S215. Telling Our New War Stories: Witness and Imagination across Literary Genres.

Room 211 C&D, Level 2
Saturday, April 11, 2015
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

 

It has been argued that credibility requires direct witness, that true war stories can only be told by those who have been there. The fact is that stories from Iraq and Afghanistan are arriving in all literary genres and from multiple perspectives, some using imagination to create equal truths. These five authors, writing through short fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and nonfiction, will discuss how the fragmentary nature of the war narrative can be written from inside or outside the uniform.


Participants

Moderator:

Benjamin Busch served as an infantry and light armored reconnaissance officer in the United States Marine Corps, deploying twice to Iraq. He is the author of a memoir, Dust to Dust, and has published in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Five Points, and North American Review.

Phil Klay served in the United States Marine Corps and was deployed to Iraq in 2007. He is the author of the forthcoming short story collection, Redeployment, and is a contributor to Fire and Forget: Short Stories From the Long War. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and Tin House.

Siobhan Fallon is the author of You Know When the Men Are Gone, winner of a PEN Center USA Award in fiction. Her stories have appeared in Prairie SchoonerSalamander, Huffington Post, Publishers Weekly, and Washington Post magazine, and have been staged in California, Colorado, Texas, and France.

Brian Turner is the author of My Life as a Foreign CountryHere, Bullet; and Phantom Noise. He has received a United States Artists fellowship, an NEA fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, the Poets’ Prize, and a fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He directs the low-residency MFA at Sierra Nevada College.

 

Katey Schultz is the author of Flashes of War, a debut short story collection awarded Gold Medal Book of the Year in Literary Fiction by the Military Writers Society of America and Foreword Reviews' IndieFab Book of the Year.

#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center