of cardboard cutouts. They also appreciate the intensive research I do, actually crewing and training alongside them, to make sure the events I describe could actually happen. And in a few cases, it has – notably with the Gulf War, which began as my novel The Gulf was hitting the streets.

Do you enjoy doing readings? How do you get yourself revved up? Do you have any ritual you’d like to share?

Reading used to freak me out at first. Very nerve-racking. I’d write EVERYTHING out and just read from my notes. Now I’m comfortable with a looser approach. I love answering questions from the audience. That really engages me. On Thursday I plan to read short excerpts from three very different kinds of work, to dispel the (unfortunately widespread) presumption that I only write sea thrillers.  It’s true that’s what seems to sell the best for me, but I don’t limit myself to that genre!

Of the four types of books you write – Dan Lenson, Tiller Galloway, Hemlock County, and the Civil War at Sea – which do you enjoy writing most?

Well, I practice literary crop rotation.  That is, if I write the same kind of book time after time, I get weary. The crops come up limp and yellow and stunted. So I will usually vary a heavy book with a lighter one.

The Hemlock books were very close to my heart. I taught with John Gardner in the late seventies, under the auspices of the New Virginia Review, and I admired his model of the socially engaged writer, a la Dickens, Zola, and Steinbeck. The Hemlocks took on such issues as toxic waste dumping, nursing home scams, teen suicide, labor organizing. Unfortunately I really had the wrong publisher for those books and it proved impossible to make them work in the marketplace with their imprint on them.
The Galloways are what I consider “light” fiction – diving adventures – short, fast-moving undersea thrillers. They’re fun to write, but sort of like Cheetos, which I love but which are not exactly great nutrition. (Did you know that sentence is illegal to publish under the Disparagement of Perishable Food Products Act of 1995, only one of many current challenges to our First Amendment rights?) Plus, the Galloways let me write off some of my diving expenses.

The Civil War at Sea was planned as an eight-book series, but Simon & Schuster cut it off at three books because of declining sales with each volume. Which was shattering to me – it was really as if someone I loved had died, to know those wonderful characters, Theodorus Hubbard, Eli Eaker, Calpurnius Hanks, Catherine Claiborne, and the nefarious yet indefatigable Henry Lomax Minter woudn’t return.

Are you noticing a trend here? Setbacks are part of every writer’s career. A real professional never gives up. He or she just regroups, alters the direction of his attack, and continues the offensive.

Right now I’m mainly concentrating on the Dan Lenson books, but the next one out will be followed by a sailing adventure with supernatural elements – something totally new for me. Who knows how it’ll do? Certainly not me!

I know you must always get asked this, but who are your own personal favorite writers?

Almost too many to list, but I’ll give it a try! From the nineteeth century, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Goncharov, Austen, Zola, Conrad, Saltykov-Schedrin, Hugo, Gissing, Hardy, Chekhov, Collins, Twain.  In the twentieth, Faulkner, Renault, Bellow, Heinlein, Dreiser, Page Edwards, Mahfouz, McKenna, Oates, Mishima, Orwell, Plevier, De Hartog, Huxley, Jones, Dick, Hayden, Gardner, DeLillo, Busch – that’s just a start. Currently I instantly buy and avidly devour anything that appears from Alan Furst, Martin Cruz Smith, Colleen McCullough, Michael Chabon, John Connally, and of course, Lenore Hart. A real writer never stops reading. Never.

Your new book, The Weapon, just hit bookstores. Does it still thrill as it did in the early days?

It sure does, but every book is different. Each began with an idea, a character, or an image that excited me; the plot built from that.  That’s the real source of the thrill – seeing massive, ramified stories germinate and grow, from something as insubstantial as a dream.

There will be a lot of writers coming to see you at ODU’s Literary Festival. What advice can you give them? Will you be sharing your “Three Mistakes, Three Misconceptions and Two Pieces of Advice” during this appearance?

I don’t think I’ll share that up front, since it and other advice to beginning writers is available on my website. Some of what it covers I expect to come up in the Q &A after the reading, though. The most important concept older writers can pass on to younger ones, in my experience, is the conviction they can make it. That famous names are just as human as they are, and that if they persevere the way their models did, they too will attain the same heights. But you have no idea, when you start, how much work it’s going to take!

You’ve said that you throw characters and plot into the writing pot and stir. You’ve also said you have ten or more novels in the works at any one time. Do you ever have nightmares where characters or plot jump out of one pot into another?

Yikes – I hope I never said I had TEN novels actually in the works at any given time!  Usually I’m writing a new one, reading galleys for the one just finished, and daydreaming out my proposal/outline for the next one more or less simultaneously. That’s what I mean when I say I practice “literary crop rotation.” See above!

Tell us about your latest book, The Weapon. Should we buy it?

The short answer is, absolutely . . . if not for yourself, first editions make great gifts!

The Weapon is set more or less in the present. TAG Charlie, based in Virginia Beach – an elite team of active duty sailors, SEALs, and civilian analysts – investigates and defuses emerging naval threats around the globe. When an unstoppable rocket torpedo designed to destroy U.S. aircraft carriers is demonstrated at a Moscow arms show, Dan Lenson is tasked to buy one, so the Navy can build a countermeasure.  Instead, he’s lucky to escape with his life when he’s set up by Russia’s new counterespionage service.

The Russians sell the new weapon to Iran and China instead. So Dan decides if he can’t buy it, he’ll steal it. But when a daring nighttime penetration of Iran’s largest naval base goes wrong too, he finds himself captaining a submarine he barely knows how to submerge, pursued by Iranian destroyers and sub-hunting aircraft through the shallow, hazardous Persian Gulf.

I’d call this a mediumweight book – neither heavy nor light. A thriller, but with well-developed characters and serious questions about the morality of international arms sales and also of espionage.  I quote Graham Green in the epilog – “Moral judgments are singularly out of place in espionage.” But I leave it to the reader to decide if that’s actually true.

I welcome anyone who wants to show up at the University Village Bookstore at ODU at 2 PM this Thursday October 8. I think you’ll enjoy the readings – I’ll keep them short – and learn a bit about what a working writer’s life and career has really been like. Unpolished. Unedited. The sort of things you probably won’t hear in writing classes or read in most biographies.

Until then I remain, yours in the Word, most respectfully, Dave Poyer!

David Poyer will be reading @ 2pm @ The University Village Bookstore. For a complete Lit Fest schedule, click here.