Hello!
When I ask my dear friends from the military writing community to recommend holiday books, I politely request that they not include books from friends, and I don’t let myself, either. (The only reason for this is that I think we all might feel too much pressure deciding who to include, because a lot of us know each other. It’s like the terror of writing your Acknowledgements; what if you forget somebody?!)
But this post is different. This is a roundup of books that have come out of the military community. It is neutral yet loving, like your favorite aunt. Happy holidays!
But, (mostly) neutral as my list is, these books are firestarters. There is thought and language in these books that will blow you away. There is innovation. They give us a variety of ways to consider the costs and effects of war but also love and peace, family, how we tell and make stories and legends, why we keep them.
Consider them for holiday gift-giving — books make the best gifts. I can attest that every title on this list is wonderful and will not leave you disappointed. Give books!
Let’s go!:
David Abrams, ‘Brave Deeds,’ ‘Fobbit’
“In one very full, very messed up and hair-raising day, Brave Deeds delivers everything we could ever ask for in a novel, no less than birth, death, and all points in between. David Abrams has written a flat-out brilliant book of the Iraq War, one that reads like a compact version of the Odyssey or Going After Cacciato. Soldiers on a journey―it’s one of humankind’s oldest stories, and Abrams has given us the latest dispatch from the field, to stunning effect.”
―Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
David Abrams, an Iraq veteran, was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Jackson, Wyoming. He earned a BA in English from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. He now lives in Butte, Montana with his wife.
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Afghan Women’s Writing Project, translated by Pari with Ahmad Aria, ‘Washing the Dust from Our Hearts’
“This bilingual collection, in English and Dari, of poetry and prose gathers the work of women participating in the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, an international group that supports the human right to voice one s story. For many of the writers, this will be the first time that their words are printed in their own language a rarity for women living in Afghanistan. Washing the Dust from Our Hearts is a testament to the resilient spirit of Afghan women. The impact of their bravery is but the beginning of a quiet revolution.”
“Washing the Dust from Our Hearts is the best possible testament to the resilient spirit of Afghan women. The impact of their bravery is just the beginning of a quiet revolution. Do not give this book a miss, even if you are not one for poetry.” -Peace Reads
“Reading the poems and prose of these women felt like reaching across the world to a frightening, battered place, and taking hold of their outreached hands. This lovely book puts in our hands the words of the real women living behind the burqas: ‘Share the beat of my heart, with all the world’s people, who have failed in love.’ ‘I am fire – no water can put out my flames.’ ‘Our sky is full of stars like you, veiled in blue.’ Written in Afghanistan by women in online writing workshops and translated into Dari, or Afghan Persian, this collection is the first time many of these women will see their words printed in their own language. Just thinking about their courage in putting their words out into the world, and the great effort of the American women who are their facilitators, makes a writer like me, with all the freedom and time I need, cheer for their growing strength and spirit.” – reviewer Linda C. Wisniewski
“What remains in my mind after reading the poems in Washing the Dust is the pure humanity of these brave women, the way their circumstances have hurt and changed them, but also the way they have survived.” –The Military Spouse Book Review
^^ Hey, that’s us. We’re everywhere! I highly recommend this beautiful collection.
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Brett Allen, ‘Kilroy Was Here’, ‘Sly Fox Hollow’
“In SLY FOX HOLLOW, Brett Allen delivers a bushel of laughs and frights, all in a glorious stew of monsters, small-town politics, and corruption. This novel tastes like the titular town’s applesauce itself: sweet and tart.”
Brett Allen is a husband, father, and former U.S. Army Cavalry Officer, who deployed to Afghanistan in 2009 with 3rd Squadron, 71st Cavalry Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division, in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. On deployment, Brett served as his Squadron’s air operations planner, lead bootleg movie scout, and was the linchpin in Headquarters coffee production. His experiences, good, bad, and odd, made him uniquely qualified to pen his debut novel, Kilroy Was Here, a tongue-in-cheek look at American operations in Afghanistan.
Veering away from the military theme, Brett’s new novel, Sly Fox Hollow could best be categorized as a cryptid murder mystery comedy, as it leans into the legend of the Michigan Dogman while also lampooning corrupt politics, media fearmongering, and political tribalism.
Brett has written numerous short stories, including Project Valhalla, which was announced as the winner of the 2022 Colonel Darron L. Wright Award for the Line of Advance Literary Journal, The Kherwar, originally published on The Veteran’s Writing Project’s website, “O-Dark-Thirty,” and Pine River Raid, which has been published in the Fourth Edition of the Walloon Writers Review in Michigan.
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M.C. Armstrong, ‘The Mysteries of Haditha’ and ‘American Delphi’
On ‘The Mysteries of Haditha’: “The Mysteries of Haditha is a coming-of-age story and an unprecedented glimpse into the heart of the war on terror.” — Potomac Books
On ‘American Delphi’: “The writer [offers] readers an intriguing kaleidoscope of grief, romantic feelings, boredom, and body image issues but also addresses the challenges of being young in a turbulent world…An engaging story of current events and social justice for teen readers.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Daring, dark, and hilarious…pulls no punches.” — Amazon (Hell yeah) (Sorry, sudden, biased spasm, forgive me)
M.C. Armstrong is a writer, professor, and musician who lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. ‘The Mysteries of Haditha,’ based partly on his time as an embedded journalist in Iraq, was called “one of the best books of 2020” by The Brooklyn Rail. He has won a Pushcart prize and has been published in Esquire, The Missouri Review, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, and many more places. You can follow him on Twitter at @mcarmystrong.
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Susanne Aspley, ‘Ladyboy and the Volunteer,’ ‘Granola, MN’
Aspley’s writing has been described as possessing “a lot of heart” and “beautiful…well worth reading.”
Susanne Aspley served 20 years in the U.S. Army, with tours in Bosnia, Cuba, Kuwait, and Panama. She also worked with the Peace Corps in Thailand, and has worked in the U.K. and Israel. She holds a degree in English literature and a minor in film, and now lives in Minnesota.
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Terri Barnes, ‘Spouse Calls: Messages from a Military Life’, ‘Stories Around the Table: Laughter, Wisdom, and Strength in Military Life’
“Since 2007, Terri Barnes has been a touchstone for readers of Stars and Stripes through her popular weekly column, Spouse Calls. In Spouse Calls: Messages From a Military Life, Terri continues to bridge generations with a ‘best of’ collection sure to touch the hearts and homes of every reader.
From her own kitchen table to Capitol Hill, Terri takes readers beyond the headlines and homecoming videos for an inside look at the day-to-day hardships, victories, and many ways military life shapes, challenges, and enriches its families.
Through poignant personal stories, incisive interviews, and emotive reflections, Terri’s military life columns create an historical snapshot of American and world affairs, preserving an important piece of our nation’s culture.
About her book, Terri says, “My hometown isn’t a geographical location, but a place in American culture that is invisible to many people. My family lives in the hometown of military installations and military communities. This book is the story of the people we know and the life we live in the neighborhood of our American military life.” — MilitaryFamilyBooks.com
“This book grabs your heart and won’t let go.” – ME, quoted on Terri’s web site, though I didn’t even know I was! I was so happy!
Terri Barnes is a journalist, author, and book editor. Spouse Calls: Messages from a Military Life is a best-of collection from her weekly column in Stars and Stripes. She has contributed to several other books about military life and has edited many more, including Stories Around the Table. Her work has appeared in Air Force/Army/Navy Times, Military Spouse magazine, The (Charleston, SC) Post and Courier, Books Make a Difference magazine, and dozens of newspapers, magazines, and publications worldwide.
Terri has a lifetime of experience in military life, growing up in a military family and then becoming a military spouse. Her father was a Vietnam veteran and career airman. Her husband, Mark, served in three wars in his Air Force career. Terri and Mark have three children.
Terri is a cum laude graduate of Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she studied journalism. After living in eleven states, two foreign countries, and one U.S. territory, Terri is currently based in Summerville, South Carolina, which she estimates is her eighteenth new hometown as part of a military family.
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Tim Bazzett, ‘Soldier Boy’
“In 1962 when Tim Bazzett graduated from high school he’d had enough of academia and classroom drudgery, so he joined the army – and received an education he’d never imagined. Perhaps one of the most unlikely and inept citizen-soldiers since Gomer Pyle, Tim somehow survives the terrors and tribulations of basic training at “Fort Lost-in-the-Woods, Misery,” and after further training in the mysteries of Morse code in Massachusetts and Maryland, the small-town innocent is launched overseas and into the larger world. In northern Turkey he finds himself a link in the outermost defenses of America during a Cold War he only imperfectly understands. There he sees poverty and hatred in the faces of children and is forced to confront his own faults and inner demons. Later on in Germany, no longer quite so innocent, he chases girls and dreams of being a rock star. But at the heart of Bazzett’s narrative are the characters – the friends he makes along the way. For this is ultimately a book about friendship – and about growing up. In his first volume of memoirs, Bazzett made his Michigan hometown in the fifties come alive for all his readers. In Soldier Boy, his military experiences are made just as real. Get ready to laugh, and maybe cry a little too, as the irrepressible Reed City Boy rides again.”
“Bazzett’s story is anything but dry military history .. He recreates the experience of army life essentially through the eyes of the boy he was in the 60s … But this is far more than just a story about the US Army … [It’s] simply a helluva good story!” -Harry Shukman
Emeritus Fellow, St. Antony’s College, Oxford, author of War or Revolution and co-author of Secret Classrooms
Born in 1944, Tim Bazzett grew up in west Michigan and spent three years in the army after high school, completing tours in Turkey and Germany. He then attended Ferris State and Central Michigan Universities where he earned a teaching degree and an MA in English. After teaching for five years at Monroe County Community College in southeast Michigan, in 1976 Bazzett reenlisted in the army, staying five years that time, serving again in Germany and earning a second Master’s degree from Eastern Michigan University. Following his discharge he worked for the next 21 years as a Russian linguist and intelligence analyst at the National Security Agency in Maryland. He retired from federal service at the end of 2001 and returned to his home town in Michigan where he began to write. Since 2004, Bazzett has published four memoirs and a biography.
Since the publication of his most recent memoir, BOOKLOVER, Bazzett has devoted much of his time to reading and reviewing other authors, feeling that serious readers are nearly as important as writers. In the course of this endeavor he has made numerous long-distance writer friends and continues to add to a much cherished collection of inscribed and signed books direct from authors and/or their publishers. Even knowing it’s a cliche, Bazzett nevertheless lives by the mantra, “So many books, so little time.”
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Jerri Bell, with Tracy Crow, ‘It’s My Country Too!: Women’s Military Stories from the Revolutionary War to Afghanistan’
“This inspiring anthology is the first to convey the rich experiences and contributions of women in the American military in their own words—from the Revolutionary War to the present wars in the Middle East.
Serving with the Union Army during the Civil War as a nurse, scout, spy, and soldier, Harriet Tubman tells what it was like to be the first American woman to lead a raid against an enemy, freeing some 750 slaves. Busting gender stereotypes, Josette Dermody Wingo enlisted as a gunner’s mate in the navy in World War II to teach sailors to fire Oerlikon antiaircraft guns. Marine Barbara Dulinsky recalls serving under fire in Saigon during the Tet Offensive of 1968, and Brooke King describes the aftermath of her experiences outside the wire with the army in Operation Iraqi Freedom. In excerpts from their diaries, letters, oral histories, and pension depositions—as well as from published and unpublished memoirs—generations of women reveal why and how they chose to serve their country, often breaking with social norms and often at great personal peril.”
“Tracy Crow and Jerri Bell have done a phenomenal job of capturing the stories of our courageous women combat veterans in this incredible book. It’s about time we women veterans knew our history and I feel so proud to be part of their legacy!- reviewer CJ Scarlet
Jerri Bell is the Managing Editor for O-Dark-Thirty, the literary journal of the Veterans Writing Project. She retired from the Navy in 2008; her assignments included antisubmarine warfare in the Azores Islands, sea duty on USS Mount Whitney and HMS Sheffield, and attaché duty at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Russia.
Her fiction has been published in a variety of journals and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her nonfiction has been published in journals and newspapers and on blogs.
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Helen Benedict, ‘Map of Hope and Sorrow,’ ‘Edge of Eden,’ ‘The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq’
“Helen Benedict, award-winning British-American professor of journalism at Columbia University, teams up with Syrian writer and refugee, Eyad Awwadawnan, to present the stories of five refugees who have endured long and dangerous journeys from the Middle East and Africa to Greece.
