Kevin Sites

Kevin Sites is an award-winning journalist and author. He has worked as a reporter for more than thirty years, half of that covering war and disaster for ABC, NBC, CNN, Yahoo News, and Vice News. He was a 2010 Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard University and a 2012 Dart Fellow in Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University. For a decade he lived and taught in Hong Kong as an associate professor of practice in journalism at the University of Hong Kong. He’s the author of three books on war, In the Hot Zone, The Things They Cannot Say, and Swimming with Warlords. He lives in Oregon.

Sites's new novel is The Ocean Above Me.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

For me, titles are like the first block in a game of Jenga. It’s the foundation. It cues my brain to what I’m trying to accomplish whether a journalistic piece, a short story – or a book-length work.

But like Jenga, that doesn’t always mean the whole structure will collapse if you decide to pull it.

For example, when I first considered my novel in 2018, I saw it as an exploration of the protagonist’s psyche following tragic events in his experience reporting the Iraq War. More metaphysical than physical journey.

I dubbed it rather ambiguously, 15 Fathoms of Grief.

That held for the first five drafts, but gave way to the even more opaque, Beautiful Hole.

This referenced a line in the novel in which the Captain’s daughter, Olveda, speaks about her mother’s use of drugs and alcohol following multiple military deployments overseas. Here’s the passage:

“Mom had that for a bit too, after she was wounded. Got on the pills for pain, stayed for the forgetting. Told me later, after she kicked it, that the percs and the beer made her feel like she was in a beautiful hole and never wanted to come out.”

I loved that title because it created a sense of mystery. It kept readers guessing and interested since the line didn’t emerge until the last third of the novel.

But I was ‘violently’ disabused of that notion when both my wife and my agent, nearly simultaneously, told me it sounded like a porn film. The sad kind with aspirations of being more than what it really was.

I had never once thought of it that way. A common issue of being myopic. Too steeped in the work. But once they’d flagged me, all I could see anymore was the porn title.

It took another two weeks of writing hundreds of options on my dry-erase board. But by that time the novel’s narrative arc had evolved. It emphasized Landon’s fight for survival as much as his psychological agony, as Maya Angelou wrote, of ‘bearing an untold story inside you.’

In the end, crafting a new title became akin to magnetic poetry on the fridge (if we’re to continue with the game metaphors).

I had a list of prepositions and variations of water nouns and rearranged them. Under an Angry Sea was a contender for a while, but felt uninspired.

A good title should tell us something about what’s inside, but also challenge our preconceptions. Get us thinking. Engaged.

The Ocean Above Me did both. The instant I wrote it I knew it would be on the cover. Like everything in this novel, it was a long way from where I started, but so much better than where I began.

The lesson for me here was not to be so creatively self-righteous as to be foolishly myopic.

Consider, like any good artist does, the place others carve out for themselves in your work. That dialogue with your audience, in this case my wife and agent, may wake you up to unimagined possibilities.

And in creating something, that’s about as fun as it gets.

What's in a name?

Naming is tricky. Few things can make a reader lose confidence in you faster than inaptly naming your characters.

At 15, when I first started writing fiction, I shorthanded character descriptions by attempting to shoehorn everything into their names. Brock Woodstrop. Bonita Solano. The kind of clumsy stuff you find in pulpy thrillers or cookie cutter romance.

But there’s another pitfall as well. Names so forgettable or generic the reader has difficulty keeping straight who’s who in the narrative.

My goal is to try to make sure character names are realistic, but also suitably tailored to who wears them.

I accidentally discovered a rich source for names while attending my daughter’s high school graduation. She went to a large and diverse public school near Los Angeles.

Looking over the hundreds listed on the program I was struck by the rich cultural and ethnic diversity in both given and surnames.

I realized that graduation programs, old phone books, anything with lists of names can yield innumerable mix and match variations that help me get exactly the right fit for my characters.

In The Ocean Above Me the two characters I really wanted to make sure I got right were obviously the main protagonists: journalist, Lukas Landon and shrimp boat captain, Clarita Esteban.

Landon, despite his worldly experiences, is still a bit of grey man. Someone on the downward spiral of his life and career. So I didn’t want the name to be too flashy but would still stand out when seen on the by-lines of his articles. Story by Lukas Landon.

I’m not a big fan of alliteration for character names, but here it helped reinforce him to readers. Especially since, apart from his by-lines, almost no one uses his first name.

Everyone calls him Landon, denoting a lack of intimacy. The result of him keeping people at arm’s distance.

