All the Rivers Flow into the Sea by Khanh Ha: Review, Interview

All the Rivers Flow into the Sea and Other Stories by Khanh

 HaPublisher: Eastover Press LLC (June 7, 2022)
Category: Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Vietnam
Tour dates: July 25-August 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1958094020
Available in Print and ebook, 208 pages

 

Description All the Rivers Flow into the Sea by Khanh Ha

From Vietnam to America, this story collection, jewel-like, evocative, and layered, brings to readers a unique sense of love and passion alongside tragedy and darker themes of peril. The titular story features a love affair between an unlikely duo pushing against barely surmountable cultural barriers. In “The Yin-Yang Market,” magical realism and the beauty of innocence abounds in deep dark places, teeming with life and danger. “A Mute Girl’s Yarn” tells a magical coming-of-age story like sketches in a child’s fairy book.

Bringing together the damned, the unfit, the brave who succumb to the call of fate, All the Rivers Flow Into the Sea is a great journey where redemption and human goodness arise out of violence and beauty to become part of an essential mercy.

All the Rivers Flow into the Sea was selected as a winner of the 2021 EastOver Prize for Fiction and has received much advanced praise.

Review All the Rivers Flow into the Sea by Khanh Ha

Review by Suzie

“Poling oars at rest crisscrossed one another, soaring from the water in pale blue ripples as blue as cooking smoke, thinly drifting, that palled the river.”

A whirlwind of a book that will leave you breathless, 'All the Rivers Flow Into the Sea,' by Khanh Ha is the kind of collection that short story lovers dream about. Having read some of Khanh Ha's other works, I was prepared to enjoy this collection, but not prepared by just how emotional I would get reading it. This is an absolutely beautiful piece of literature that should be thought of as a modern classic.

So many different emotions are represented and evoked in the telling of these eleven stories that it almost makes the book seem like magic. The stories in this group are all about Vietnam, whether they take place there or are centered around Vietnamese people in in the U.S.A., each story represents the people of the country in some way.

From a story about a college student who meets a young girl on his return to Vietnam and wishes that he could help her, to a story about a man who is wounded during an American air raid, and comforted by a young nurse while he waits to be rescued from the destruction of a bridge, these tales captivate and astound the reader.

'The Children of Icarus,' tells the story of a young couple who are discussing future marital plans when the young woman is attacked by a friend and raped. The young man reacts badly when she tells him and must apologize to her the next morning. This story of a young Vietnamese man coming to terms with his own views on love and purity culture was incredibly poignant, especially in today's world.

There are so many stories in here that are bound to touch any readers heart and soul. I'm giving this one as many stars as I can! 

Interview with Khanh Ha, Author of All the Rivers Flow into the Sea

SM: Tell us about your new book, ‘All the Rivers Flow into the Sea? Why did you write it?

KH: This story collection is a tale of salvaging one’s soul from the received war-related trauma. It takes the reader into places, both dark and wonderful, in the human condition where true love hurts and the human psyche is tested with brutal self-awakening. The title refers to the oneness; but it also refers to the kinship, the connections between us and those to whom we are related, even if we would choose not to be.

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 thought of putting them together in a collection. That thought entertained me for a while and I left it there for my busy schedule of writing a novel. After the novel was finished, I revisited the idea of the short-story collection. I asked myself, ‘What stories should I pick?’ I took time to review the stories and found a number of them sharing something in common—a motif. Love and its heartbreaking loss. I decided to use those stories as the mainstay of the collection for their common thread, namely, “All the Rivers Flow into the Sea,” “The Girl on the Bridge,” “A Scent of Long-Ago Love,” “The Children of Icarus,” and “Night, This River.” And that’s the genesis of this collection.

SM: Why do you write? 

KH: 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.’ You write because the urge to write has always been within you since you were a young boy. Then when you had enough vocabulary and your thoughts have become more refined, you were 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. 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.

SM: How did you develop your writing?

KH: It all starts with a seed of passion for something. It could be an image. A flame burning low for many years, never dying. You would glimpse people moving around like specters; these would later become characters in your stories. You would see the locales, colorful flashes of them, you could smell them. . .. Then the plot begins to form, at times you would interfere, at times you would back off. The moment you could finish that mental long walk from the beginning to the end of your story, you’re ready to write it. The characters and their names must be harmonious with their personality, or I’d risk misrepresenting them. It’s a must that you know your characters well—if literary fiction is what you write. Your savvy of life and knowledge of people is the essence of conceiving a well developed character. Likely if I conceive a character well, his name will come automatically. The story will stall if a character is badly conceived. That make-believe world represented by my characters must be real to me, and I must believe in it to be its creator.

