Stephen Wright

Listen while I tell you about a dream he had.

Meditations in Green is the debut novel of the writer and Vietnam veteran, Steven Wright.

Published in 1983 to praise in mainstream circles, the New York Times Review called it brilliant and scarifying.

Meditations offers an idiosyncratic, hilarious, and horrifying perspective on that blunderous war in Southeast Asia.

And I'd been talking to him about it, and he'd said that Meditations in Green had been a, like sort of an inspiration or an influence on that book, I think mostly structurally rather than kind of line by line.

And so I was pretty interested in that, and you know, I'm a...

Uh, my, my dad's a combat veteran in Vietnam, so, you know, generally sort of peripherally interested in Vietnam stuff at a, at a minimum.

And so I picked, I picked that up and was just like, "Oh, this is, this is nuts." [laughs] 'Cause, 'cause, uh, you know, and this is something I did kinda wanna talk about.