Hasan, Asmahan, Evans, Mursal and Calvin each tell their story, tracing the trajectory of their lives from homes and families in Syria, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Cameroon to the brutal refugee camps, where they are trapped in a strange and hostile world.
These are compelling, first-person stories of resilience, suffering and hope, told in a depth rarely seen in non-fiction, partly because one of the authors is a refugee himself, and partly because both authors spent years getting to know the interviewees and winning their trust. The women and men in this book tell their stories in their own words, retaining control and dignity, while revealing intimate and heartfelt scenes from their lives.”
“WOW! AMAZING BOOK! I had no idea what was going on with refugees in Greece! We met Eyad in Iceland a few months ago. What an awesome young man. As we got to know him, he told us about this book and spoke so fondly of Helen. I pre-ordered the book and when it arrived I read it in one sitting. I’m so grateful Helen and Eyad have written such a compelling book about what is REALLY going on with the refugees. The book is very well written. Kudos to Helen and Eyad for sharing such a heartfelt book. And kudos to Eyad for surviving with such dignity and for helping others in a similar situation. Really, an amazing read.” – reviewer Midwest Mom and Wife
Helen Benedict (www.helenbenedict.com) is the prize-winning author of eight novels and six books of nonfiction. Her newest novel is The Good Deed, to be published by Red Hen Press in April 2024. Her related and latest nonfiction is Map of Hope and Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece, written with Syrian writer, Eyad Awwadawnan, published by Footnote Press in 2022.
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Bryan B. Bliss, ‘Meet Me Here‘
Summary: “In a single night—graduation night—Thomas has to decide: do what everyone has always expected of him, or forge an entirely new path? Bryan Bliss’s absorbing examination of one boy struggling with expectations and realities will appeal to readers of Sara Zarr and Chris Crutcher.
Thomas is supposed to leave for the Army in the morning. His father was Army. His brother, Jake, is Army—is a hero, even, with the medals to prove it. Everyone expects Thomas to follow in that fine tradition. But Jake came back from overseas a completely different person, and that has shaken Thomas’s certainty about his own future. And so when his long-estranged friend Mallory suggests one last night of adventure, Thomas takes her up on the distraction. Over the course of this single night, Thomas will lose, find, resolve, doubt, drive, explore, and leap off a bridge. He’ll also face the truth of his brother’s post-traumatic stress disorder and of his own courage. In Bryan Bliss’s deft hands, graduation night becomes a night to find yourself, to find each other, to find a path, and to know that you always have a place—and people—to come back to.”
“Bliss offers a well-crafted story about the people who come home from war damaged and the family members this affects. …A love story between brothers, the novel provides a touching glimpse of a different kind of courage.” — Kirkus Reviews
Bryan Bliss is the author of the National Book Award longlist title ‘We’ll Fly Away,’ as well as ‘Thoughts & Prayers,’ ‘Meet Me Here,’ and ‘No Parking at the End Times.’ He holds master’s degrees in theology and fiction and has worked as a curriculum designer and developer and as a youth pastor. His nonfiction has been published in Image Journal, along with various other newspapers, magazines, and blogs. He lives with his family in St. Paul, Minnesota.
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Adrian Bonenberger, ‘The Disappointed Soldier,’ ‘The Road Ahead‘
“A subversive, satirical, and sometimes surreal collection of short fiction that follows the experiences of American military personnel deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan during the Global War on Terror, and what happens to them, their friends, and their family when they return home.”
Adrian Bonenberger is an essayist, writer and poet who splits his time between the USA and Ukraine. In addition to publishing his war memoirs and co-editing an anthology of veteran fiction, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Commonweal Magazine, The New Republic, Forbes, and other outlets. He co-founded and edits fiction for The Wrath-Bearing Tree.
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Samantha Otto Brown, ‘Sub Wife: A Memoir from the Homefront’
“As the spouse of a newly-minted Navy submariner, Samantha soon discovers how little she and the other wives are permitted to know about the top secret workings of their husbands’ lives while underway. When the Argentine submarine ARA San Juan goes quiet in November 2017, other than the reporting of an underwater “seismic anomaly,” a sound consistent with an implosion, Sam and her fellow Navy wives devise ways to keep themselves afloat during the excruciating silence of their husbands’ sub. Wide-eyed Sam, at times unsure of her place in a world governed by reactors, warheads, and relentless operational tempo, eventually discovers a truth about the inner strength of women.”
“As a fellow military spouse, I could relate to so much of this story. As someone who knows nothing about submarine life, I learned a lot. As a woman, wife, and creative type, I found the feelings, experiences, and emotions relatable. Sub Wife was a wonderful combination of serious reflection on the challenges faced by our military and their families and honest reflection on friendship and relationships and all the emotions — serious, but fun, enlightening and engaging. Serious fun.” – reviewer SD Mom
Samantha Otto Brown holds a BA in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia and an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Her nonfiction work appears in PANK Magazine and Mizzou’s EPIC. She lives with her husband, daughter, and dog in Lawrence, Kansas and runs a writer’s blog, The Page & Print.
SUB WIFE: A MEMOIR FROM THE HOMEFRONT is her debut book.
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Randy Brown, ‘Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire,’ ‘Twelve-o-Clock Haiku: Leadership Lessons from Old War Movies and New Poems,’ ‘So Frag & So Bold: Short Poems, Aphorisms, & Other Wartime Fun’
“A Military Writers Society of America 2016 Gold Medal in Poetry winner! An overseas tour de force and a memoir-in-verse! An evergreen satire of the “Forever War” in Afghanistan and Iraq!
Armed with deadpan snark and poker-faced patriotism—and rooted in the coffee-black soil and plain-spoken voice of the American Midwest—journalist-turned-poet Randy Brown reveals behind-the-scenes stories of U.S. soldier-citizenship. “From Boot Camp to Bagram, Afghanistan.” And back home again.
The book includes haiku, sonnets, and less-traditional forms of poetry, intended to create moments of empathy and conversation among military veterans and civilians.”
“Sherpa does a great job blending the world of combat with the civilian world back home. He’s good at contrasting the foreign with the familiar. […] The poems range from the outright humorous to the dark.”- reviewer Eric Chandler
Randy Brown traveled the world as a child in an active-duty U.S. Air Force family in the 1970s, then landed permanently and happily in the American Midwest. A former editor of community and metro newspapers, as well as national trade and “how-to” consumer magazines, he is now a freelance writer and editor based in Central Iowa.
His journalism, essays, and poetry have appeared widely in print and on-line, including graphic novels and anthologies. He is the author or named editor of more than six books, chapbooks, and collections.
Brown holds an undergraduate degree in journalism and mass communications from Drake University, Des Moines, and a Master of Science in Architectural Studies (MSAS) from Iowa State University, Ames. As a retired 20-year veteran of the U.S. Army National Guard, Brown is active in various veteran-facing literary organizations.
Launched by Brown as a sole proprietorship in 2003, Middle West Press first focused on providing freelance writing, editing, and editorial project-management services to the print-magazine sector. In 2015, it was reorganized as a limited liability corporation in the State of Iowa, and expanded business operations as an independent book publisher of journalism, non-fiction, and poetry. The press publishes from one to four titles annually, often with a focus on the people, places, and history of the American Midwest.
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Alison Buckholtz, ‘Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War‘
Alison Buckholtz is the author of Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War (Tarcher/Penguin, April 2009; paperback April 2013), one of the first memoirs of the Iraq war period by a military spouse. It’s been called “outstanding nonfiction” by the Washington Post and is regularly named as a resource that helps bridge the civilian-military divide and included in roundups of the most influential books by military spouses.
Alison also wrote the “Deployment Diary” column on Slate.com from 2009-2010. Her articles and essays have been published in the New York Times (including its Modern Love column), New York magazine, Washington Post, Real Simple, Parenting, Washingtonian magazine, Time.com, Salon.com and many other publications. As an advocate for military families, she has appeared on NBC Nightly News, NPR , BBC, MSNBC , Fox & Friends, and in national news and feature stories. Her L.A. Times op-ed, “An ‘It Gets Better’ for the Troops,” was the inspiration for a national public service announcement campaign about military suicides. She has spoken about the military family experience at the U.S. Capitol building and at bases and community centers around the country.
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Benjamin Busch, ‘Dust to Dust,’ ‘The Road Ahead’
I am chuckling that the New York Times describes Ben Busch (in a very favorable review) as a “Trench Poet.” That makes him sound like he is slightly rotting. He is not, to my knowledge. He is one of the kindest and most generous, funny people you will meet, and seems to have a clean bill of health. ‘Dust to Dust’ is one of my favorite memoirs of all time. — Andria Williams, author of ‘The Longest Night’ and ‘The Waiting World’
“Tim O’Brien meets Annie Dillard in this remarkable memoir by debut author Benjamin Busch. Much more than a war memoir, Dust to Dust brilliantly explores the passage through a lifetime—a moving meditation on life and death, the adventures of childhood and revelations of adulthood. Seemingly ordinary things take on a breathtaking radiance when examined by this decorated Marine officer—veteran of two combat tours in Iraq—actor on the hit HBO series The Wire, and son of acclaimed novelist Frederick Busch. Above all, Benjamin Busch is a truly extraordinary new literary talent as evidenced by his exemplary debut, Dust to Dust—an original, emotionally powerful, and surprisingly refreshing take on an American soldier’s story.”
“Beautifully told. . . . There is not one bad sentence in this book. . . . I cannot wait to see what [Busch] writes next.” — Library Journal (starred review)
“Extraordinary. . . . It is impossible to read any part of this work and not be moved. . . . [Dust to Dust] is one to be savored. Don’t fail to read it.” — New York Journal of Books
Benjamin Busch is a United States Marine Corps infantry officer, photographer, film director, and actor whose many roles have included Officer Anthony Colicchio on the HBO series The Wire. His writing has been featured in Harper’s and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He has also appeared as a guest commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered. He lives on a farm in Michigan with his wife and two daughters.
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Abigail Calkin, ‘The Soul of My Soldier: Reflections of a Military Wife’
“After 45 years of marriage, celebrated author and poet Abigail B. Calkin explores the complicated relationship she has with her husband who served three tours of duty in two different wars. Raw, riveting, and engaging, Calkin recounts how war and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) shaped their marriage and family.
Told in prose and poetry, The Soul of My Soldier is a vivid exploration of the history of war on family, the extended and significant impact war has on loved ones, and how war affects deployed military personnel far beyond their tour of duty.”
I was reading an online review of Calkin’s book and nodding along, thinking, This is exactly how I felt, and then saw at the end that I had written it — years ago! I burst out laughing. It’s my Ghost of Christmas Past! But a very good one.
| “The Soul of My Soldier makes its perfect practice the art of informed, intellectual generosity. Generosity between two partners, sure, and also between Calkin’s smart, interrogating mind and the rest of the world, which is found complex and damaged but not destroyed — never destroyed while people still pay attention and while we are still trying to fix our mistakes, make things better and more peaceful than they were. The final page of the book says, very simply, “Welcome Home.” I love that, in all its meanings. With The Soul of My Soldier, Calkin has welcomed Robert home in a more thoughtful variety of ways than most people get welcomed in their lifetimes. I hope he feels how genuinely he was worth it.” -Andria Williams, author of The Longest Night, and also the reviewer of Military Spouse Book Review. “Abigail Calkin’s memoir is a beautifully written, deeply honest, and necessary book. This memoir blew me away.” -Abigail Thomas, memoirist. |
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Ron Capps, ‘Seriously Not All Right: Five Wars in Ten Years: A Memoir’
“For more than a decade, Ron Capps, serving as both a senior military intelligence officer and as a Foreign Service officer for the U.S. Department of State, was witness to war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. From government atrocities in Kosovo, to the brutal cruelties perpetrated in several conflicts in central Africa, the wars in both Aghanistan and Iraq, and culminating in genocide in Darfur, Ron acted as an intelligence collector and reporter but was diplomatically restrained from taking preventative action in these conflicts.
The cumulative effect of these experiences, combined with the helplessness of his role as an observer, propelled him into a deep depression and a long bout with PTSD, which nearly caused him to take his own life. ‘Seriously Not All Right’ is a memoir that provides a unique perspective of a professional military officer and diplomat who suffered (and continues to suffer) from PTSD. His story, and that of his recovery and his newfound role as founder and teacher of the Veterans Writing Project, is an inspiration and a sobering reminder of the cost of all wars, particularly those that appeared in the media and to the general public as merely sidelines in the unfolding drama of world events.” (Amazon.com)
Also:
Trying to Catch Amnesia (EP original songs)
Hand-Clubbed Baby Seal, Buttdial, Come Dawn (short plays)
The Inn at Little Bethlehem (full length play)
Trying to Catch Amnesia (full length musical).
