The Assay Interview Project: Michael Ramos
April 1, 2025

Michael Ramos is an Iraq war veteran, a writer, teacher, book designer, editor, and the art director for Ecotone magazine. His work focuses on dispelling myths about war, warriors, and veterans, and bringing military and civilian communities together through the power of art. You can find his work in Fourth Genre, Slice, PANK Daily, and other places. His essay collection The After: A Veteran's Notes on Coming Home received a starred Kirkus review and is available now from UNC Press.
About The After:  Barely thirteen days before 9/11, Michael Ramos enlisted in the Navy and got assigned to serve as a chaplain’s bodyguard. At that time, he did not know he would be going to Iraq. For a decade, he embraced his combat service, until, at age thirty-four, he was informed his skills were no longer needed in the military. The After is both a meditation on Michael’s life in active service as well as what came after including divorce, remarriage, loss of friends to war and suicide, his inability to sleep or rest, or fully embrace a civilian life. Through this collection of twenty-four nonlinear and subversive essays, Michael presents a vivid portrait of what it means to be a civilian, warrior, friend, father, husband and professor.
Sayantani Dasgupta: Michael, congratulations on the publication of your extraordinary book. It is both a meditation on a military life as well as what comes after. You show your reader what life was like when you were on active duty, so we may understand something we have only vague notions of, but in doing so, you don’t patronize us. One of the most surprising moments for me as a reader, who also happens to be a teacher, was when you addressed teaching as an “act of service” that in its essence is not all that different from serving in the military. How do you teach your students the craft of seeing such patterns or thematic similarities, be that in their professional or personal lives, and then writing about it in artful ways?

Michael Ramos: I try to help my students recognize patterns and thematic similarities by encouraging them to slow down.  I have gotten into the habit of reminding my students that a school setting is a construct—a useful construct, but a construct all the same—that doesn’t reflect the realities of writing and publishing. In a writing program you produce a piece, it gets feedback, you edit the piece, you get a grade. The writing program is a compressed process that tricks us into thinking things happen fast when the reality is writing takes time. And I don’t just mean the physical act of typing or writing, but the thinking about the work (I think about or write in my head most of an essay before I ever go to the computer) and examining of a life and its incidents that takes up time, too. And if you rush that internal germination period for the sake of a product or a workshop piece you miss the patterns that present themselves and make your own work standout.

And as far as making your work standout in an artful way, I ask my students the same question I ask myself: What am I bringing to the conversation about topic x that is new?  I think newness comes from a person’s perspective, their insights, their pattern recognition. In my case how I relate writing and teaching to military service and how I think about form and structure and chose nonconventional essays to tell a story (the return from war) that is as old as humanity is how I demonstrate for my students how to think about newness. I also encourage my students to think about their writing as problem solving and the problems are: what story do I tell? And how do I tell it? That allows me to encourage my students to read widely to observe how other people have solved a similar problem, and how they can in turn use and repurpose those techniques or find alternative solutions, which is a lot of what we do in the military, or at least in my experience.

How did you decide on the overall narrative arc for the book as a whole and for each essay in particular?

I would love to say it is all my own brilliance, but that would be a lie. Having an editor challenge me about what I thought the book was doing was vital to what the book became. Cate at UNC Press saw a narrative arc where I didn’t, confirmed some of my thoughts on what the book needed, and then let me figure out how best to find and craft it. That’s why we have the present narrator at the very beginning, followed by the narrator in the middle, then going backward to 9/11, the war, and the after, the narrator’s struggles in the after, and ending with the present narrator who has navigated the troubled waters of return. It is fact, a hero’s journey narrative of sorts and a little like The Odyssey.

During the essay writing stage, I thought a lot about music—like albums or mixtapes and how those get structured. I thought about jazz and rap and punk rock and how those songs have narrative movement through sound, and how I could capture those musical movements I hear on the page. In addition to art and music, I thought about the thematic, emotional, and physical movement of my narrator in each essay. In one essay you might get a complete micronarrative like in “A long and incomplete list,” or my version of an Impressionist painting in “Time” or series of vignettes like “Thank You For Your Service” but all of these elements I wrote and placed to move—forward or backward in time or emotion.

