Alumni Corner

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In this section of The Chameleon, we focus on an alumna and Nfaculty member who is involved in the creative arts to highlight that not only are students doing wonderful writing and art, but so are professors across campus. Addie Armstrong ’10 is a math professor at Norwich University and serves as the Chair of the Institutional Review Board and Research Ethics Committee. Her current research E

focuses on aspects of graph theory. In her spare time, Armstrong Rcan be found writing. Professor Armstrong was interviewed on her work by Ben Zacher ’20, one of The Chameleon’s 2020 editors.

Addie Armstrong ’10 Ben Zacher: As a math professor, why do you write?

Addie Armstrong: I always wrote when I was growing up. It basically came down to two things, what I would do: I would either write or I would do research in mathematics. And they’re not very similar. But in some ways, they actually are. When you get to research-level mathematics, what you do in mathematics is you think about ideas that people have never thought about before. So you spend a great deal of time imagining if there were rules, and how would things be affected by those rules, which at some level is very similar to writing, particularly science fiction, because you imagine the future in which there are some rules and you try to apply those rules to society. So, I actually see the two as very similar. I also like writing because it exercises the other half of my brain, so to speak. It’s not analytical. It’s not ‘these are always the rules.’ I’m allowed to change the rules when I write. And that’s a lot of fun. I’ve always thought, well, I could either be a writer or a mathematician, and I kind of became a mathematician. So we’ll do that for a while and then we’ll see.

BZ: Is there a way that teaching here in the math department at Norwich has impacted your writing in any way?

AA: So, I’m a Norwich graduate. When I was at Norwich, I was lucky enough to be around the military academy. And that gave me a whole set of extra experiences that you wouldn’t get if you just go to a normal university. And when I came back and started teaching, I had the flip side of those experiences. Now I know what it’s like to mentor people and really bring them up to where you want them to be. And that kind of that impacts what I can talk about in my writing. I’ve gotten the chance to open up a new can of worms. Instead of just looking at the standard kind of fantasy world, I can look at the fantasy world that has an academy advisor in it, and what it’s like teaching these people and the types of responsibilities you feel when you are in that position.

BZ: You had the experience of studying under Professor Cox and taking classes with him. What was that experience like for you?

AA: Oh, it was fantastic. He’s a science-fiction horror writer. And that was what I always liked to read growing up. So, I first took English 201, and when I got to do [science fiction] in a writing class, he said, “Oh, you write, and you read science fiction?” And I said, “Yes.” He said, “I’m offering the science-fiction literature class.” And it was the first or second time it had run, actually. And I said, “Oh, well, I’ll take it.” And I ended up doing a lot of writing with him. He encouraged me to look at The Chameleon and to keep writing. And every time I see him to this day, he always says, “Keep writing. Have you submitted anything?” Or he’ll tell me, “I got turned down from three magazines this summer,” and it just makes you feel better, knowing, “Okay, it’s not just me who keeps getting rejected.” Learning from Professor Cox was one of the best experiences I’ve had the opportunity to have, because he’s very encouraging and he always just said, “It’s okay. We get rejected all the time. Don’t worry about that.” And that gave me a large confidence boost.

BZ: What has been your process in getting your pieces published?

AA: I have a lot of rejection letters, one piece that’s currently submitted, and one acceptance letter. And then a lot of the work that I’ve been doing, like the poem “Song of the Yeomanette,” was sent to the Navy, and it’s not published in a formal literary journal, but it was published as a celebrational thing in 2017, about the 1917 rise of the Yeomanette. So, a lot of my stuff has appeared more publicly in spots. I’ve written for local papers. I’ve done a lot of articles and stuff like that, but a lot of my stuff just appears in little local things for now.

BZ: What interests you about genres ranging from war, sci-fi, and fantasy? And why did you decide to cover such a wide range?

AA: I would say that all of my pieces seem very different, but most of them do center around some type of large conflict. And this is because America has been at war my entire life. I was in elementary school when the World Trade Center went down, and before that, we were conducting Desert Storm. So I’ve always grown up with this kind of sense of impending doom.

A lot of times my work focuses on something that’s not so well-known or so well-supported. World War I was not very well supported by the American public. Even when we entered [the war], there were protests. It was almost as bad as Vietnam. When you dig into the source materials, it

is really quite interesting. And so a lot of my work focuses around moments like that.

And my brother was a Merchant Marine, so growing up in that kind of environment and coming to Norwich, a lot of my friends have been overseas and some of this is their stories. Some of the stories come from my grandfather, who was in World War II, and I have a great-great-grandfather who was in the Civil War, and a grand uncle who was in World War I. So we have always heard a lot of the stories. Sometimes they have stories they can’t tell, but they will give you bits and pieces, and I’ve always wanted to be able to express that. So that’s where my interest in the war genre has arisen.

