Trying to Make the Pen as Mighty as the Sword:
The program, called "Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience," is aimed at preserving stories from the battlegrounds of Iraq and Afghanistan. The endowment expects to hold 20 or so workshops at American military installations between now and next spring (Camp Lejeune was the second stop; the first was Fort Drum in upstate New York in June), with a formidable roster of participating writers selected by an independent panel of editors appointed by the endowment. It includes military thriller heavyweights like Jeff Shaara and Tom Clancy, as well as prominent literary lights like Tobias Wolff and Richard Bausch.
The program, which will cost about $500,000, is being paid for almost entirely by the Boeing Company. And the Defense Department (an unlikely-seeming bedfellow for the endowment, which is also providing $1 million for a program that will take productions of Shakespeare to military bases) is providing logistical services. [...]
At Camp Lejeune, a sprawling base that is home to 40,000 marines, the workshops were taught by Ms. Mason; another novelist, Erin McGraw; and a poet, Andrew Hudgins. They partly conformed to the image of the visiting-writer workshop that traumatizes visiting writers at colleges, Kiwanis Clubs and bookstore talk-backs.
There were the familiar, irrelevant questions: How do you find an agent? How do you decide whether to write a poem or a story? Should I submit my writing simultaneously to more than one publication? And the writers dispensed the tried-and-true advice that has been dispensed to fledgling writers since time immemorial: Be specific. Write every day.
"If you all go home thinking, `Journals and details, journals and details,' we've done our job," Ms. McGraw said. [...]
This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy
on Wednesday, August 04, 2004 at 3:04 PM.
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