All right. Hello, everybody. How you doing? Welcome to The Other People's Show. I'm Brad Listy here in Los Angeles. It's good to be with you. I have on the program today, David Tromblay. He is the author of a memoir called As You Were, available now from DeZank Books.

It is the official February pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.

The Nervous Breakdown.com is my online culture magazine and literary community founded 15 years ago.

It is now edited by Joseph Grantham, who also happens to be the social media director

for this program. He is also a poet and a bookseller and a writer. He's a man of many gifts.

So David Tromblay, as you were, Kirkus Reviews calls it

an incandescent addition

to both Native American letters

and the literature of the Iraq and Afghan wars

end quote

It's a very difficult book to sum up in a few words

But I'll give it a go here just for the

purpose of the monologue. David Trombly survived an incredibly difficult and traumatic childhood.

He was raised in the Duluth, Minnesota area, and, you know, addiction the legacies uh the dark legacies of colonialism the indian

boarding schools adults in his world who did not have the capacity to parent or who, you know,

were just carrying the weight of their own traumas and their own human suffering.

So the conditions of David Trambley's childhood were so difficult that he fled to the army.

And, you know, goes off into the armed forces and, you know, by comparison, it was like a relief.

I don't know if that's exactly how he would put it, but you know what I'm saying.

He was in the military for over a decade, and then after getting out of the military, he attended the Institute of American Indian Arts and received his MFA and worked with Stephen Graham Jones, a recent guest on this program, coincidentally enough.

Stephen Graham Jones is one of his mentors.

So I had a great time talking with David Trombly.

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