As the book started taking shape I carried over my thoughts on music, but I also thought about art, and art museums and art books and how you can look at an art book and flip through the pages or leave the book open to a page and meditate on a specific painting for a bit, how you can wander around an art museum and get the whole experience while lingering on a specific piece or two. I wanted to mimic —or maybe render is a better word—the audio and visuals I thought about and consumed in The After. That’s the theory.

The practical part of shaping the arc is that I wrote the themes present in an essay, the physical timeline, and the emotional timeline above the title of an essay and laid those out on my kitchen table and moved them around until I had what became the structure of the book.

You reference The Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh in The After. I am curious if these stories and storytelling traditions influenced you even before you consciously took up writing. Or if you were drawn to them once you started working on this essay collection. I ask this question because I have been profoundly impacted by the stories and myths of Hinduism that I read as a child, and they continue to influence how I view the world.

I think I was influenced by what I read before I ever started writing, same as you, and I wonder if we would find that most of us writers would say the same. I remember reading as many myth books as I could as a kid, I was fascinated and consumed by them, they just felt so…right, you know? I also used to read the dictionary and encyclopedias, and my history textbooks, I couldn’t get enough of the world beyond my house. And I think the voracious curiosity that fuels our mental development as a child is the part of being a writer that is so cool, or what makes each of us so unique and so worth reading. When we think about the things that influenced us as children, that shape how we view the world and interact with it, whether we adhere to these things now or challenge them or have adapted the way we look at them, that is what makes us the writers we are. Which is why I, and you do too, I’m sure, try to encourage my students to read widely and well.

In nearly every essay in this book you play with punctuation to the point of giving it your own unique signature. You do it in such artful and seemingly effortless ways that not once does it appear gimmicky. Could you speak to how and why it felt necessary and useful to you to push the boundaries of punctuation in this way?  

Thank you for that compliment! I felt it was necessary and felt organic to the story for a few reasons.  First, I took a class as an undergrad on book design, and typesetting my own chapbook those years ago and thinking about the personalities of typefaces and the visual effect of words and punctuation on the page made me think about and challenge the notion that readers don’t pay attention to punctuation. We do, even if we don’t realize it. A comma is a soft pause, a period a hard stop. We know that because that is what we have been taught, but do we pay attention?  Second, I also think a lot about sound and movement and cadence. Manipulating punctuation allows me to shape an essays sound, how the narrator’s thoughts move, how people speak, how to overwhelm a reader when the narrator was feeling overwhelmed. I think punctuation plays a major part in that. Third, I was thinking about Whitman and how he challenged line length and Ginsberg who carried that challenge further with the breath length line in Howl and how he created a sense of emotional urgency and angst, and I just wanted to see if I could do that in creative nonfiction. I guess I use punctuation to communicate to the reader what I felt emotionally and maybe try to get them to experience a little of that emotion too as they take their reading cues from punctuation.

I am deeply invested in the tone of the book overall and that of the individual essays. At times, your tone is playful and funny, even when you are writing about serious topics like the death of beloved mentors. At other times, there is a matter-of-factness woven in with sincerity and empathy. Did the subject of each essay dictate its tone? Did the tone itself evolve over time?

Yes, I think each essay’s subject matter dictated its tone in some ways, and in other ways the setting of the essay dictated tone, perhaps, too, my emotional/psychological state while writing the essay drive its tone. I think about “Boxes,” and how matter of fact it is. When I wrote it, I wanted to stay away from hyperbole and let the bare facts of some of what we say and how we think carry the tonal weight and momentum of the piece. In “Time,” and “Section 60,” the setting—Arlington Cemetery and a secluded beach—took center stage in how I crafted the essay and how I wanted it to feel and read. Elegiac in “Section 60” and calm and mimicking the ocean in “Time.” In the “Long and Incomplete list,” I used punctuation and sentences to shape the tone of it because I was feeling overwhelmed by thinking of the totality of the experience.

