Category Archives: Writing

The Road to Publication

September 21, 2015 By in War, Writing Tags: , , Leave a comment
"Oh Well (2)" courtesy of Lydia Komatsu

“Oh Well (2)” courtesy of Lydia Komatsu

When I first started writing again, I’ll admit that I had a pretty narrow view of nonfiction. Just the facts, right? So when I enrolled in UAA’s MFA program, I thought I had everything figured out. It’s amazing what the addition of the word “creative” in front of “nonfiction” can do in terms of detonating paradigms. Within a few weeks, I was exposed to a world of possibility within the world of creative nonfiction. Not just essays either. Prose poems. Lyric essays. Open forms. I distinctly recall writing something for my online semester, then posting a silly comment about it being “flash nonfiction,” which I supposed was an imaginary genre. Our instructor, Sherry Simpson, let me down easy and recommended I check out Brevity. 

It turned out I hadn’t invented anything new. In fact, Brevity had been doing it for some time, publishing essays of 750 words or less. And boy, did those babies hum. Inspired, I had this foolish idea that someday, I could see some of my own work in Brevity. I even had something in mind – a short piece written from a class prompt that seemed to have promise, to hint at something more. 

There were a couple of breakthroughs – one when I decided to fragment the essay. Another big moment was when I embraced the attention to detail needed for such a short piece. I wrote the piece, and edited it about 30 times, which. Then I sent it off to about twenty journals and waited.

I wrote the piece after reading as many Brevity essays as possible, so to say that I wrote specifically for the journal is no exaggeration. Most places rejected it, but I did get one nice note from the editor of Grist, who said they liked it but it didn’t for thematically. Nice, but a rejection no less.

Brevity got in touch, but it wasn’t quite the home run I wanted. They wanted to see a minor rewrite – the conclusion, it was lacking. So I rewrote. Again. And waited some more.

When I received my acceptance email, I was ecstatic. After nearly six months of cutting and editing and agonizing over articles and nouns and format, there it was: Accepted.

At my second summer residency, Ron Carlson said something profound about writing. The reward, he said, was the same whether we get published or rejected; whether we win an award or fail to make the semi-finals. We get to keep writing. That stuck with me, and still does every time something good or not-so-good happens to me as a writer.

So, what’s next now that I’ve published something in an incredible journal?

I get to keep writing.

***

The piece, called “When We Played,” is available to read for free online here. I’d love to hear what you think about the essay in its comment section.

Book Review: “I’d Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them” by Jesse Goolsby

July 1, 2015 By in Reading, War, Writing Tags: , , Leave a comment
Read This Book.

Read This Book.

Tom Ricks over at Foreign Policy was kind enough to publish my book review of USAFA graduate and all-around fantastic writer Jesse Goolsby’s debut novel. It’s a stunning, heartbreaking work that I can’t recommend enough. Especially if you want to read about war in a different way, one in which war recedes behind character-driven writing.

To read the full review, go here.

The Loss of Pedro 66

June 9, 2015 By in Reading, War, Writing Tags: , , , , 8 Comments

“Soldier Antlers” by Lydia Komatsu

Last fall, I began drafting a new essay inspired by Dust to Dust, the Benjamin Busch memoir. There was this passage in which Busch recalled the moment of his mother’s death to cancer, only a year after his father Frederick Busch died. Reading that passage will always be for me the moment I knew I could go deeper with my writing. I won’t give anything away or quote the stunning prose – you need to read the entire work for yourself – but Busch does this magic trick in which he slows the moment of her passing. That, I thought, is how I would like to write.

Essay writing is a labor of love, as is any act of creativity. I’ve always taken this to mean “unrequited,” but lately learned it just means you must love what you are writing about. The situation must be near to you, precious enough to drive you to the page, tilting at the quixotic question: What does all this mean to me?

The essay began as a foray into the connection between my running and my wars, but ended up leading me down unexpected paths until when I finished and realized this is less about running than it is about loss and memory. Some of this was just evolution. Nonfiction to me was history books and journalism; but as I read and wrote through my first year of a Master’s Degree in Creative Nonfiction Writing, that word “creative” became more and more important.

In writing, we talk about what happened as “the situation.” It’s the who, what, where, when, why, and how of things. The “story” is how we choose to write about those things in order to bring forth what felt most true. When Pedro 66 went down five years ago on this date, the story was obscured to me for the longest time. I knew what happened to a certain extent, the situation that enveloped it. But I could not find the what it meant, and without that in hand, I couldn’t find a way to write about it beyond the chronology of events that exposed in me a raw grief.

Reading Dust to Dust taught me that the understanding the story isn’t about having the answers; rather, it’s about the pursuit. Seeking truth is the story in some cases, and to write in such a way as to illuminate it like Ben Busch did, well, I’d say that’s a good goal for an essay.  I don’t know why Mike Flores, Joel Gentz, and Ben White had to die on June 9th, 2010, but I do know that their deaths were meaningful to me. What went through their minds in their final moments can never be known, but that won’t stop me from trying to imagine it, even if it’s painful to do so. I will forever be in front of their caskets as long as I’m at the page.

Blue Skies, Brothers

Capt David Wisniewski, Pilot
1Lt Joel Gentz, CRO
TSgt Michael Flores, PJ
SSgt David Smith, FE
SrA Benjamin White, PJ