Dirty Realism, Veteran Transition, and Contemporary War Literature
Somewhere between “fiction” and “nonfiction” sits the military veteran, pen and paper in hand, wondering why they lived while their friends died.
Tim O’Brien
Writing Trauma: Notes of Transcendence
Writers have the privilege—and power—of putting words to experience: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Try to Become Him
One thing I’ve learned teaching in the Cornell Prison Education Program is that a person in prison, more often than not, is someone whose whole life has felt like a long imprisonment. People don’t become prisoners at random. First came the violences of neglect or poverty. Or the glimpses of horror. As children, they were the…
How Books Brought Me Back into the World
My parents worried about me when I was young. They clipped out articles with titles like “What To Do When Your Child Doesn’t Speak” and strongly encouraged me to interact with the other kids in my nursery school and kindergarten classes. When my kindergarten teacher suggested to my parents that I be held back a…
What Is It About the Literature of War?
Up until that short story workshop I took my junior year of college, my TBR pile was made up of a bizarre mix of Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, and Bill Bryson. Then my professor passed around photocopied packets containing stories by Lorrie Moore, Grace Paley, and Tim O’Brien, and I realized there was more to life than homicidal clowns and…