I do think the tone evolved over time. Partly out of natural writerly growth and partly out of narrative necessity. I remember our colleague David Gessner telling me an early version of The After was all punk rock one speed, aggressive and he wanted more nuance, and he was right, the book needed that and I wanted that for the book too.  I realized that I can’t be matter of fact over the entire book, or frenetic, or sad, or heavy, or comic; there has to be some nuance and movement to a book’s tone—and the individual essay’s tone in some cases—to bring the reader to where you want them without exhausting them. That variance of tone for me reflects what I was talking about earlier regarding music and musical movements, too. I guess the tone of the book is one of the many gears, for lack of a better word, that I have working together and moving the narrative.

Several of the essays are short and tightly put together. Was that to avoid lingering for long on difficult subjects? Or do you tend to lean toward brevity?

I think it’s a little of both. At first, it was hard to dwell on difficult subjects, but I also realized that I was at home with using brevity. Brevity is a trait that the Marines appreciate—which they acquired from the Spartans who were renowned for their brevity (laconic comes from Laconia, where the Spartans lived)—and that I came to appreciate as a greenside Navy guy who was attached to the Marines.  Because I am a part of that culture and value it, I think our shared tendency toward brevity came out in my writing subconsciously at first, but as I evolved as a writer, I kept to it and learned to use brevity for maximum effect. I remember when a few of my Marines read “A long and incomplete list” the consensus was it was solid, but a little wordy—and that is only about 5200 words or so, I think.  I also used brevity as part of my what I am bringing new to the conversation. I hadn’t read many military things that used brevity as a technique, so I felt there was room to innovate there.

One of the most striking aspects of The After is how you have titled each essay. They have a directness to them, but they are also telling their own stories. What is your advice for young writers who often struggle with titling their works?

First, I would say don’t skimp on the title or copout and say you’re bad at titles. Get better if you are bad at titles. I think sometimes that people are bad at titles because they write the essay first and then stick a title at the top. They aren’t thinking about the title as an active, working part of an essay. Titles can be powerful tools in an essay and can serve to corral and organize information. This is a technique I learned from poets. I observed how a poem’s title interacts with the poem, and I wanted to replicate that in my work. And so, second, I would say read. Read to see how other writers title their work and how they use their titles as part of the work or how it informs the work. And practice. I think about the young Joan Didion who used to copy sentences to figure out how they worked. I think we can do the same with titles.

Your essays ask important questions about masculinity, fatherhood, what makes a brotherhood and a family, etc. Were you an inquisitive child when you were growing up? What sorts of questions did you ask of the adults around you?

If I remember correctly, I used to ask all kinds of questions all the time to adults when I was a child. I know I asked why a lot. I remember a Memorial Day almost forty years ago now and the president was on TV, and we found my dog Sox’s puppy buried under our house and I remember asking my dad “why did President Reagan lay a wreath at Arlington cemetery in the rain? Why did our dog Sox bury her puppy?”  Why, why, why. I am sure I drove adults crazy with my incessant questions. But I think that curiosity is what really makes a writer. We can teach a person how to write a sentence, or think about technique or mimic a technique, but teaching curiosity…I don’t think that can be taught.

While you grant a lot of permission to the reader, to the extent of even breaking down the fourth wall a few times, I also got the sense that there is much you are not yet telling us. Is that subject for the next book?

Yes, I think some of what I left out is for different books. I hope for the plural anyway. The next book I am working on is titled Things Left Unsaid, for that very reason. I didn’t get to say all the things I wanted, and some things didn’t need to be said in this book and so that’s the beauty of writing, isn’t it? You can say here are some essays linked thematically or temporally and then a separate book has different themes or comes at a similar subject from a different angle or perspective. I am really into hybrid work and thinking about redaction and how the things I didn’t say in this book can be said in the next one with hybridity and experimentation—even more so than this one.