A lot of my science fiction and fantasy and especially the historical fiction is set around these areas that we haven’t really examined too much. And there’s more protest literature than there is literature about people who actually wanted to go [to war]. And one of my uncles was a tunnel rat in Vietnam, and he had some of the most horrifying stories. And he loved it. He did three tours. And then he said, “I want to go back.” And they said, “No, George, you can’t go back anymore. We won’t let you.” But he didn’t love all of it. But there were parts of it that he felt called to do. I wanted to be able to help people like my Uncle George express [his experiences], and say, “Okay, this is another side to it.”

And then science fiction, like I said, in mathematics, you have rules and you say what happens to the world, [creating an] imaginary world under these rules. Science fiction is the same thing. I grew up reading it. I’ve read it ever since I was a small child. Probably the first science fiction book I read was Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein when I was 10. My dad had a lot of original science fiction. He grew up during the golden age of science fiction. He bought everything he could and saved it. All of these books were sitting around home and that sparked this idea of “Oh, we can think about the future.” I also just really like imagining the what ifs. Fantasy is just more of a fun game. I tend to have a hard time writing pure swords and sorceries, so I always ask, “Well, how would this work? Why would this work?” A lot of my fantasy fiction tends to be a little bit on the side of almost scientifically plausible.

BZ: With your World War I poetry, I was really intrigued by the decision to use the same central character for three drastically different scenarios. Why did you decide to do that?

AA: The idea behind that actually arose from a novella that I wanted to write, something that focused on, in, and around World War I. I’ve been in touch with the Navy about the Yeomanette, about the fact that they existed because that was something that I didn’t know of until about 2016. And said wait, really, women could enlist 100 years ago? And I felt like a lot of people didn’t know that. I wanted to draw attention to that. But to do it, I didn’t want to just pick one random female character and have her be the central character because there were only 11,600 of them. Instead, I selected another character, whose background is a schoolteacher, and he likes writing poetry. He wanted to be a poet and became a schoolteacher, and his father and brother were blacksmiths. So the idea is that he’s trying to be a poet, which gives him the ability to work in different genres. I wanted to use his perspective as kind of this connecting thread through all of the different types of things he might write about with his experiences, mixed together with what he wants to make out of his poetry. And as the dates progress, you see the poems getting a little bit darker and harsher. They start off a little bit idealistic, then he goes to World War I and he sees

more things, he has more experiences. So you watch his poetry get a little darker.

BZ: How did you come to pick those specific scenarios to write about?

AA: Those are actually three of 27 poems that are different scenarios. So those three were three that I’m partial to. I like “Song of the Yeomanette” because I wanted to draw attention to the fact that there were women doing these things. And everyone thinks, “Oh, the WAVES [Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service] was such a groundbreaking thing [in 1942],” but actually no, go back 30 years, and then you have the groundbreakers. I wanted to draw attention to that.

The blacksmith poem, the one about the shop, my brother actually passed away in March. That gave me a different perspective on some things. That was something that, if you lost someone, you want to be able to think about it, and express it.

“Chatting Lice,” that one has an interesting story. I wrote that poem while waiting for my car to get an oil change. For this project, I’ve been reading the sourcebooks from World War I. I own the original sourcebooks that were written between 1916–1920 about how World War I started, who was involved, what was going on. And these include telegraphs that were exchanged, and they include letters. I have a packet of letters from someone in the 101st Infantry Regiment, who was in the final push in Germany. Reading those letters about what the trenches were actually like and talking to my grandfather who fought the Japanese in World War II about what are the parts you don’t talk about. You write home about the cheerful stuff, but then there’s the other parts where you’re walking along and then the sky blows up, and you just keep walking because you don’t have anything to do. That was what I really want to capture, that sense of what happens during a night in the trenches. You sit around, you pick lice, you put them into a can, burn them and then you get shot at by Germans and you just move on. So “Chatting Lice” may be one of my favorite poems I’ve written because it seems very blunt.

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BZ: In “Song of the Yeomanette,” the last three lines are what stood out for me because there’s this brutal honesty to them. What’s the message behind that poem and those three lines specifically?

AA: Those last three lines specifically were designed to capture the intent of the young men in 1917. After the Arabic pledge had been broken and the Germans resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, one of the admirals in the Navy called up his boss and said, “Can we recruit women?” And they said, “I guess so.” And they didn’t know what to do with that. And the idea was that they wanted a million fighting men by June of 1917. And in order to do that, the admiral said, “Well, we have a lot of roles that we don’t need men to fill, so we could take those men and put them someplace else.” That was the entire intent behind the Yeomanette.

I really wanted to capture that intention with those last lines, and the way it was viewed. The other soldiers didn’t view it as “We should put women in combat.” They weren’t thinking of that, they were thinking, “She’s taking over a job so that I can go to war. I can go do something more for my country.” I wanted to capture the attitude, which was not, “Oh, she’s also picking up the rifle and helping us out.” It’s “she’s doing something to support us to kind of make sure that we can go fight the war.”

BZ: What is your writing process like?