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Eric Chandler ‘Kekekabic,’ ‘Hugging This Rock’
“Whether on haiku treks about town, or bushwhacking across the Boundary Waters wilderness with his loyal dog Leo, pilot and poet Eric ‘Shmo’ Chandler shows us how to be easily present while moving through the world: Take notes. Reflect on small moments. Enjoy the ride. “You’re only lost if you don’t / know what to do next.”
–Randy Brown, author of Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire
“Award-winning Duluth writer Eric Chandler’s first collection of poetry reflects his rich and varied life. From his career as an F-16 fighter pilot to challenges and joys of being a husband and father to his passion for the outdoors, Chandler writes verse with thought-provoking sensitivity and often self-deprecating humor.” – Northern Wilds Magazine
Eric Chandler is a former F-16 fighter pilot, poet, and father who lives in Duluth, Minnesota.
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Liam Corley, ‘Changelings’
“When Commander Tauran’s young son, Lausus, is diagnosed as one of the despised changeling mutants, Tauran believes the government assurances that his boy will be treated well. His less trusting wife, Beatra, however, flees with Lausus to a changeling planet.
After years of leading troops into battles against the mutants, while tirelessly searching for signs of Beatra and Lausus, Tauran seizes on an offer from a trusted, yet rogue, scientist with a time travel device that will enable Tauran to harvest fresh DNA from humans before Earth’s nuclear wars.
Teamed with three others-a scientist, a scholar, and a war criminal with nothing to prove-Tauran maxes out the time travel device, arriving to Earth’s first century where he encounters a healer from an abandoned religious sect. Faced with more of a mystery than ever, Tauran determines to learn the healer’s secrets or risk kidnapping him for his DNA to save Lausus, purge the mutation, and end the war between humans and their mutant offspring.
But Tauran and his team have to move fast-before mutants from their own era overrun the team’s time travel site on Terra, and beore a government conspiracy to prolong the war destroys what’s left of humanity’s home world with a final nuclear blast.”
“An intricate, compelling exploration of humanity and its core flaws and values.
—KIRKUS REVIEWS”
Liam Corley is an award-winning poet and scholar. Changelings Insurgence is his first work of fiction. He is a professor of American Literature at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. His work on literature and war has been published in War, Literature, & the Arts, College English, and the Journal of Veterans Studies and has been supported with a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
Liam is the author of Bayard Taylor: Determined Dreamer of America’s Rise, 1825-1878 (Bucknell University Press, 2014). A debut poetry collection, unwound, came out from Middle West Press in 2023. His poems can also be found in Strange Horizons, Chautauqua, First Things, Badlands, Inlandia, The Line Literary, O-Dark-Thirty, and Wrath-Bearing Tree.
Since 2004, Liam has served in the U.S. Navy Reserve. He has completed multiple deployments, including ones to Afghanistan and Iraq, and throughout the Pacific area of operations. He lives in Riverside, California, with his wife and four children.
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Paul Crenshaw, ‘Melt with Me,’ ‘This One Will Hurt You’
“At the intersection of 1980s pop culture, the Cold War, and the trials of coming of age sits Melt with Me. Paul Crenshaw takes up a range of topics from Star Wars to video games, Choose Your Own Adventure books to the Satanic Panic. Blending the personal with the historical, levity with gravity, Crenshaw shows how pop culture shaped those who grew up in 1980s America: how Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative drove fears of nuclear war, how professional wrestling taught us everyone was either a good guy or a bad guy, how Bugs Bunny cartoons reflected the absurdity of war and mutually assured destruction, and how video games taught young boys, in particular, that no matter how hard they tried to save it, the world would end itself. Reflecting on the decade and its dark influence on fear-based notions of nation and manhood, Crenshaw writes, ‘All this reminds me I’m still afraid of the same things I was afraid of as a child. Some days I think the movies are real and we’re watching the last hour of humanity. You’ll have to decide if there’s any hope.’” (Amazon)
Online review from Tessa 4321: “Every so often you stumble upon writers whose work will never leave you. This is Paul Crenshaw. Without ever being head-handed, he manages to tell moving stories, connect disparate ideas, figure out a way to bring sly humor to our greatest sorrows. I’ll be forever grateful for his essay ‘The Sadness Scale, As Measured by Stars and Whales’ (in this collection). A MUST READ for people who came of age in the 80s or who are any age at all.”
“The powerful essays in Paul Crenshaw’s This One Will Hurt You range in subject matter from the fierce tornadoes that crop up in Tornado Alley every spring and summer to a supposedly haunted one-hundred-year-old tuberculosis sanatorium that he lived on the grounds of as a child. They ruminate on the effects of crystal meth on small southern towns, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, and the ongoing struggle of being a parent in an increasingly disturbing world. They surprise, whether discovering a loved one’s secret, an opossum’s motivation, or the unexpected decision four beer-guzzling, college-aged men must make. They tell stories of family and the past, the histories of small things such as walls and weather, and the faith it takes to hold together in the face of death.
With eloquence, subtle humor, and an urgent poignancy, Crenshaw delivers a powerful and moving collection of essays, tied together by place and the violence of the world in which we live.”
Paul Crenshaw is the coauthor of Text, Mind, and World: An Introduction to Literary Criticism. He was a finalist for the Bakeless Prize and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize in 2017. His writing has appeared in Best American Essays, Brevity, North American Review, Ascent, Gulf Stream, River Teeth, The Rumpus, Wrath-Bearing Tree, and many other publications.
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Tracy Crow, ‘Cooper’s Hawk: The Remembering,’ ‘On Point: A Guide to Writing the Military Story,’ ‘Eyes Right: Confessions of a Female Marine,’ ‘It’s My Country Too!: Women’s Military Stories from the Revolutionary War to Afghanistan‘
“At the Cooper VA Hospital, tensions surface after the arrival of a rage-filled war hero and his troubled son and the mental breakdown of everyone’s favorite nurse. Drawing on his upbringing with a shaman grandfather, Willis, the new-hire janitor and Vietnam veteran with one arm, relies on lessons from the natural world–and a special hawk–to steer the boy and Phoebe, in fact everyone at the Cooper VA, toward the most benevolent outcome.”
“So much brilliance throughout, starting with the multiple interpretations of the title.” ~LT
“I got to the end and thought, What?! What?! No! I had to read the last several pages several times and then I just lost it. Burst into tears. What an emotional release. Now I’m going back to read the whole thing over again!” ~MB
Tracy Crow is the author/editor of six books: the novella, COOPER’S HAWK: THE REMEMBERING; the popular history, IT’S MY COUNTRY TOO: WOMEN’S MILITARY STORIES FROM THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION TO AFGHANISTAN with co-author Jerri Bell; the award-winning memoir, EYES RIGHT: CONFESSIONS FROM A WOMAN MARINE; the military conspiracy thriller, AN UNLAWFUL ORDER, under her pen name, Carver Greene; the true-story collection, RED, WHITE, & TRUE: STORIES FROM VETERANS AND FAMILIES, WWII TO PRESENT; and the breakthrough writing text, ON POINT: A GUIDE TO WRITING THE MILITARY STORY, in which Crow combines her skills and experience as a former Marine Corps officer, award-winning military journalist, author, editor, and professor of creative writing. For more information, visit http://www.tracycrow.com.
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Dario Di Battista, ‘Retire the Colors: Veterans and Civilians on Iraq and Afghanistan’
“The impact of war, and the complex aftereffect it has on both veterans and civilians, is–for myriad reasons–largely invisible to the public. Media may create news cycles around horrors or stereotypes, but the effort required to redefine and sustain ”normal” lives after war stays below the surface and out of sight.
In Retire the Colors, nineteen thought-provoking stories by veterans and civilians consider the residual effects of Iraq and Afghanistan. A pacifist describes her decision to accompany her husband, an Iraq veteran, to the shooting range. A hospital worker in Mosul talks about what happens on a hunting trip back home with his grandfather. Two friends–one civilian one veteran–complete an ultramarathon together. The wife of a combat medic considers their unusual nighttime routines. A mother and former 50 cal gunner navigates truth and lies with her children.
These stories offer a grace uncommon in war literature today. They also make an appeal to readers: to witness with compassion the men and women who–because of war–possess the strength to show us what it means to be fully human.
Contributors include: Tahani Alsandook, Joseph R. Bawden, Brian Castner, David Chrisinger, David P. Ervin, Teresa Fazio, CH Guise, Colin D. Halloran, Lauren Kay Halloran, Matthew J. Hefti, Brooke King, Randy Leonard, Eva KL Miller, Stewart Moss, Caitlin Pendola, Mark Solheim, Richard Allen Smith, Christopher Stowe, and Melissa Walker.”
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Colin Cutler (musician): “Tarwater” (album)
“Armed with a guitar, banjo, a brace of harmonicas, Colin tells stories of love and loss with characters wide open as a Midwest sky and wild as the mountains, with poetry thick as a Carolina swamp.”
Editor’s note: Colin particularly recommends the song “A New Tattoo” as applicable to the veteran experience. He himself is a veteran.
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“Former Army Sergeant Hester Trueblood struggles to find the answer, seven years after fate bonded her to the ancient Sumerian Goddess, Inanna. Whether engaging in battles to the death with demons or entering fight club scraps, Hester’s life is forever subjected to Inanna’s whims and insatiable lust. It hasn’t been easy to juggle the mounting perilous challenges, or to tolerate the demands of her demi-god lover, Gilgamesh.
When her warrior Quincy is stricken with a mysterious illness, Hester thinks a supernatural blade could be the answer to save him. Or it just might destroy the world.
One thing is for sure. Nobody is immune from the painful reality of loss and suffering—not even a goddess.
Read the exciting second installment of The Desert Goddess series. A blend of fantasy, action adventure, mystery, and romance with a biting sense of humor.”
M. L. Doyle, a veteran, writes award winning mystery, erotic romance, urban fantasy and co-authored memoir. In all of her work, she features women who wear combat boots. She is an editor for Wrath-Bearing Tree literary journal.
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Jehanne Dubrow, ‘Exhibitions: Essays on Art and Atrocity’
“What happens when beauty intersects with horror? In her newest nonfiction collection, Jehanne Dubrow interrogates the ethical questions that arise when we aestheticize atrocity. The daughter of US diplomats, she weaves memories of growing up overseas among narratives centered on art objects created while working under oppressive regimes. Ultimately Exhibitions is a collection concerned with how art both evinces and elicits emotion and memory and how, through the making and viewing of art, we are–for better or for worse–changed.” -University of New Mexico Press
“Exhibitions is a fantastic book–both smart and inviting, intimate and outward-looking, creative and critical. It’s the best of all worlds in an essay collection, and one I will return to again and again.”–Randon Billings Noble, author of Be with Me Always: Essays
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Stateside and Red Army Red. She is the director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House and is an associate professor of English at Washington College.
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David Eisler, ‘Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction’
“For nearly a century after World War I, there was an assumption that a person—a soldier—must have experienced war in the flesh in order to write about it in fiction. Yet contemporary American fiction tells a different story. Less than half of the authors of contemporary war novels are veterans. And that’s hardly the only change. Today’s war novelists focus on the psychological and moral challenges of soldiers coming home rather than the physical danger of combat overseas. They also imagine the consequences of the wars from non-American perspectives in a way that defies the genre’s conventions.
To understand this great shift, David Eisler argues that we must go back nearly fifty years, to the political decision to abolish the draft. The ramifications rippled into the field of cultural production, transforming the foundational characteristics— authorship, content, and form—of the American war fiction genre. “
“David Eisler’s Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction, WWI to Present is a brilliant excavation of the stories Americans have been telling ourselves about war for the past century. Eisler has written a sharp, engaging, and troubling cultural history.”—Phil Klay, National Book Award winner, author, Redeployment
“This brilliant, deeply interdisciplinary study is Eisler’s first book, but with it he joins the ranks of Jay Winter, Samuel Hynes, and Paul Fussell. A stunning achievement.”—Choice
David F. Eisler is postdoctoral researcher in literary and cultural studies. He previously served on active duty in the United States Army. His work has appeared in the New York Times, War on the Rocks, Daily Beast, Collier’s Magazine, Military Review, Drunken Boat, and The Road Ahead: Fiction from the Forever War. Eisler lives in Amberg, Germany.
