Her entry begins:I recently facilitated a book discussion/writing workshop centered around The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, a Vietnam narrative that straddles the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction. The book was this year’s selection for "The Big Read" in Westchester, NY, the NEA-initiated program that makes reading a community activity for a month or two, and I found it both poignant and haunting. It’s a classic example of how a writer transforms an autobiographical experience into powerful fiction and compelled me to go back to his first post-Vietnam book, If I Die in the Combat Zone. Reading these books back-to-back was a chance to see the evolution of a gifted writer – from twenty-something-year-old fresh out of the war, recounting his experiences in straightforward nonfiction, to forty-something-year-old looking back through the lens of fiction. The best stories beg to be retold again and again, searching for a framework that is, in a way, organic to the underlying themes. In this case, the fragmented, episodic framework of The Things They Carried...[read on]Deborah Batterman is the author of Shoes Hair Nails, published by Uccelli Press.
Her stories have appeared in anthologies as well as various print and online journals, including Many Mountains Moving, Sistersong, Dunes Review, The MacGuffin, The Alsop Review, three candles, Standards: The International Journal of Multicultural Studies, Prose Toad, and The Potomac.Visit Deborah Batterman's blog.
Read--Coffee with a Canine: Deborah Batterman & Maggie.
Writers Read: Deborah Batterman.
--Marshal Zeringue
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