AA: I usually end up coming up with a character that I want to tell the story about. I always think of writing as if I’m trying to tell someone else’s story. So when I sat down and I said, “I want to do something about World War I,” I wanted to capture some Yeomanettes in it. And I wanted to kind of hone in on the stories that have been passed down to me about what it’s like to be in that situation. I started out and I said, “Whose story am I telling?” And so I went through a bunch of ideas and kind of thought about, “Do I want to actually just tell the story of a Yeomanette?” And I liked that idea. So one of the secondary main characters is a Yeomanette. But I didn’t want to just do that because there’s a lot of other reasons that went into their existence, and there’s a lot of people around them and there’s their families and their spouses and their boyfriends who said, “Yeah, that’s fine. Go to Washington, D.C., go to Boston. Do that.” And that was a large step in 1916, just say to your daughter, “I support you to go learn to drive an automobile,” or even more, “Go to France and become a switchboard girl, operate the phone.”

Even today, it’s a big decision. These were the first women who were allowed to do this and I wanted to capture everyone around them. And that’s how I kind of honed in on Walter [Leccese, the poet in the novella]. It was, okay, who would be someone around them? He’d be somewhat educated. He doesn’t have a degree because he can’t possibly have one or otherwise he’d be serving as an officer. Schoolteachers didn’t need a degree in those times. For me, it was “What was he like at that time? What’s his background?” And I try to fill in his story and see from there, ‘What influences him? Why would he act this way? Why does he write poetry? Why would he know a woman going off to become a Yeomanette? How would they have met? What drives them?”

So all of my fiction and poetry is about some character. I always start by saying, “Whose story am I telling? What do I know about them? And then why is their story interesting? What makes it different than anyone else’s story?” But that’s always where I start.

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BZ: Do you think of yourself as a writer or a mathematician?

AA: I love to write. I love to write just about as much as I love to do math. If I weren’t a math professor, I would be a writer. And who knows, maybe one day I’ll be both. I hope so. I like to think of myself as both. So if anyone is thinking, “I want to write,” just write. It doesn’t have to be good. Not everything I write is good. Some of it is total garbage. Just write all the time. I make an effort to write for 15 or 20 minutes a day, every day.

Always be listening and thinking. Find when you’re sitting down to tell a story, find out why you’re telling it. Some people write to tell about an event, and so for them the central item is this event. Some people write to talk about a character, some people write to talk about some overarching theme. That’s the hardest part, finding that thin red thread of the plot. And I find it best when I’m focusing on the character. And that’s why all of my stuff is very character-focused.

BZ: Do you have a specific influence or someone who has had an impact on you in your writing?

AA: I really like Professor Brett Cox’s work, actually. It’s very penny dreadful, very oldschool science fiction. Heinlein, Asimov. Hal Clement is someone whose writing has felt vividly real to me. And then some others

that maybe are surprising. Rudyard Kipling is actually a large influence on my poetry. I always liked his poetry. It didn’t pull any punches, and it didn’t soften anything. And he was often funny. There were things in it that were funny, except you’re not entirely sure if they were meant to be funny, and I’ve always liked that. Longfellow always has some interesting works. In the land of fantasy, I grew up as a young girl reading Tamora Pierce and that crowd, they definitely were influences on how I became a writer. I’m probably more influenced now by Hal Clement and Robert Heinlein.

BZ: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?

AA: I got bored with reading. I read everything. I read everything voraciously. I was the child who always had a book. Books were so much better than anything else I could have been doing with my time. And then, eventually, I had read literally everything, and nothing was new anymore. Eventually, my dad said, “Well, if you don’t like it, just write your own story.” And one of my brother’s friends, my brother was five years older than me, his friend was in college as an English major, and he was dead set on becoming an author and he brought out his writing for us once, and it was at that moment that I was reading his work that it clicked. “Oh, I could do this too. If someone I know can write a story, then so can I.” Then I just didn’t stop there because to this day, I will buy a series of books, read it and go, “That was good. What else is there?” I tend to run out of things. So I just have found the stories in my head that are just as interesting. Sometimes more interesting. That’s literally why: because I got bored with what I was reading.

In the following pages, The Chameleon highlights some of Professor Armstrong’s creative writing. We share both poetry and an excerpt of a fantasy novel. Professor Armstrong introduces these pieces below.

Addie Armstrong: These three poems are a representative sample of a collection I wrote on to go with a novella written about WWI. They are all written from the perspective of the same character.

“Echo” tells of the memory of a blacksmith, killed in action in France, from the point of view of his brother as they prepare to sell the shop.

“Song of the Yoemanette” was written to draw attention to the approximately 11,600 women who enlisted in the US Navy long before the WAC or WAVES existed. These women were the first to be allowed to enlist in any branch of the US armed forces; they served in varying stints from March 1917 to December 1919.

“Chatting Lice” tells of any evening in the trenches of the Meuse-Argonne forest during the final offensive push into Germany.

The byline on each poem is attributed to the character who wrote them, Walter Ransom Leccese, and the dates indicate the approximate time of writing in the novella’s timeline.