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Siobhan Fallon, ‘You Know When the Men Are Gone,’ ‘The Confusion of Languages’
“A searing debut novel from the award-winning author of You Know When the Men are Gone, about jealousy, the unpredictable path of friendship, and the secrets kept in marriage, all set within the U.S. expat community of the Middle East during the rise of the Arab Spring.”
“A gripping, cleverly plotted novel with surprising bite.”— Phil Klay, National Book Award
winner and New York Times bestselling author of ‘Redeployment’
Siobhan Fallon is the author of the award-winning short story collection, You Know When the Men Are Gone, and the novel, The Confusion of Languages. Her essays and stories have been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, NPR, Stars and Stripes, the anthologies Fire & Forget: Short Stories from the Long War and The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers, among others. Theatrical productions of her work have been performed home and abroad.
Siobhan also has a series on YouTube titled The Lives of the Little Bighorn.
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Amalie Flynn, ‘Flesh,’ ‘September Eleventh,’ ‘Wife and War‘
“Amalie Flynn’s “FLESH” is a courageous and unflinchingly honest chapbook that delves into the most intimate corners of the body and mind. Through the artful use of metaphor and vivid imagery, Flynn takes readers on a journey through the complexities of pregnancy, choice, and loss.
A deeply personal journey. Raw and visceral; full of heart and guts. A poignant exploration, multifaceted with grace, empathy, and unwavering sincerity. A beacon of authenticity, offering solace and understanding to those who have walked similar paths.”
“If you are interested in the hard choices women have to make every day, the history of political violence over the last twenty years, or just enjoy especially good poetry, buy this book. The author makes vivid an intensely personal and painful experience by refusing to let traumatic moments—usually considered, by definition, unspeakable—remain that way. By focusing on the body and nature, she finds sound in these lonely places and suddenly gaps between people and different kinds of trauma and their pain do not seem so distant and overwhelming. Highly recommended.” -reviewer M Carson
Amalie Flynn is a poet and the author of Flesh (Alien Buddha, 2023), September Eleventh (Middle West Press, 2021), Wife and War: The Memoir (2013) and a collection of poetry blogs: Pattern of Consumption, September Eleventh, Wife and War, The Sustainability of Us, and Border of Heartbreak. Her writing has appeared in Things We Carry Still (forthcoming), American Book Review, Beyond their Limits of Longing, the New York Times, Time, and Huffington Post and has received mention from the New York Times and CNN. Flynn has a BA in English and Studio Arts, an MFA in Creative Writing, and a PhD in Humanities. She serves as poetry editor for The Wrath-Bearing Tree. Flynn lives in Rhode Island with her husband and their two children.
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J. Malcolm Garcia, ‘The Khaarijee: A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul’; ‘What Wars Leave Behind: The Faceless and Forgotten’; ‘Without A Country: The Untold Story of America’s Deported Veterans’; ‘A Different Kind of War: Uneasy Encounters in Mexico and Central America’; and ‘Most Dangerous, Most Unmerciful: Stories from Afghanistan.’
“Reporting from Kabul and Kandahar between 2001 and 2015, J. Malcolm Garcia tells us what actually happened to the Afghan people as the conflict between first world nations and fundamentalists raged. In telling the stories of ordinary Afghans, Garcia shows the impact of years of occupation and war—and the sudden and harsh changes as new occupiers push in—on a people and their culture.
Garcia meets Laila Haidary—everyone calls her “mother”—who, with no resources to speak of, gives addicts living on the street one month of detoxification and clean living, while at the same time sending her own children to make the perilous journey to Western Europe as best they can. And there is nine-year-old Ghani, who earns a few dollars a day collecting cans on the street to support his two brothers and sister now that his father has died of a brain tumor. There are the translators and fixers Garcia hires, who risk their lives working for foreigners against the warnings of the Taliban, and also the US soldiers who don’t understand what their mission is here, and why they can’t just do what they are trained to do, which is to seek out and kill the enemy.
J. Malcolm Garcia has been compared to the Russian writer Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, for how the voices of everyday people ring out in the stories he tells. Most Dangerous, Most Unmerciful is an essential work of literature that documents one of the true disasters of our age, at the same time as it celebrates the human endurance and ingenuity of the Afghans we meet in these pages, and affirms the role journalists can play to make sure their stories can be heard.”
J. Malcolm Garcia has reported from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chad, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Honduras, Bolivia and Argentina. His beat is the stories that usually go unreported, the lives of people not usually considered newsworthy or important, people who struggle just to survive.
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Aaron Gywn, ‘All God’s Children,’ ‘Wynne’s War,’ ‘Dog on the Cross’
While Gwyn is not himself a veteran, he has been hugely supportive of the military writing community, and much of his work deals with the impact of war and we consider him a friend.
“Finalist for the Reading the West Book Award for Fiction
A novel about the remarkable people living on the edge of freedom and slavery, All God’s Children brings to life the paradoxes of the American frontier – a place of liberty and bondage, wild equality, and cruel injustice.
In 1827, Duncan Lammons, a disgraced young man from Kentucky, sets out to join the American army in the province of Texas, hoping that here he may live – and love – as he pleases. That same year, Cecelia, a young slave in Virginia, runs away for the first time.
Soon infamous for her escape attempts, Cecelia drifts through the reality of slavery – until she encounters frontiersman Sam Fisk, who rescues her from a slave auction in New Orleans.
In spite of her mistrust, Cecelia senses an opportunity for freedom, and travels with Sam to Texas, where he has a homestead. In this new territory, where the law is an instrument for the cruel and the wealthy, they begin an unlikely life together, unaware that their fates are intertwined with those of Sam’s former army mates including Duncan Lammons, a friend – and others who harbor dangerous dreams of their own.
This novel will take its place among the great stories that recount the country’s fight for freedom – one that makes us want to keep on with the struggle.”
“Gwyn creates an overwhelmingly visceral and emotionally rich narrative amid Texas’s complex path to statehood [ . . . ] This is a masterpiece of western fiction in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy and James Carlos Blake.”—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)”
Aaron Gwyn is from Oklahoma. He is currently a professor in North Carolina.
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Jeffery Hess, ‘No Salvation,’ ‘Cold War Canoe Club’
“Inspired by actual events, No Salvation features the USS Salvation as it sails for months on end in the South China Sea in the violent closing days of the Vietnam War. Exhaustion, drugs and discontent run rampant aboard ship and crew morale is at an all-time low. These conditions affect four thousand men being sequestered for months on end without port visits has everyone on edge.”
“Hess is one of those rare talents who tells a great story with compelling characters, pacing and action. Always a hell of a read!”- Terrence McCauley, Author of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and ‘The Devil Dogs of Belleau Wood’
Jeffery Hess is the author of the novels Scar Tissue, Roughhouse, No Salvation, Tushhog, Beachhead and the story collection, Cold War Canoe Club, as well as the editor of the award-winning anthologies Home of the Brave: Stories in Uniform, and Home of the Brave: Somewhere in the Sand.
Prior to earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte and a Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of South Florida, he served aboard the Navy’s oldest and newest ships. He’s published numerous short stories that recall this period of his life.
He’s held writing positions at a daily newspaper, a Fortune 500 company, and a university-based research center.
He lives in Florida, where he writes and leads the DD-214 Writers’ Workshop for military veterans.
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Colin Halloran, ‘American Etiquette,’ ‘Icarian Flux,’ ‘Shortly Thereafter’
“While Shortly Thereafter works as a memoir in verse, recounting Halloran’s war experiences, Icarian Flux picks up at the aftermath of his war, utilizing metaphor, narrative, and persona to explore his new life with PTSD. This collection brings readers on a journey through trauma, reflection, memory, and childhood, all the while asking them to question what truly defines reality, time, and existence.”
“Halloran’s deeply felt, rigorously intelligent poems are deeply attuned to the lyric and the analytic. His limits as a writer are nowhere in sight.” – Sara Manguso, author of ‘Two Kinds of Decay’
Colin D. Halloran served with the US Army, deploying as an infantryman to Afghanistan in 2006. After being medically evacuated out of the war zone, Colin returned to civilian life where he became a teacher and a writer, earning an MFA from Fairfield University. His first book, Shortly Thereafter, a collection of poems on his war and redeployment experiences, was published in 2012 to much acclaim. His sophomore collection, Icarian Flux was released in 2015. In response to the increase in mass shootings in the US in 2019, he published Thou Shalt Not Kill: A Primer Even THAT Uncle Will Understand, an irreverent but sharp children’s book style rebuke of the culture of violence, complete with illustrations. He has had essays and short stories appear in such anthologies as Retire the Colors (2016), The Road Ahead (2017), Incoming: Sex, Drugs, and Copenhagen (2019), and the forthcoming Military Writers Guild: Why We Write (Middle West Press, 2019).
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Pamela Hart, ‘Mothers Over Nangarhar’
“Mothers Over Nangarhar is an unusual and powerful war narrative, focusing less on the front lines of combat and more on the home front, a perspective our American cultural canon has largely ignored after 222 years at war. In her stunning poetry debut, Pamela Hart concentrates on the fears and psychological battles suffered by parents, lovers, and friends during a soldier’s absence and return home, if indeed there’s a return. With honest grit and compassionate imagination, Hart describes her own experience having a son overseas, incorporating lyric meditations, photography, news articles, support group meetings, family interviews, oral histories, and classic literature to construct a documentary-style narrative very much situated in the now. Blending reality with absurdism and guided openly by a Calvino kind of logic, Hart reveals to us a crucial American point of view.”
“Rich with literary, political, and geographical references, Hart’s debut collection details the journey of a mother whose son is serving in Afghanistan. . . . Hart’s drive to keep looking and listening while ‘the long war goes on’ reads like a fundamental act of compassion.”
―Publishers Weekly
PAMELA HART is author of the award-winning collection, MOTHERS OVER NANGARHAR, published by Sarabande Books. She is writer-in-residence at the Katonah Museum of Art where she manages and teaches an arts-in-education program. She received the Brian Turner Literary Arts Prize in poetry in 2016. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship as well as a fellowship from the SUNY Purchase College Writers Center. Toadlily Press published her chapbook, The End of the Body. She is a teaching artist in the schools and lives in North Salem, New York. She is a poetry editor for the Afghan Women’s Writing Project and for As You Were: The Military Review.
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Matthew Hefti, ‘A Hard and Heavy Thing,’ ‘The Road Ahead: Fiction from the Forever War,’ ‘Retire the Colors: Veterans and Civilians on Iraq and Afghanistan‘
“Contemplating suicide after nearly a decade at war, Levi sits down to write a note to his best friend Nick, explaining why things have to come to this inevitable end. Years earlier, Levi – a sergeant in the army – made a tragic choice that led his team into ambush, leaving three soldiers dead and two badly injured. During the attack, Levi risked death to save a badly burned and disfigured Nick. His actions won him the Silver Star for gallantry, but nothing could alleviate the guilt he carried after that fateful day. He may have saved Nick in Iraq, but when Levi returns home and spirals out of control, it is Nick’s turn to play the savior, urging Levi to write. Levi begins to type as a way of bidding farewell, but what remains when he is finished is not a suicide note. It’s a love song, a novel in which the beginning is the story’s end, the story’s end is the real beginning of Levi’s life, and the future is as mutable as words on a page.”
“You can hardly ask for more out of a war story or any other kind of story. I recommend the book on the strength of its narrative and the author’s storytelling powers alone.” – Reviewer M. Carson
Matthew J, ‘Across the Lake’ Hefti is the author of A Hard and Heavy Thing, Tyrus Books/F+W (January 2016). He was born in Canada and grew up in Wisconsin. After 9/11, he visited the Armed Forces recruiter. He then spent 12 years as an explosive ordnance disposal technician. He deployed twice to Iraq and twice to Afghanistan, once to Iraq as an EOD team member and the remaining three tours as an EOD team leader. While enlisted, he earned a BA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing. He is now working, studying, and living in Madison, Wisconsin, where he is pursuing his Juris Doctor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. His words have been seen in Pennsylvania English; Blue Moon Literary & Art Review; Chad Harbach’s MFA v. NYC; and War, Literature and the Arts. He is an editor for Wrath-Bearing Tree literary journal.
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Patrick Hicks, ‘Across the Lake,’ ‘The Commandant of Lubizec,’ ‘In the Shadow of Dora‘
While not himself a veteran, Hicks’s scholarly work and fiction often focuses on themes of war, peace, and redemption.