SM: What do you hope people will take away from your writing? How will your words make them feel?

KH: First, 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 VN 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.

Now, the reason why readers can relate to certain characters is the fact that those characters have stirred something in them. I can only hope that they sympathize with them. The word ‘sympathy’ here should be expounded further. I believe that, as human being, we are at the very core universally unique, sharing the same essence. We have passed through eons in the cosmos, here or elsewhere, theologically and spiritually, born in different cultures, races, having different skin colors at one time or another, in this cyclic transmutation and endless evolution. So, who are we? We are who we are by birth, and yet we exist in everyone around us; and conversely the others exist in us as well. At the innermost of our beings, we are the same. That’s why I hope we can connect—that is the readers and the characters in this collection.

At the same time, as a Vietnamese-born person who grew up in Vietnam during the war and later lives in the United States, I have the time to look back and form opinions about the war. I have read novels written by American authors as well as Vietnamese authors about the war, and though their books are informative—and good—I never feel that they are adequately addressed about the psyches that I want to know and feel. Perhaps as a journalism major, I always desire to hear both sides of a story. So, these stories I set out to write did just that. I hope the readers can see a variety of characters, hear their voices, and feel their empathy. If that elicits sympathy from the readers, it’d be rewarding.

SM: Location and life experiences can really influence writing, tell us where you grew up and where you now live?

KH: I was born in Vietnam and grew up in the war. The post-war traumatic effects live on in me after I settled in America. What it taught me is endurance and humility, and no success is guaranteed even when you have tried your hardest. But in spite of that, you will never consider yourself a failure. My journalism background helped me when I took up creative writing classes in college. Journalism taught me how to be economical with words, how to write lean prose. But it all started with Daniel Keyes to whom I owe an enormous debt as a student who was trying to write in a language not his mother tongue and at the same time not to make a fool of himself in the class critique session.

I studied Journalism before Creative Writing. And that helped! Writing journalism forces you to be judicial and sparing with words. It asks you to write objectively and unsentimentally. When you write fiction, you must be creative with words in imagery and cadence. Yet all the time you must not write superfluously and sentimentally. Therefore, my karmic journalism background helps in writing literature.

SM: Every writer has their own idea of what a successful career in writing is, what does success in writing look like to you?

KH: To me a successful writer is one who has mastered his voice that allows readers to recognize him in every work he writes. I do not consider financial success is a true barometer to be used to judge a successful writer. His success must stem from his distinctive voice. “Call me Ishmael.” Why is the opening of Moby Dick irresistible? The VOICE. However, style and voice are not the same. Hemingway’s style is classic in its own right; but he doesn’t have the voice commanded by Faulkner. We can see that every writer has, or can have literary style; but not all of them have a literary voice. If you consciously work on your writer’s voice, you will doom it. But if you concentrate on your characters, the voice for your characters will take care of itself. Basically, a point of view, be it first person or third person, must be married to the viewpoint character with an authentic voice, so that the narrator’s characterization is true and convincing, and his voice comes out naturally from him rather than the author.

William Faulkner was a master at this technique. In The Sound and the Fury, you can read any chapter, be it with Quentin the third, or Benjamin, or Jason the Fourth, you know which character’s head you’re in. Faulkner has given each of his characters such a distinctive interior voice, you really feel you are seeing the world through their eyes.

About Khanh Ha

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, The Orison Anthology Award for Fiction, The James Knudsen Prize for Fiction, The C&R Press Fiction Prize, and The EastOver Fiction Prize.

Mrs. Rossi’s Dream was named Best New Book by Booklist and a 2019 Foreword Reviews INDIES Silver Winner and Bronze Winner. All the Rivers Flow into the Sea & Other Stories has already won the EastOver Fiction Prize.

Website: http://www.authorkhanhha.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/KhanhHa69784776
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorkhanhha

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This giveaway is for 3 print copies and is open to the U.S. only. This giveaway ends on Aug 27, 2022 midnight, pacific time.  Entries accepted via Rafflecopter only.

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