In many ways it hasn’t even been much explored in fiction at all. That relative downplaying of what happened and our reticence to discuss it-especially in the white community-was really a mark of cultural shame, and I knew there was a story there that hadn’t been explored on the local scene. But having said that, the book is about the history of the community I grew up in that, by the 1970s and 1980s, was a community that was largely white.Īs a boy, I think I was aware of the internment, but only in the abstract, as a facet of California history. I’m not someone who believes that white writers should be taking up any space in this particular discussion. We discussed the moral craft of writing from his own prejudices, how he juggles work and fatherhood, and the writers who are teaching him the practice of listening.Īmy Reardon: Why write about Japanese internment?Ĭhristian Kiefer: Well, first of all, I’m still not entirely sure I should have, or that any white writer should. Kiefer and I spoke at a recent manuscript workshop he taught in Lake Tahoe, with follow-up over email while Kiefer was staying at the Ronald McDonald House at Stanford and while his youngest child (of seven) was in the hospital. Unlike the white savior narratives that have dominated the imaginations of writers-especially white, male writers-for generations, Kiefer presents a story that both subverts and complicates that trope, while still acknowledging its pull and inescapable pitfalls. Kiefer’s entrée to that discussion is a complex conversation about who gets to have a voice and who has to live with the consequences of complicity.

The subject of race and white culpability has been central to an entire scope of American literature. Traumatized and addicted, John finds himself helping two heartbroken matriarchs chase down their own entwined ghosts from the internment.

Kiefer’s third novel, Phantoms, invites privilege and prejudice into the light as the book’s narrator, John Frazier, returns from fighting in Vietnam to a community still hiding from its own complicity. By then we had put the whole thing behind us, or tried to, whatever concern or even guilt we might have felt replaced by that mixture of jubilation and despair brought on by the war’s end, for our boys were coming home and the war had changed them.” So begins Christian Kiefer’s exploration of white guilt in the aftermath of the removal and internment of an entire Japanese American population from Newcastle, a small orchard community near his Northern California hometown of Auburn. The author of The Animals and The Infinite Tides, he lives with his family in Placer County, California. Christian Kiefer has a PhD in American literature from the University of California–Davis and directs the low-residency MFA at Ashland University.

The Animals by Christian Kiefer