“Set in Nazi Germany’s only all-female concentration camp, Across the Lake is a story of survival amid overwhelming brutality. With a keen eye towards historical accuracy, this is an unflinching portrayal of how prisoners supported each other while holding onto their humanity.
This is also a story of the female guards—the Aufseherin—who were every bit as vicious as the SS in Buchenwald, Dachau, and Auschwitz. What did it mean to be a woman in a concentration camp like Ravensbrück?
Across the Lake is an unforgettable story about gender and violence in the Holocaust. As Svea Fischer struggles to survive yet another day, she has to forget her past and endure the brutal reality swirling around her. Meanwhile, a new guard, Anna Hartmann, enters Ravensbrück and sees not horror, but opportunity. As the story unfolds, these two women find their futures inextricably tied together.
Told with historical insight, Across the Lake explores a concentration camp that was totally unique in the Third Reich.”
“A very good book. Patrick Hicks’ extensive research shows in the details he writes of the Ravensbruck camp, from the physical descriptions to how the place operated. It is a grim and sad book, and it has to be in order for it to be true to the events that happened at Ravensbruck. So many dead, so many tortured — and the Germans tried to make it seem so normal. Ugh. We must always remember the horrors of the Holocaust. And this book helps us do so.” -reviewer Dana Yost
Patrick Hicks is a dual-citizen of the United States and Ireland. He is the Writer-in-Residence at Augustana University in addition to being a faculty member at the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.
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Vicki Hudson, ‘Things We Carry Still, ‘It’s My Country Too!: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan’
“In an anthology chock-full with revealing poetry and prose, more than 50 emerging and established military writers unpack their stories of sacrifice, hardship, joy, and laughter in uniform!
Contributors to Things We Carry Still: Poems & Micro-Stories about Military Gear were challenged to capture their narratives in 300 words or less, or few lines of poetry!“
“Featuring emerging and established voices, ‘Things We Carry Still’ tells the story of contemporary military experience through the objects and rituals held dear to those who serve. Humorous and poignant by turn, this anthology offers something for everyone.”
Victoria A. Hudson is a photographer who writes poetry, narrative nonfiction and occasional fiction.
Wanting always to become a writer and told “write what you know.” she has worked in culinary, security, health, sales, educational, and other fields of endeavor while developing her craft. In 2012, she retired after 33 years combined active and reserve duty in the United States Army where she was a Military Police, Civil Affairs, and Information Operations professional. Her service included five years enlisted and over 28 years as a commissioned officer. Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) Hudson’s service included five recalls to active duty that included three combat theater tours of duty. She commanded two companies (Military Intelligence & Civil Affairs) and three battalions (Military Police & Information Operations) during her career.
She earned a Master of Fine Arts from Saint Mary’s College of California in creative writing/nonfiction. In 2007, she was a Fellow at the inaugural Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Retreat. She has studied with the former North Carolina Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti, former Los Angeles Poet Laureate Eloise Klein Healy, and Poets Camille T. Dungy.
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Benjamin Inks, ‘Soft Targets‘
“War upends lives.
An aspiring paratrooper wants to be hazed…a bored squad creates an urban legend…an Army sergeant falls in love with a Marine Corps officer….
Soft Targets is a collection of short stories linked by themes of identity, camaraderie, vulnerability, and loss. They examine the stories we tell about war, and how conflict shapes us as individuals and as a society. A profoundly human journey, Inks shows us the wounds, both seen and unseen, soldiers collect along the way. In the end, we’re all soft targets.”
“I sometimes find it hard to make progress on books I really enjoy because of the business of life. This collection of short stories is perfect though! Just short enough to get through in one sitting! Apart from their brevity, the author really brings you into the mind of the characters and brings to life their stories and thoughts. The book kept me thinking for hours afterward about the stories and the experience of service members in similar situations. A++++ read!” – reviewer Joe
A Purple Heart recipient, Benjamin Inks served three years in the Army and has worked an odd array of jobs—private investigator, personal trainer, peer recovery at a crisis receiving center. So far, the highlight of his résumé was teaching literature as a grad student at George Mason University.
Follow him on Instagram @Inks__Thinks
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Amber Jensen, ‘The Smoke of You’
“After years of flirting in the baseball dugout of their small South Dakota town, denying to friends and family anything beyond a friendship, Amber-now home from her college study abroad in Mexico-and Blake-newly committed to military service-reunite, and finally confess their true feelings for one another. Later, their love and marriage are tested by Blake’s deployment to Iraq during Amber’s first pregnancy, and by the changes in Blake after his return and reintegration, his subsequent battle with chronic pain, and the slow-burning challenges of married life.
Through it all, Amber and Blake draw on their deep commitment to each other and to the legacy of family in a discovery of what to let go of and what to hold on to. Clinging to memories of baseball and hunting, family traditions, and to each other, Amber and Blake learn to discard expectations and Midwestern reticence, and to find comfort in silence while also asking the difficult questions they hope will keep their love alive.”
“It’s not often that I read a book in one sitting–but this one I did. Ms. Jensen is a gifted and talented writer, and the narrative she tells left a lasting impression on me: the importance of family, tradition, legacy, silence, communication, faith, and peace. I will reach for this book again and again; its beautiful prose captures the essence of the South Dakota prairie so effortlessly that I found myself re-reading paragraphs. Every sentence sings.” -reviewer Katie Leary
Amber Jensen teaches courses in writing and literature at South Dakota State University in Brookings, South Dakota. Her work has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies to include Oakwood, North Dakota Quarterly, O-Dark-Thirty, and Red, White, & True: Stories from Veterans and Families, WWII to Present. The Smoke of You is her first book.
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Lauren Kay Johnson, ‘The Fine Art of Camouflage,’ ‘The Road Ahead,’ ‘Retire the Colors,’ It’s My Country Too!’
“Lauren Kay Johnson is just seven when she first experiences a sacrifice of war as her mother, a nurse in the Army Reserves, deploys in support of Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. A decade later, in the wake of 9/11, Lauren signs her own military contract and deploys to a small Afghan province with a non-combat nation-building team. Through her role as the team’s information operations officer-the filter between the U.S. military and the Afghan and international publics-and through interviews and letters from her mother’s service, Lauren investigates the role of information in war and in interpersonal relationships, often wrestling with the truth in stories we read and hear from the media and official sources, and in those stories we tell ourselves and our families.
A powerful generational coming-of-age narrative against the backdrop of war, The Fine Art of Camouflage reveals the impact from a child’s perspective of watching her mother leave and return home to a hero’s welcome to that of a young idealist volunteering to deploy to Afghanistan who, war-worn, eventually questions her place in the war, the military, and her family history—and their place within her.”
“An astonishing glimpse into the daily life of America’s military women. A moving chronicle of a mother-daughter relationship. A powerful coming-of-age tale. Johnson has pulled off a hat trick with her haunting debut. I couldn’t put it down.”
—JOANNA RAKOFF, internationally bestselling author of My Salinger Year
Lauren Kay Johnson is a writer who also works for a girls’ STEM organization. She is a veteran and the mom of twins, and an editor for Wrath-Bearing Tree literary journal.
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Adam Kovac, ‘The Surge’
“After a tour in Afghanistan and a brutal wound, Larry Chandler was done. Then came the 2007 troop surge and another deployment to Iraq. With only five weeks left in their tour, Chandler and his men are assigned a dangerous mission. While his men crave action, Chandler just hopes they’ll make it home alive.”
“Adam Kovac has written in ‘The Surge’ a novel rare in its insight and power. There is no trumpeting of conflict or sacrifice here, no outlandish satire. Instead, Kovac faces the boredom and horror, the drudgery of a forever war, with a steady hand and gaze. Readers will come away from this book shaken, mad, stunned. -Eric Shonkweiler, author of ‘Above All Men’ and ‘Moon Up, Past Full’
Adam Kovac served in the U.S. Army Infantry, with deployments to Panama, Haiti, Iraq, and Afghanistan. A former journalist, he’s also covered the crime and court beats for newspaper in Indiana, Florida, and Illinois. He lives in the Chicago suburbs with his wife and son.
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Christopher Lyke, ‘The Chicago East India Company‘
“While America carried on with Pax Americana, a generation of men were asked to watch children suffer without as much as a flinch, then return home and continue as America has for decades.
When the men returned, they brought with them unexpected cargo that is shaping the future of America in unintended ways. In The Chicago East India Company, a series of short stories and vignettes walk the reader through the consequences of two decades of war, and the attitudes it creates.
Lyke’s setting shifts in time and place but forever casts the main character of The Chicago East India Company as someone trying to maintain his sanity, his humanity, and his kindness as the state and its bureaucratic inefficiencies unknowingly try to take them away.
In the tradition of Camus, Orwell or Steinbeck, Lyke’s work illuminates human nature and seeks the truth hidden under layers of grit.”
“Lyke’s stories pull together as a scathing indictment of outdated American ideals. In the spirit of willful surrender a la Orwell’s Gordon Comstock, Lyke’s aging narrator plods down beaten Chicago school hallways, relieves the horrors he experienced in Afghanistan, and pines for the lost joys of his Ohio adolescence. A fearlessly personal, disquietingly honest, and subtly hilarious look at a chewed up and spat out man.”-David Hoenigman, author of ‘Burn Your Belongings,’ ‘Squeal For Joy,’ and ‘Man Sees Demon’
Christopher Lyke is a writer and teacher living in Chicago. He served in Afghanistan and Africa as an enlisted infantryman in the U.S. Army. Chris co-founded and edits Line of Advance, a literary blog for veterans, as well as overseeing the annual Colonel Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards. He can usually be found running with his dog in Bucktown or catching a game at Floyd’s Pub. Lyke’s work has been featured in such venues as Blaze Vox, Military Experience and the Arts’ literary journal As You Were, Heart of a Veteran, Why We Write from Middle West Press, and he won the short story award in Proud To Be: Writing by American Warriors Vol. 4. He helped edit the anthology “Our Best War Stories” published by Middle West Press in 2020. The Chicago East India Company is his first book of short stories.
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Bill McCloud, ‘What Should We Tell Our Children About Vietnam?,’ ‘The Smell of the Light: Vietnam 1968-1969’
“In The Smell of the Light: Vietnam, 1968-1969, Bill McCloud’s poems take the reader chronologically through his personal experience with the Vietnam War. From his decision in the spring of 1967 to join the army, to the present-day determination by the VA that he has a service-connected disability, these poems chart a remarkable journey. McCloud served on an army airbase during the height of the war. The poetry he uses to describe his experiences is based on more than fifty letters he wrote home to his family. His poems deal with helicopters being shot down, air rescues, rocket attacks, and buddies being wounded in action. But they also address the day to day routine, boredom, hooch maids, bar girls, memorable characters, and the time he met Ann-Margret. It’s a collection unlike any other.”
“This memoir, written in poetic form, is wonderful. The author uses the form to focus the reader on the details of being a soldier in that conflict, using the soldier’s point of view. His spare style of writing adds focus for the reader, there are not wasted words, just the experience of being there in a war. I highly recommend ‘The Smell of the Light, Vietnam 1968-1969. ‘”-reviewer Tom Keating
Bill McCloud has been teaching American history since 1974 and is a three-time Teacher of the Year. His first book, WHAT SHOULD WE TELL OUR CHILDREN ABOUT VIETNAM? (University of Oklahoma Press), was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. All of his Vietnam War papers have been purchased by the main library at Harvard University. Dozens of his Vietnam War poems are part of the official curriculum in both English and American History classes at the University School of Milwaukee, WI, one of the nation’s leading private college-preparatory schools. His new book, THE SMELL OF THE LIGHT (Balkan Press), consists of 106 poems that cover, chronologically, his year in Vietnam. He’s a 2017 Woody Guthrie Poet and is an adjunct professor of American history at Rogers State University. He lives in Pryor, OK, where a Little League baseball field has been named in his honor.
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Abby Murray, ‘Hail and Farewell,’ ‘How to Be Married After Iraq’
“This award-winning debut collection is an expertly woven treatise on love, war, and politics…Abby E. Murray’s debut HAIL AND FAREWELL is a bold examination of the intimate relationship between a soldier and a pacifist, bound together by choice. The collection reveals a wife’s perspective during her husband’s deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, including the whiplash of infertility experienced between tours. Inseparable by heart, their marriage is also built on disagreement. Military spouses are often expected to express absolute patriotism, and to conform to gender roles shaped by sexist, archaic ideals. But these poems don’t aim to accuse; rather, they call for compassion and community in the face of isolation. Capable of inserting levity into the most dire of circumstances, the poet never lets the reader forget what is at stake. Murray tears the idealized from the real, illuminating the brutality of battle and loss–traumas we tend to avoid in both military and civilian life. HAIL AND FAREWELL is an expertly woven treatise on love, war, and politics.”
Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Abby E. Murray has moved around the country and taught writing in Colorado, Georgia, Alaska, New York, and Washington, where she served as the 2019-2021 Poet Laureate for the city of Tacoma. Her first book, Hail and Farewell, won the 2019 Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Previous chapbooks include How to Be Married after Iraq (Finishing Line Press, 2018), Quick Draw: Poems from a Soldier’s Wife (Finishing Line Press, 2012) and Me and Coyote (Lost Horse Books, 2010).
In 2016, Abby launched Collateral, a literary journal publishing work concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. She earned an MFA in Writing from Pacific University (Oregon) and her Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University (New York).
She teaches rhetoric in writing military strategy for U.S. Army War College fellows at the University of Washington, as well as poetry workshops at community centers, coffee shops, military posts, detention centers, shelters, and schools. Recent and forthcoming poems can be found in Prairie Schooner, Adroit Journal, Poets Reading the News, and the anthology We Got This: Solo Mom Stories of Grit, Heart, and Humor. Her poem “Asking for a Friend” won the Rhino Founder’s Prize in 2018. You can read more of her poems here.
When she’s too anxious to write, she bakes.
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Julie Kane, Kiem Do,‘Counterpart: A South Vietnamese Naval Officer’s War’
“Amid the chaotic fall of Saigon in April 1975 Capt. Kiem Do, deputy chief of staff for operations in the South Vietnamese Navy, secretly planned and quietly carried out the evacuation of thirty-five ships and some thirty thousand at-risk South Vietnamese. That disciplined retreat is only one of many little-known events of the war recalled in this revealing memoir, the first to be published in English by an officer of the South Vietnamese Navy. Also included are first-person accounts of skirmishes against the Binh Xuyen pirates, life with Diem and Madame Nhu, the foiled communist car-bomb attack on Saigon’s naval headquarters during Tet, and the 1974 sea battle between China and South Vietnam. In addition to viewing particular events from a Vietnamese perspective, this book offers an intimate look at the human side of the war, at Vietnamese culture, and at the relationship between the men of the South Vietnamese Navy and their American counterparts – specifically, the naval advisers who crossed paths with Kiem.”
“Very illustrative of the war from the side of the South Vietnamese Navy. The closing days of our involvement there are vividly described. Very good historical background. Highly recommended.” – reviewer Joseph Gamboa
A past Louisiana Poet Laureate, Julie Kane is a native of Boston and a longtime resident of Louisiana. Her most recent poetry collection is MOTHERS OF IRELAND (LSU Press, 2020). If you enjoy Dorothy Parker, you would enjoy her book of humorous poems, PAPER BULLETS. JAZZ FUNERAL won the 2009 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, judged by David Mason. RHYTHM & BOOZE was selected by Maxine Kumin as a National Poetry Series winner and was one of four finalists for the 2005 Poets’ Prize. Kane is the co-editor, with Grace Bauer, of the anthologies NASTY WOMEN POETS: AN UNAPOLOGETIC ANTHOLOGY OF SUBVERSIVE VERSE and UMPTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A POSSUM: CRITICAL AND CREATIVE RESPONSES TO EVERETTE MADDOX (a finalist for the 2007 Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Book Award in Poetry). The nonfiction Vietnam memoir that she co-authored with Kiem Do, COUNTERPART, was a 1999 History Book Club Featured Alternate. A former George Bennett Fellow in Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy, New Orleans Writer-in-Residence at Tulane University, and Fulbright Scholar at Vilnius Pedagogical University (Lithuania), and Professor Emeritus of English at Northwestern State University of Louisiana, she currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Western Colorado University. Follow Julie on Twitter at @juliekanepoet, or read more about her work and upcoming appearances at juliekanepoet.com.
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Tom Keating, ‘Yesterday’s Soldier: A Passage from Prayer to War’
“‘Yesterday’s Soldier’ is a different Vietnam War memoir. Packed into this tidy book is the story of a young man’s coming of age in troubled times. The book is about of his transformation from infantryman to conscientious objector and his experiences in Vietnam. War, religion, and morality are always in the background of his story and they move to the surface in every chapter.The author, after years of studying for the priesthood in a religious seminary, leaves and is quickly exposed to the Selective Service. His belief in God and his country inspired him to enlist in the US Army during the Vietnam war, and he proceeds through the Army’s infantry training cycle of weapons and war tactics, which clash with his years of prayer. His faith and his ideals caused him to struggle with being trained to kill, and so he becomes a conscientious objector. He survives the Army’s systematic punishment (‘the Treatment’) during the long months of waiting for a decision in his case as he defies the will of his family, his church, and faces criminal charges by the US Army. Yesterday’s Soldier’ is his story of that journey from prayer to war.”
“There are many stories of heroes going off to war that follow a familiar script. In this case the author describes his personal journey in a deeply reflective way that doesn’t stick to the standard format. It illuminates the difficulties of the experience and the difficulties of the mental aspects. His faith is the thread that carries through the entire story in various forms.” – reviewer M. Gallagher
Tom Keating is a graduate of Stonehill College, North Easton, MA. “Yesterday’s Soldier,” the story of his journey from Infantry Officer Candidate to conscientious objector, is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
Tom studied for the priesthood at Holy Cross Seminary for five years before serving in the United States Army, including a tour of Vietnam from 1969 to 1970. He served with the 47th Military History Detachment, assigned to 1st Logistical Command Headquarters, Long Binh Vietnam, and Headquarters, US Army Vietnam, (USARV) also in Long Binh. He was awarded the Army Commendation Medal twice for his work with those units.
Tom attended Boston University and completed his Master’s degree in Education, and taught at the high school in Burlington, MA for eight years. A career in corporate communications and learning followed. He worked for high technology firms such as Wang Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, IBM and EMC Corporation.
His writing at the AGAPE writing program for veterans at the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College was under the direction of Roxana Von Kraus. He also attended the Joiner Institute Master Writing Program at at the University of Massachusetts, Boston in 2017 and 2018.
Excerpts from Tom’s memoir have appeared in national anthologies such as “War Stories”, an anthology edited by Sean Davis, and “Shakedown” published by Warrior Writers Boston in their book “Complacency Kills”.
Tom and his wife, the artist Kathleen Keating, live in Massachusetts where he is an active member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and is committed to assisting veterans of all ages.
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Kelly Kennedy, ‘They Fought for Each Other,’ ‘Fight Like a Girl (co with Kate Germano),‘‘ Queen of Cuba (co with Pete Lapp, out last week), ‘The Unit: My Life Fighting Terrorists as One of America’s Most Secret Operatives’ (co with Adam Gamal, coming February)
“U.S. government officials knew they had a spy. But it never occurred to them it was a woman—and certainly not a superstar Defense Intelligence Agency employee known as ‘The Queen of Cuba.
Ana Montes had spent seventeen years spying for the Cubans. She had been raised in a patriotic Puerto Rican household: Her father, a psychiatrist, was a former colonel in the U.S. Army. Her sister worked as a translator for the FBI and helped break up a ring of Cuban spies in Miami. Her brother was also a loyal FBI agent.
Montes impressed her bosses, but in secret, spent her breaks memorizing top secret documents before sending them to the Cuban government. She received no payment, even as one of her missives could have brought her the death penalty.
She also listened to anxiety-relief tapes, took medication, and saw a psychiatrist. She dreamed of a normal life where she could work a job she enjoyed. She dreamed of getting married, and even had a man in mind: a defense analyst on the Cuba account for Southern Command. He had no idea that, three times a week, Montes pulled a short-wave radio from her closet and received encrypted messages from Cuba.
After the 9/11 attacks, Cuba wanted Montes to continue her work. They couldn’t know the FBI was already on to her. Retired FBI agent Peter J. Lapp explains the clues—including never-released information—that led their team to catch one of the United States’ most dangerous spies.”
Kelly Kennedy is the author of They Fought for Each Other: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hardest Hit Unit in Iraq, as well as co-author of Fight Like a Girl: The Truth Behind How Female Marines are Trained. She served in the U.S. Army from 1987 to 1993, including tours in the Middle East during Desert Storm, and in Mogadishu, Somalia. She is the managing editor of The War Horse, a nonprofit investigative and long-form journalism newsroom affectionately known as the ProPublica of military news. She has worked as a health policy reporter for USA Today, as well as reporting for Military Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Oregonian, and The Salt Lake Tribune. As a journalist, she has embedded in both Iraq and Afghanistan. She is the only U.S. female journalist to both serve in combat and cover it as a civilian journalist, and she is the first female president of Military Reporters & Editors. In her spare time, she dances ballet and completely loses her military bearing.
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Brooke King, ‘War Flower’
My mom, a pacifist, loved this book.
“Brooke King has been asked over and over what it’s like to be a woman in combat, but she knows her answer is not what the public wants to hear. The answers people seek lie in the graphic details of war—the sex, death, violence, and reality of it all as she experienced it. In her riveting memoir War Flower, King breaks her silence and reveals the truth about her experience as a soldier in Iraq. Find out what happens when the sex turns into secret affairs, the violence is turned up to eleven, and how King’s feelings for a country she knew nothing about as a nineteen-year-old become more disturbing to her as a thirty-year-old mother writing it all down before her memories fade into oblivion.
The story of a girl who went to war and returned home a woman, War Flower gathers the enduring remembrances of a soldier coming to grips with post-traumatic stress disorder. As King recalls her time in Iraq, she reflects on what violence does to a woman and how the psychic wounds of combat are unwittingly passed down from mother to children. War Flower is ultimately a profound meditation on what it means to have been a woman in a war zone and an unsettling exposé on war and its lingering aftershocks. For veterans such as King, the toughest lesson of service is that in the mind, some wars never end—even after you come home.”
“This book is an amazing way to get to know how deeply affected people are by war in general, and how hard it is to come back to your normal life after that.”—Radioactive Book Reviews
Brooke King is an adjunct professor of English and creative writing at Saint Leo University. She served in the United States Army, deploying to Iraq in 2006 as a wheel-vehicle mechanic. Her nonfiction work has appeared in numerous publications, including Red, White, and True: Stories from Veterans and Families, World War II to Present (Potomac Books, 2014) and It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan (Potomac Books, 2017).
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Travis Klempan, ‘Have Snakes, Need Birds’
“Sergeant John Mackenzie is on his third deployment to Iraq at the height of combat operations. His overriding goal: get his soldiers home safely. That mission is difficult enough when every day is a fight against snipers, roadside bombs, or just plain old boredom-it becomes impossible when John accidentally awakens two ancient spirits, each bent on destroying the other, collateral damage be damned.
A soul-collecting demon named Moonlit Samuel wants to move up in the hierarchy of evil; a malevolent force of nature known only as taliment destroys everything it touches; and John still faces local insurgents, foreign fighters, a belligerent battalion commander, a greenhorn lieutenant, and questions of his own sanity.
John must find a way to protect his men, save the city, and return to the woman he loves before she becomes just another victim of supernatural combat.”
“Klempan is a great storyteller. With a voice of an expert, he paints an accurate picture of combat in the Iraq War interwoven with a mythological plot twist. Mack the Knife leaves little to be desired as a real-life protagonist who wants nothing more than to bring his troops home in the face of a relentless enemies some from this world, others not. If you want to go for an adventure like never before, this is a good choice.” – reviewer Mark Daniel Gutierrez
Travis Klempan is the author of Have Snakes, Need Birds. He was born and raised in Colorado, joining the U.S. Navy to see the world. After realizing most of it is water, Travis returned to the Mile High state, collecting tattoos and degrees along the way. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in such literary venues as Proximity, Windmill, and Bombay Gin. He helped launch a short-lived guerrilla ‘zine, and his work has received recognition from Line of Advance, Flyway Journal, and the Veterans Writing Project. He is a member of the Military Writers Society of America and remains in Colorado with his wife, cats, and dogs.
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Valerie Miner, ‘All Good Women,’ ‘A Walking Fire’
Much of Miner’s work (this is only a sampling) deals with issues of war and peace. Miner herself moved to Canada in protest of the Vietnam War.
