Oct 9, 2026 · 2 hr 18 min · 12 segments
*Meditations in Green* is the debut novel of the writer, and Vietnam veteran, Stephen Wright. Published in 1983 to praise in mainstream circles—the New York Times review called it “brilliant, and…
David Leo RiceGuestThe more time I do this show, the more I'm realizing that so much of the audience is writers, and so I like to do a little bit of like l- what we, you know, kinda craft talk, sort of what can we glean from this book as writers.
And, and one space, uh, you know, I kinda wanted to sorta start in that, in, in that part of the conversation, is just thinking about how Stephen Wright does exposition here.
There is a sort of set of images, a set of information, um, and I was really fascinated.
Like one way that you can kinda get bogged down in, I think, writing a piece of war fiction or something that is so explicitly tied to actual historical events is in trying to overexplain what that historical event is in a historical sense.
And so in the Vietnam case it would be like trying to tell us, you know, when it started, where it happened, who the big time players were.
There m- I might be missing one, but like it, nobody, nobody's mentioned by name that was an actual person who exists as far as I remember.
We also don't even know where the, the 1069th, which is this fictional intelligence group, we're not even told really...
I- i- if you, if you're in deep on the details of Viet- Vietnamese geography and the war, you could probably figure out roughly where it was, but he never tells you where it is in country.
One, one of my, uh, maybe the most fun part for me of the book is, I don't know if you remember, fairly early on in the remembered part of Vietnam, he's, uh, basically Spec Four James Griffin, our main character, is sitting in a room with all these other recruits, and it's like they're fresh out of boot camp or something, but they're not yet at the war.
And there's this sort of hilarious like presentation that, that is, that is given.
The more time I do this show, the more I'm realizing that so much of the audience is writers, and so I like to do a little bit of like l- what we, you know, kinda craft talk, sort of what can we glean from this book as writers.
And, and one space, uh, you know, I kinda wanted to sorta start in that, in, in that part of the conversation, is just thinking about how Stephen Wright does exposition here.
There is a sort of set of images, a set of information, um, and I was really fascinated.
Like one way that you can kinda get bogged down in, I think, writing a piece of war fiction or something that is so explicitly tied to actual historical events is in trying to overexplain what that historical event is in a historical sense.
And so in the Vietnam case it would be like trying to tell us, you know, when it started, where it happened, who the big time players were.
There m- I might be missing one, but like it, nobody, nobody's mentioned by name that was an actual person who exists as far as I remember.
We also don't even know where the, the 1069th, which is this fictional intelligence group, we're not even told really...
I- i- if you, if you're in deep on the details of Viet- Vietnamese geography and the war, you could probably figure out roughly where it was, but he never tells you where it is in country.
One, one of my, uh, maybe the most fun part for me of the book is, I don't know if you remember, fairly early on in the remembered part of Vietnam, he's, uh, basically Spec Four James Griffin, our main character, is sitting in a room with all these other recruits, and it's like they're fresh out of boot camp or something, but they're not yet at the war.
And there's this sort of hilarious like presentation that, that is, that is given.
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