With Clarita Esteban I wanted a given name that was sharp, direct as she was and a surname name that conveyed her Afro-Latinx heritage.

This would signpost to readers that she likely faced significantly more challenges in all aspects of life than her white, male counterparts. Especially in her job as a shrimp boat captain.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

It’s fair to suspect that when a novel’s protagonist has the same day job as the author then the book must be autobiographical.

The novelist might just be lifting scenes from their own life, adhering to that old chestnut of literary advice, ‘write what you know.’

In my novel, the main character, Lukas Landon is a journalist. Just like me.

More specifically, he’s spent much of his career reporting on war and conflict. Just like me.

But he is not me. Not by a longshot.

While we both bumped up against major ethical dilemmas in our reporting careers, his life, his narrative has a much darker and more unforgiving arc.

One developed from the foundational “what happens when” question posed before I started the novel.

What happens when an individual bears a secret so great it could destroy them if left untold? A premise perfectly suited to someone who once reported on war.

And while Landon relates many anecdotes from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which I also covered, his are all fully fictional.

However, some are inspired, at least in part, by my own journalistic reporting experiences or those of colleagues.

Experiences that provided essential specificity and detail to help render war authentically – in all its insanity, absurdity, banality and even -- hilarity. Yet still, in service of that over-arching question: What happens when?

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Let me bend the question a bit before I answer by revising it to this: What non-literary influences have impacted your writing?

All my life experiences have impacted my writing. Including my darkest ones. Like that of alcohol and cocaine misuse.

The key term here is impacted. I don’t see my past substance use as a boon to my writing. Quite the opposite. It shaved away at least a handful of productive years and delayed projects that may have begun much earlier in my career.

In some cases it directly obstructed the work itself.

Some exposition is necessary. After covering war and conflict for nearly half of my career I found it difficult to function in a peacetime environment. I was overstimulated and wracked with guilt and moral injury over bad decisions I had made reporting on the frontlines.

I coped by self-medicating with alcohol and cocaine. I prided myself on never becoming altered in a war zone. Because I believed if those who lived there had to endure their misery straight, so did I.

But this did not apply when I was back home. Drinking was a daily indulgence. Monthly or weekly for the drugs. Due to expense.

A big challenge to this lifestyle was I still had work to do. While researching my second non-fiction book, The Things They Cannot Say, the dilemma became darkly comic in my efforts to interview a young Marine I was profiling.

When I was sober and ready to talk I would call him only to get his answering machine or find he was too drunk to answer my questions.

Then he would call me back in a day or two, sober and ready to talk, but I would be too drunk to ask them. This went on for months until we both straightened up.

I eventually figured out that both my journalistic and literary aspirations would be permanently derailed If I didn’t find a solution.

Since that time I have used (in-person and online) evidence-based, science-focused programs to achieve intermittent, years-long sobriety.

My work and my mental and physical health have benefited greatly. Yet, while I’m currently Alcohol Free (AF) I still consider myself a nomad between worlds of the imbibers and the abstinent.

Part of this ambivalence is due to the erroneous and deep-seated hold of the concept that psychoactive substances, especially alcohol, are the writer’s friend. Just look at all the anecdotal evidence.

Many of the greatest writers of the 19th and 20th centuries were either firmly in the grip of alcohol addiction or had a very unhealthy relationship with it: Poe, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, Parker, Fitzgerald, Rhys, Cheever, Plath, Capote, McCullers, Williams.

If being addled is such a big deal, how did they pull off such masterpieces in the midst of it?

But, if you follow those personal and career trajectories to their final splashdowns, very few end well. In fact most could be considered cautionary tales.

While a little alcohol may reduce inhibitions and even increase creativity for writers, according to some minor scientific studies, even a tiny bit too much can bring it all crashing down.

Probably why even Papa “Pour Me Another” Hemingway never wrote drunk, even though the apocryphal quote, “write drunk, edit sober,” is often attributed to him.

Fortunately our attitudes about the value of drugs and alcohol on writing have evolved to a more sophisticated and nuanced level.

Personally I don’t want to get in the habit of regretting experiences, even bad ones—as they all add to the sum of my character and the authenticity of my work.

And the struggles with anything, whether we overcome them or not, often lead to indisputable benefits for writers, such as enhanced understanding and empathy, if we’re wise enough to let them.

Visit Kevin Sites's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Ocean Above Me.

The Page 69 Test: The Ocean Above Me.

--Marshal Zeringue