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| Home Front: Culture Wars | |
| NEA sponsors soldiers writing about the war | |
| 2006-12-26 | |
With this in mind, Dana Gioia, the NEA's director, attended a poetry conference in April 2003 and stepped into that incubator of so many good writing projects: a bar. Over drinks he was prodded by the poet laureate of Connecticut, Marilyn Nelson, to launch a writing project for soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq and other fronts in the war on terror. Later that year, the project began to take shape. The NEA asked soldiers and their families to submit essays about their experiences on either far-flung battlefields or the home front. And Mr. Gioia persuaded Boeing Co. to underwrite the program by donating hundreds of thousands of dollars. The results have been published in a recent book--"Operation Homecoming"--and have inspired a documentary expected to air on PBS next year. At the beginning, the NEA tried to spur on the soldier-writers by holding 50 workshops on military bases with well-known authors--e.g., Tom Clancy, Jeff Shaara and Bobbie Ann Mason. The purpose was to help each would-be writer get used to putting his thoughts and experiences down on paper. Half the workshops were in the U.S. and half abroad. Soldiers, veterans and military contractors responded enthusiastically. More than 6,000 people showed up, many of them still on active duty. In some cases, family members came to learn what their loved ones had been reluctant to tell them about the nature of war. Mr. Gioia estimates that the NEA has received some 1,200 submissions during the course of the project, all of which are to be preserved at the Library of Congress. One hundred of the best essays made it into "Operation Homecoming." The book was edited by Andrew Carroll, a historian who has studied letters home from previous American conflicts. Mr. Carroll told me that the writing from this project is on a par with what was written by American soldiers during the Revolution and every war since. He thinks that one or two of the current crop of warrior-scribes may end up as a writer of stature. | |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #2 ...As much as I'm looking forward to seeing this, I suspect that the result the NEA is actually looking for is a powerful ANTI-war work that can be used as one more hammer against the war effort. Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2006-12-26 11:25 |
| #1 I've added it to my I Want list. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-12-25 20:05 |