Looking For Canterbury:
An Interview with Jason Marks

Q. What makes Looking for Canterbury of universal interest?

A. Looking for Canterbury focuses on several Vietnam war veterans who suffer from post-traumatic-stress disorder and seek to heal themselves by telling tales in idyllic Central Park, the one stipulation being that the stories have nothing to do with Nam.  On the surface, the novel deals with a group of fictional characters whose journey through the Park acquaints them with a number of its famous scenes and settings. But on a more profound level their odyssey plunges the into the secret depths of their hearts and minds.

Q. What is the relevance between Looking For Canterbury and our time?

A. The novel dwells upon the lasting impact on our national consciousness of the Vietnam War—the one war from which America failed to emerge victorious and which continues to nag at our psyche. Was America right to engage in that war? Did our cause justify the sacrifice of more than 58,000 American lives in dead or missing? Looking For Canterbury speaks for them and, in particular, for the veterans who survived Nam but continue to live scarred mentally and emotionally by devastating experiences they suffered there. Their lot in life resonates the fate that now apparently confronts survivors of the 9-11-01 World Trade Center tragedy as well as friends and loved ones of those who did not survive—a long, painful encounter with the symptoms of post-traumatic-stress

disorder.

Q. What has the 14th-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer got to do with contemporary

Vietnam war veterans?

A. Chaucer is a master psychologist widely regarded as second only to William Shakespeare among classical English poets in understanding human nature or what makes people tick. Because he knew we are the stories that we tell, the tales told in his The Canterbury Tales almost invariably reflect the needs, emotions, predispositions, and cultural backgrounds of their tellers. Chaucer becomes an ideal vehicle for carrying the plot in Looking For Canterbury. The Vietnam vets not only play the roles of his storytellers whom they strikingly resemble (the gregarious Host, sexy Wife of Bath, unscrupulous Pardoner, rowdy Miller, etc.), they, too, reveal their innermost being through the tales they narrate.

Q. Why is Central Park the setting for Looking For Canterbury?

A. The author and his wife Edith, also a writer, who reside adjacent to Central Park, walk through it daily and admire its beauties. Each spring, following a long, icy winter, the Park renews itself and their spirits, bursting once again into gorgeous bloom. Much like Chaucer's pilgrims on the road to Canterbury, the Vietnam vets undertake their journey through the Park during springtime in quest of redemption. Their pilgrimage to an "American Canterbury" is conceived, funded, and set in motion by Harry Baylor, a Broadway butcher and "Chaucer nut," who like his fellow veterans is in flight from years of unrewarding support-group therapy and still struggling to purge himself of his own particular catastrophic Nam torment.

Q. What makes Looking For Canterbury different from other books about the American Vietnam-war veteran?

A. Looking For Canterbury may appear simply to concern the plight of several Vietnam war veterans who continue to suffer from post-traumatic-stress disorder. What raises the novel-based to a considerable extent upon books and articles written by American men and women who served in Nam-above a grim reprise of their afflictions is the transforming power of imagination. Because Harry Bayior and his fellow vets tell their stories in a paradisiacal setting, an aura of romance suffuses what might have been yet another unrelievedly dire catalogue of Nam horrors. And because Harry enjoins his compatriots to tell tales that have nothing to do with Nam (his theory being that truth is sometimes best arrived at by indirection), he enwraps their journey in a mystery: How is it possible for them to arrive at the truth about themselves by telling tales that avoid their having to cope with their inner conflicts? The characters whom the author has imagined and created in Looking For Canterbury answer that question through their thoughts and actions.