Some of the most poignant sections of the book are about your son. How did he react to being written about?

He enjoyed being written about. He makes those appearances because he was so important to me then—as he is now.  Thinking about not dishonoring him, and providing an example to him, and knowing where his path might lay, he understands—because he is a dabbler in writing—that he is an integral character to this narrative too and he embraces it. And since he is a veteran too, he understands the necessity of seeing our culture as husbands and fathers or mothers and wives as well as warriors.
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You put white space to great use in your book. When did you start playing with white space as a craft device? Are there any authors who specifically inspired you to think this way?

I started experimenting—furtively—with white space about thirteen years ago, partly from what I had been reading but then it really clicked for me because of my book design class. I started think about white space as a visual signal to think about the scene or vignette before the space and the way we shift scenes mentally when telling a story. Conversely, as I teach my reader what the white space means, they also learn what a lack of white space means and how that shapes emotional intensity or tone of a piece, right? And the list of inspirations is pretty long: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Eula Biss’s “The Pain Scale,” Brian Lennon’s City an Essay, Marie Carter’s “Trapeze Lessons,” Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, “Consumptions” by Sunshine O’ Donnell, “Notes on the Space We Take,” from Bonnie J. Rough. And poems. Lots of poems. Ginsberg, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, H.D., T.S. Eliot. I was fascinated with how space breaks functioned in a long narrative poem. And then after reading and studying, I just started experimenting.

How does anyone, whether a military vet or a civilian, hold on to who they are and what they want to write about when they are in a creative writing program? Often, students can feel the pressure to conform especially in workshop settings. How did you not only hold on to your Voice all through your time as a student but also strengthen it?

That is the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I would say tenacity, flexibility, and gut instinct (and guts), but also supportive peers and faculty.

For me, I am a bit stubborn, and I started my MFA at thirty-seven, so that helped me. I knew what I wanted to do, what I wanted my work to be and what I didn’t want, so resisting the urge to conform to an MFA product wasn’t difficult.

Some of my students have said they would have loved to have seen my essays workshopped and I had to tell them, well, sometimes it went how you would think. Pleas for conventional sentence structure and punctuation, assuming the whitespace was me not writing enough—a classmate used to tease me about the white ghost and the spare sentences, until he tried them out in his own work. Another time a student asked why it was so important that he read an essay about my boots when he wore combat boots as a teen, a workshop leader once asked why I didn’t write a longform, traditional essay and be done with the whole matter. And that’s where the guts and the tenacity come in.  I pushed back in some cases and in others I just ignored feedback that sought to make me what was known or familiar and focused on the feedback from peers that pushed my boundaries and supported my vision.

Also, the support of faculty helped tremendously. Before a workshop one workshop a professor pulled me aside and said you’re going to get a lot of comments in workshop about making this a normal essay whatever that is, don’t listen. This piece— he was talking about “A long and incomplete list”—nailed it.

And don’t sell your vision short and stick to it. John Jeremiah Sullivan once told me that he was into my work because it was so different because it was a little bit essay and memoir, and emotion and poetry, and other compliments, and then he told me that it was going to be hard to get published because people wouldn’t know how to categorize and sell it but stick to it. So I guess I am saying as long as the work is good and or getting better, believe in yourself, let your voice ring clear and true, and get after it—even if it takes awhile.

Thank you, Michael, for your time and this conversation. It was an honor to read and learn from your book.

Thank you, Sayantani.
Born in Calcutta and raised in New Delhi, Sayantani Dasgupta is the author of Brown Women Have Everything: Essays on (Dis)comfort and Delight. Previous books include the short story collection Women Who Misbehave and Fire Girl: Essays on India, America, & the In-Between, a Finalist for the Foreword Indies Awards for Creative Nonfiction. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington, Sayantani has also taught in India, Italy, Colombia, and Mexico. She is a contributing editor at Assay.

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