“‘Here comes a walking fire,’ the Fool says to Lear as he sees Gloucester walking across a heath carrying a torch. This novel opens in fall, 1988, as Cora, an anti-war activist, returns to the U.S. from Canada where she has lived for twenty years. A college student in the mid-sixties, Cora becomes politically curious, then joins the anti-war movement. Based on King Lear and written from the point of view of Cordelia, the book weighs definitions of patriotism and loyalty. In her return as in her past, Cora is testing borders between suffering and virtue, idealism and commitment, self and family, and exploring possibilities of change.”
“Sojourner Magazine had this to say about Miner’s novel: ‘A Walking Fire is very likely Valerie Miner’s best novel thus far. It is thoroughly believable, densely layered, and expertly told. Suspense builds as we yearn to find Cora’s missing links. And Miner knows how much to reveal and at what point…If peace is not made between Cora and all of her family, at least Cora is able to make some peace with herself, which is maybe what this journey is all about.’ I couldn’t say it better myself.” – reviewer Diana
Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of 15 books. She travels internationally giving readings, lectures, and workshops. She has received Fulbright Fellowships to Tunisia, India and Indonesia. Winner of a Distinguished Teaching Award, she’s now artist-in-residence at Stanford University.
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Patrick Mondaca, ‘Adjustment Disorder’
Winner of the Waterston Desert Writing Prize and the Monandock Essay Essay Collection Prize
In this memoir, written within a collection of essays, Patrick Mondaca deftly threads together stories of his wartime service in Iraq, his pre-war experience, and his postwar efforts to readjust to civilian life. From small-town Connecticut to Baghdad, to Darfur and New York City, Mondaca considers the effects of war on the soldier–what it does to one’s psyche, identity, and morality. While he is just one of millions who have returned from this country’s ongoing armed conflicts, his moving essays offer a glimpse into the experience of veterans struggling to find their way back to their prior lives and the loved ones trying to understand them. The collection speaks deeply and thoughtfully to many issues of our times.
Patrick Mondaca served in Baghdad, Iraq, as a sergeant with the Connecticut Army National Guard’s 143rd Military Police Company in 2003. After being discharged, he returned to civilian policing until leaving to work as a field safety and security officer for a humanitarian organization in South Darfur, Sudan, from September 2007 to September 2008. A graduate of Central Connecticut State University, he holds a MS in Global Affairs from New York University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. He won the Waterston Desert Writing Prize in 2018 and his writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, Litro, and Shooter Literary Magazine, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, and others. He lives in Clinton, Connecticut.
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Jennifer Orth-Veillon (with Monique Seefried), editor, ‘Beyond Their Limits of Longing: Contemporary Writers and Veterans on the Lingering Stories of WWI’
“In America, WWI became overshadowed by WWII and Vietnam, further diluting the voices of poets, novelists, essayists, and scholars who unknowingly set a precedent for all successive war writers who appear in this collection. Those who survived WWI and wrote about it opened the space for readers and writers alike to explore the complexity both of war’s physical and mental horrors and of its historical significance in today’s world in crises. From the vast scenes on the battlefield to the fight at the home front, WWI writing and scholarship in this collection allows us, through contemporary perspectives, to inhabit the mind and body of individual soldiers, doctors, nurses, civilians, and families.”
“A deeply moving collection, ‘Beyond Their Limits of Longing’ bears witness to the enduring legacy of WWI. From essays on literature, history, and memory to original works of poetry and fiction, this anthology shows how, even after a century, the impact and lessons of the war remain today. It is a worthy memorial to both the experience of soldiers long gone and those who continue to serve today. We are so fortunate to have these voices join such a rich literary tradition.” – Daniel Mason, bestselling author of ‘The Winter Soldier, A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth’ -finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the California Book Award-and other.
Jennifer A. Orth-Veillon, PhD, is a French-American writer, educator, and translator. From 2016-2019, she curated The WWrite Blog: Exploring WWI’s Influence on Contemporary Writing and Scholarship for the Official United States World War One Centennial Commission. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from Emory University and led veteran writing workshops while completing a Marion L. Brittain postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Georgia Technology in Atlanta. A member of the board for the literary magazine, the Wrath-Bearing Tree, she currently teaches interdisciplinary humanities courses at the Catholic University of Lyon, the Lyon University Studies Abroad Consortium, and the Ecole Normale Superieure of Lyon. Her fiction, non-fiction, and translations have appeared in the New York Times, the War Horse, the WrathBearing Tree, Consequence Magazine, L’Esprit, Lunch Ticket, and Les cahiers du judaïsme. Dedicated to exploring narratives of war through the arts, she has also written a novel based on the experience of her grandfather, a WWII battalion surgeon and concentration camp liberator.
Monique Seefried was born a French citizen in Tunisia and became a U.S. citizen in 1985. She holds a PhD in history from Sorbonne University in Paris. She is fluent in English, French, German, and Italian. She spent the last forty years working in education and the museum world. A curator for twenty years at the Carlos Museum of Emory University, she became in 1999 the founding executive director of CASIE (Center for the Advancement and Study of International Education). From 2003 until 2009, she chaired the Board of Governors of the International Baccalaureate (IB). President of the Croix Rouge Farm Memorial Foundation, she was appointed in 2014 a commissioner on the U.S. WWI Centennial Commission and will serve until the inauguration in 2024 of the WWI National Memorial in Washington. A knight in the French Order of the Academic Palms, in the Order of Merit and in the Order of the Legion of Honor, she is also an officer in the French Order of Arts and Letters. In 2019, she was awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service.
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Shannon Huffman Polson, ‘The Grit Factor: Courage, Resilience, and Leadership in the Most Male-Dominated Organization in the World,’ ‘North of Hope’
“For women in business and leaders in any field, this award winning book offers The Grit Triad, stories, current research, lessons and tactical takeaways to make this wisdom your own.
Your guide could not be better qualified: at age nineteen, Shannon Huffman Polson became the youngest woman ever to climb Denali, the highest mountain in North America. She went on to reach the summits of Mt. Rainier and Mt. Kilimanjaro and spent more than a decade traveling the world. Yet it was during her experience serving as one of the Army’s first female attack helicopter pilots, and eventually leading an Apache flight platoon on deployment to Bosnia-Herzegovina and a flight company in Korea, that she learned the lessons of leadership that forever changed her life.
Where did these insights come from? From her own crucibles of experience—and from other women. In writing The Grit Factor, Polson made it her mission to connect with an elite pack of tough, impressive female iconoclasts who shared with her their candid stories of combat and career. This slate of decorated leaders includes Heather Penney, one of the first female F-16 pilots, who was put on a suicide mission for 9/11; General Ann Dunwoody, the first female four-star general in the Army; Amy McGrath, the first female Marine to fly the F/A-18 in combat and a 2020 candidate for the US Senate—and dozens of other unstoppable women who got there first, including Polson herself.
These women led at the highest levels in the most complicated, challenging, and male-dominated organization in the world. Now, when positive role models of women leading are needed as never before, Polson brings these voices together, sharing her own life lessons and theirs with storytelling flair, keen insight, and incisive analysis of current research.
With its gripping narrative and relatable takeaways, The Grit Factor is both inspiring and pragmatic, a book that will energize and enlighten current and aspiring leaders everywhere—whether male or female.”
“…an intelligent and informative book on leadership authored by an inspiring woman is an essential addition to one’s library.” — School Administrator (AASA)
Bronze Medal Winner for Best Women/Minorities in Business Book in the 2021 Axiom Business Book Awards
Shannon Huffman Polson served as one of the first women to fly the Apache helicopter in the US Army. In addition to her military service, she earned her MBA at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and spent five years leading and managing in the corporate sector, at Guidant and Microsoft. She is the founder of the Grit Institute and speaks frequently on topics related to leadership, courage, resilience, and grit. She and her husband, Peter, live in the Pacific North West and have two energetic sons.
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Angela Ricketts, ‘No Man’s War: Irreverent Confessions of a Military Wife’
“Raised as an army brat, Angie Ricketts though she knew what she was in for when she eloped with Darrin – then an Infantry Lieutenant – on the eve of his deployment to Somalia. Since then, Darrin, now a Colonel, has been deployed eight times, serving four of those tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Ricketts has lived every one of those deployments intimately – distant enough to survive the years apart from her husband, but close enough to share a common purpose and a lifestyle they both love.
With humor, candor, and a brazen attitude, Ricketts pulls back the curtain on a subculture many readers know, but few will ever experience. Counter to the dramatized snapshot seen on Lifetime’s Army Wives, Ricketts digs into the personalities and posturing that officers’ wives must survive daily – whether navigating a social event at the base, suffering through a husband’s prolonged deployment, or reacting to a close friend’s death in combat.
At its core, No Man’s War is a story of sisterhood and survival. As Ricketts states: ‘We tread those treacherous waters together. Do we sometimes shove each other’s heads underwater for a few seconds? Maybe even on purpose? Of course. Are we sometimes dragged underwater ourselves by the undertow created by all of us struggling together too closely? Without a doubt. But we never let each other drown. Our buoyancy is our survival.'”
“Outspoken in her critique of the “Army machine,” Ricketts celebrates the “secret sisterhood” of soldiers’ wives, defiantly and desperately battling for survival. A blunt, bold debut memoir.” ––Kirkus
Angela Ricketts is an author, mom, and military wife who currently lives in Indiana.
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Roxana Robinson, ‘Sparta’
“Conrad Farrell does not come from a military family, but as a classics major at Williams College, he has encountered the powerful appeal of the Marine Corps ethic: Semper Fidelis comes straight from Sparta, a society where every citizen doubled as a full-time soldier. When Conrad graduates, he joins the Marines to continue a long tradition of honor, courage, and commitment over the course of a four-year tour in Iraq. When we meet him, he has just come home to Katonah, New York. As Conrad attempts to find his footing in the civilian world, he learns how hard it is to return to the people and places he used to love. Gradually, he awakens to a growing rage and the realization that something has gone wrong.
Suspenseful, compassionate, and perceptive, Roxana Robinson’s Sparta ‘is a beautifully written novel that illuminates what happens when we’re estranged from the world as we know it’ (Chicago Tribune).”
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Kathleen M. Rodgers, ‘The Flying Cutterbucks,‘ ‘Johnnie Come Lately,’ ‘Seven Wings to Glory,’ ‘The Final Salute’
“Decades ago, Trudy, Georgia, and Aunt Star formed a code of silence to protect each other from an abusive man who terrorized their family. One act of solidarity long ago lives with them still. With the election of a president who brags about groping women without their consent, old wounds and deep secrets come alive again, forcing hard truths to be told and even harder truths to be left to the dead.
On the outskirts of Pardon, New Mexico, Trudy returns to her mother, Jewel, to navigate an old house filled with haunting mementos of her father who went missing in action over North Vietnam. As she helps her mother sift through the memories and finally lay her father to rest, Trudy will do her own soul searching to say goodbye to the dead, and find her way along with the other women in her family, and through the next election.”
“Whenever a writer with such skill and sensitivity as Kathleen Rodgers publishes a novel, we must, for our own sake, read it. The Flying Cutterbucks is a profound and moving portrait of family, friendship, and forgiveness.” –Allen Mendenhall, Editor, Southern Literary Review
Born in The Land of Enchantment, Kathleen M. Rodgers is a novelist whose work has appeared in Family Circle Magazine, Military Times, and in several anthologies. Her fifth novel, Llano County Mermaid Club, will be released from University of New Mexico Press, early fall 2024 and is represented by Tracy Crow, President of Tracy Crow Literary Agency. The Flying Cutterbucks, her fourth novel, was named a 2022 New Mexico Press Women Zia Book Award 1st Runner-up and a 2021 WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Contemporary Fiction from Women Writing the West. She’s been featured in USA Today, The Associated Press, and many other publications. A native of Clovis, New Mexico, Kathleen resides in North Texas and is working on her sixth novel. She presented at Eastern New Mexico University’s Media-Con ’21 and ’22 and has been invited back for Media-Con ’23. A two-time finalist for the MWSA Writer of the Year Award, Kathleen recently gave a talk about “Not Giving Up” at the 2022 MWSA national conference in New Orleans. She is available to speak at events and book clubs.
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Scott Schultz, ‘Rural Routes and Ruts: Roaming the Road of Rural Life’
The author uses several of his own child and adult experiences, of growing up in a community that no longer exists, to describe the evolution of Wisconsin’s rural countryside and its people. The basis of his own experiences are combined with observations and reflections Schultz has made about rural Wisconsin during his 29 years of work as a journalist – the last 17 with The Country Today, an Eau Claire-based rural living newspaper.
