Matthew’s Journey: The Return Home follows a young soldier’s brutal fight to survive the battlefields while the woman he loves back home agonizingly waits for his return. Many war stories focus almost entirely on soldiers. What drew you to spend equal emotional weight on the people left behind?

Unfortunately, the people often left behind are the most forgotten, as their loved ones are called off to war. They too bear the brunt of the emotional and physical losses incurred as a result of warfare, especially during this period. The pain and the suffering and the sacrifices they are forced to endure are often under told in stories like these. Their voices need to be heard much more than they are.

The novel treats war less as spectacle and more as erosion: of bodies, homes, certainty, and innocence. Was the anti-war dimension always central to the story?

Absolutely. One of the central features of the novel spoke to the overall senselessness of war, how many important and influential people make the fateful decisions that weigh heavily and often deadly on the lives and livelihoods of others, when they themselves seek only to selfishly profit from the overall experience from safely behind the scenes.​

The prose lingers over images, weather, and moral points. How do you decide when a scene has earned that fullness, and when to move on?

I think that when the scene has effectively made the point it has been trying to make, without being too verbose in the process, i.e., in the engaging dialogue between two important characters, or when the scene has adequately described the sights, tastes, and sounds for the reader, then it is time to move the narrative forward. Much of this determination is subjective, by both me and my editor.

Matthew’s physical journey back mirrors an emotional and spiritual one. What does “coming home” ultimately mean to him by the end?

Ultimately, coming home breaks the illusion of the glory of war for Matthew, while reinforcing for him the importance of family and loved ones, to always cherish them and never take any of it for granted.

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