“The photographs Schultz has taken and used in the book capture the life of the rural countryside, and cause readers to pause and reflect what life in this part of the country is all about. The pictures, in isolation, also serve as story.
During presentations to school and library groups about Rural Routes and Ruts, Schultz is often interrupted by older people saying, ‘I remember life like that,’ and younger people saying, I’m glad I’ve learned about life like that.’ After a reading of the book, readers may find themselves in a discussion of the history of rural Wisconsin and the direction in which it’s going.
In general, Rural Routes and Ruts: Roaming the Roads of Rural Life quickly becoming a center of discussion about rural Wisconsin – its past, its present and its future.” reviewer “A Satisfied Reader”
“The author seems to have an insight to growing up in a rural area that is very familiar to me. I couldn’t put the book down.” -The Running Reviewer
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Karen Skolfield, ‘Battle Dress: Poems’
Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award
“In a poetic voice at once accessible and otherworldly, gutsy and insightful, U.S. Army veteran Karen Skolfield offers a rare glimpse of a female soldier’s training and mental conditioning. Through the narratives of a young soldier, her older counterpart, and her fellow soldiers, Skolfield searches for meaning in combat preparation, long-term trauma, and the way war is embedded in our language and psyche.”
“A terrific and sometimes terrifying collection―morally complex, rhythmic, tough-minded, and original.” ―Rosanna Warren, 2018 Barnard Women Poets Prize citation
Karen Skolfield is a U.S. Army veteran and former photojournalist. She is the author of two poetry collections, Battle Dress and Frost in the Low Areas, and teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She lives in Massachusetts.
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Jodie Cain Smith, ‘The Woods at Barlow Bend,’ ‘Bayou Cresting: The Wanting Women of Huet Pointe, ‘100 Things to Do in Mobile Before You Die‘ (travel guide)
“In Huet Pointe, ambition is as dangerous as the brackish water that surrounds the sliver of land. But, the women of this antebellum hamlet yearn for more than society insists they be-devout, feminine, and content with living according to cultural norms. So, what’s a girl to do? She could employ poison, perhaps a bit of adultery, and drowning in alligator-infested waters is always a choice-whatever it takes to achieve her goal. A novel-in-stories, Bayou Cresting: The Wanting Women of Huet Pointe, tells the stories of ten women brought together by proximity, forever entangled by the actions they take.”
“Truly loved this book. The characters are so well built…deliciously awful and genuinely endearing. The plot is engaging and the ending unexpected. A great read!!” – reviewer Jennifer Burgess
Jodie Cain Smith is a graduate of the University of South Alabama and Northern Michigan University because earning a degree on both the southern and northern border happened by pure chance and a bit of study. She is the author of The Woods at Barlow Bend, her debut novel based on the true story of her grandmother’s tumultuous adolescence in rural Alabama. Her short works have appeared in The Petigru Review, Pieces Anthology, and Chicken Soup for the Military Spouse’s Soul. When not creating fictional worlds on her laptop, Jodie hangs out with her long-suffering husband and the most precious boy ever created. Seriously, the kid is amazing, and the husband puts up with a lot.
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Lisa Stice, ‘Forces,’ ‘Permanent Change of Station,”Uniform‘
“Inspired by great works of visual art, writing, and sculpture—as well as small moments observed alongside her home-schooled daughter and beloved dog Seamus—poet and U.S. Marine Corps spouse Lisa Stice explores the invisible forces and frictions at work in our lives.
‘Stice is a master of quiet revelation and connection,’ says the publisher. Her words illuminate how to find beauty, wonder, calm, and strength in a world that too often feels filled with ugliness and chaos.’”
“Don’t let the quiet moments fool you. Stice highlights […] the spaces between our worries about the outside world, and the inner lives of our families. Her daughter inspires us to be strong when she says that her dog ‘makes me braver.’ Stice asks Sun Tzu to teach her to be ‘serene and indestructible.’ Her poetry shows that she learned how.”
— Eric Chandler, author of Kekekabic and Hugging This Rock: Poems of Earth & Sky, Love & War
Lisa Stice is a poet/mother/military spouse, the author of three full-length poetry collections, Forces (Middle West Press, 2021), Permanent Change of Station (Middle West Press, 2018), and Uniform (Aldrich Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Desert (Prolific Press, 2018). She is a Pushcart Prize nominee who volunteers as a mentor with the Veterans Writing Project, as Poetry Editor for The Military Spouse Book Review [yay! -Editor], as Poetry Editor for Inklette Magazine, and as a writer for the Military Spouse Fine Artists Network (Milspo-FAN). She is also an editor for Middle West Press. She received a BA in English literature from Mesa State College (now Colorado Mesa University) and an MFA in creative writing and literary arts from the University of Alaska Anchorage. You can learn more about her publications at lisastice.wordpress.com/ and facebook.com/LisaSticePoet and on Twitter @LisaSticePoet.
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Brian Turner, ‘The Wild Delight of Wild Things,’ ‘Phantom Noise,’ ‘The Goodbye World Poem,’ ‘Here, Bullet,’ ‘My Life as a Foreign Country‘
Albums: ‘Clouds,’ ‘American Undertow,’ ‘Little Birds Singing’
“Although grief is at the forefront of these poems, The Wild Delight of Wild Things is a simple love letter to Turner’s late wife, poet Ilyse Kusnetz (1966-2016).
The poems are also a love letter to our planet during the ongoing sixth mass extinction. Intertwining this immense grief, Turner explores the hybrid borderlands of genre, and the meditations on love and loss blur the boundaries between poetry and lyric prose. In Italian, the word ‘stanza’ is rooted in the word ‘room.’
And so, stanza by stanza, room by room, page by page, we draft ourselves forward into the imagination, our arms filled with all that we can carry from the days gone by. This is the art of survival. Profound grief teaches us how to dwell in the house of memory―that vibrant temporal landscape of the past―where we might live with the dead we love once more.”
“Brian Turner’s The Wild Delight of Wild Things brought me to my knees, kissed the top of my head, and gently gave my heart back to me. What do we mean when we say we loved and lost someone? This profoundly beautiful book begins inside a life-changing relationship and extends with graceful tendrils out into the world, reminding us that by sharing our experiences we make an endless spiral form stretching out to everyone and everything. A tender heart curl. An epic love poem.”―Lidia Yuknavitch
Brian Turner is the author of Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise. His memoir My Life as a Foreign Country was published in 2014. He’s the editor of The Kiss, and co-edited The Strangest of Theatres. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Harper’s, and other fine journals. Turner was featured in the documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, nominated for an Academy Award. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, and he’s received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a US-Japan Friendship Commission Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He directs the MFA program in Lake Tahoe and lives in Orlando, Florida.
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Ben Weakley, ‘Heat + Pressure’
“In an explosive first collection of poetry, HEAT + PRESSURE, U.S. Army veteran and Tennessee storyteller Ben Weakley explores what it means to have gone to war.
In 2018, as he was retiring from the Army, Weakley began participating in writing workshops with Rockville, Maryland-based Community Building Art Works (CBAW). The practice sparked in him a passion for creating opportunities for dialogue among “civilians” and “military” audiences through writing and literature.
“I wrote these poems on phone screens in the back of commuter buses and metro trains. I wrote them in notebooks on lunch breaks at work and quiet Sunday mornings before the rest of my family was awake,” the poet writes. “At first, I wrote about combat, acts of war, and unprocessed violence. As I pushed myself further, I wanted to know more about why I had decided to go to war […] I wanted to know what it meant for my life now. The words happened. I bore witness.”
“In HEAT + PRESSURE, Ben Weakley unpacks memory, pain, loss, and a generational inheritance of war and conflict. These verses attend to the physical of this world with a clear-eyed examination of the self—all in the service of gleaning insight into the messy and layered humanity within us all. While HEAT + PRESSURE traverses the interior and exterior terrains of war, damage, and destruction, these poems are watermarked with tenderness and care—a sure sign that these are poems rooted in the word love.” —Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise
Ben Weakley is the author of HEAT + PRESSURE, a collection of poetry that explores what it means to have gone to war. A U.S. Army veteran and Tennessee storyteller, he spent 14 years on active duty, including combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2018, as he was retiring from the Army, Weakley began participating in writing workshops with Rockville, Maryland-based Community Building Art Works (CBAW). The practice sparked in him a passion for creating opportunities for dialogue among civilians and military audiences through writing and literature.
“I wrote these poems on phone screens in the back of commuter buses and metro trains. I wrote them in notebooks on lunch breaks at work and quiet Sunday mornings before the rest of my family was awake,” the poet writes.
“At first, I wrote about combat, acts of war, and unprocessed violence. As I pushed myself further, I wanted to know more about why I had decided to go to war […] I wanted to know what it meant for my life now. The words happened. I bore witness.”
He now enjoys creating spaces for people to speak truths and tell their stories, with special care toward those who aren’t usually heard. He himself now facilitates on-line writing workshops through CBAW, as well as through the Philadelphia-based non-profit Warrior Writers. His poetry and non-fiction appears in such literary publications as Cutleaf Journal, Sequestrum, and The Wrath-Bearing Tree. His work has been anthologized in We Were Not Alone (CBAW, 2021) and Our Best War Stories (Middle West Press, 2020). He was the 2019 winner of the Heroes Voices National Poetry Contest and the 2021 poetry winner in the 2021 Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards.
He lives in the Tri-Cities of Northeast Tennessee with his wife and two children—and a well-meaning but poorly behaved hound-dog named Camo.
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Kayla Williams, ‘Love My Rifle More Than You,‘ ‘Plenty of Time When We Get Home‘
“Brian, on his way back to base after mid-tour leave, was wounded by a roadside bomb that sent shrapnel through his brain. Kayla waited anxiously for news and, on returning home, sought out Brian. The two began a tentative romance and later married, but neither anticipated the consequences of Brian’s injury on their lives. Lacking essential support for returning veterans from the military and the VA, Kayla and Brian suffered through posttraumatic stress amplified by his violent mood swings, her struggles to reintegrate into a country still oblivious to women veterans, and what seemed the callous, consumerist indifference of civilian society at large.
Kayla persevered. So did Brian. They fought for their marriage, drawing on remarkable reservoirs of courage and commitment. They confronted their demons head-on, impatient with phoniness of any sort. Inspired by an unwavering ethos of service, they continued to stand on common ground. Finally, they found their own paths to healing and wholeness, both as individuals and as a family, in dedication to a larger community.”
“Intimate and brave . . . a testament to how love soldiers on.”―People
Kayla Williams, a former Arabic linguist in the U.S. Army, is the author of Love My Rifle More than You and Plenty of Time When We Get Home. She lives with her husband Brian and their two children in Virginia.
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Andria Williams, ‘The Waiting World, ‘The Longest Night‘
“FALL 1929: The mansion of larger-than-life business magnate Titus McAvoy hums with the energy of his servants Nessa and Aoife, two Irish maids bonded through their journey to America, and a dream of escape. When preparation for one of Titus’s famous parties sends the pair to the beach, Aoife stumbles upon a strange find on the shoreline. She instinctively pockets it, unaware that the waxy, musky substance, ambergris, is the key to her and Nessa’s freedom. Ounce for ounce, ambergris holds more worth than silver or gold. Amid this discovery, a young white-passing British World War I veteran named John enters the mansion’s ranks, his history dragging behind him. When John’s path intersects with Nessa and Aoife, the trio forms a quiet trust. Eventually, the girls show John the ambergris treasure, and together, they formulate a plan to cash in their secret and make their getaway. These three friends are determined to forge a different life together-one free from the dark underbelly of how the rich treat the poor, and free from the pervasive rot of nationalist and racist behavior, not to mention the injustices and dangers that too often befall women. But with a crash in the stock market demolishing Titus’s wealth, his eye is sharp and malicious. As the trio’s strategy unfolds, so too does their boss’s own merciless plan to punish whoever defies his power. Nobody walks away from Titus McAvoy.”
“Emotionally complex and beautifully written—I didn’t want it to end.” -reviewer Amy Corley
Andria Williams is the author of the critically-acclaimed debut novel, The Longest Night, which earned starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Booklist, and was a 2016 Barnes and Noble Discover New Authors pick and an Amazon Editors’ pick for Best Literature & Fiction. She is founder of the Military Spouse Book Review and was editor-in-chief of Wrath-Bearing Tree literary journal for several years. Williams received her MFA from the University of Minnesota, and in the years since, as part of an active-duty military family, has lived all over the U.S. and currently lives in Colorado.
The Military Spouse Book Review 