Author Benjamin Buchholz, whose short story, "The Cabalfish," originally appeared in Storyglossia, and was re-printed in Dzanc Books' Best of the Web 2008, has taken the time to write a short essay/guest blog post on the top of how he wrote while he was in Iraq. He shares this below - it is one of approximately a dozen guest blog posts you can find around the web today from Best of the Web 2008 authors!
Writer's Retreat, Army Style
Since the publication of my book, Private Soldiers - A Year in Iraq with a Wisconsin National Guard Unit, I've often been asked by Veterans how I found time to write while at war. The difference between past wars and this war is the technology: computers, email, internet. I was able to find a publisher while still in Iraq, able to outline the book, write the bulk of it, stand up a mission to go out and interview Iraqis and have the two photographers who were deployed with me take the award-winning photos that really comprise the meat of the book. I've spoken about all that during interviews but I haven't discussed the advantages the environment gave to my creative, rather than non-fiction, writing.
First, time. Time for writing. I wrote every day. Army life operates via a process known in the patois as 'hurry-up-and-wait.' You rush around to get somewhere and then you sit, waiting for something to happen. Some guys filled the hours of waiting with video games, movies, lifting weights. In the old days soldiers played cards, wrote letters home. I wrote. Over the course of a year my production was vast: two novels, one full length non-fiction book, three screenplays, twenty-plus stories, three professional articles for military journals, several long series of poems, about a hundred short poems. Something on the order of half-a-million words. Some of that was crap. Some of it, I think, was pretty good, pretty truthfully voiced. All of it was catharsis, a chance to process what was going on around me and in me as I reacted to the alternating horror and humor of war, mourned for the men I lost, and missed home.
Second, material. Horror and humor. Growth and death. Young soldiers made to mature under trying circumstances so that they took back into their civilian lives new and meaningful experiences. Small towns that sent firefighters and schoolteachers overseas only to receive sages and (occasionally) madmen in return, after the homecomings. Pitiful conditions of third world existence, ramshackle mudbrick homes, shoeless children, decent lives destroyed by three wars passing through in three decades (the area where I worked was in far southern Iraq, where the Iran-Iraq War of the '80s was fought, where the culmination of Operation Desert Storm occurred, and where our spearhead at the start of this war pushed up the main road toward Baghdad.) All those things, coupled with the visceral experience of being, of existing in a foreign land with the chance of violent death around me, all that added up into a myriad of stories and imaginings and documentation that I felt compelled to write, and write, and write.
Third, time (again). Time for marketing. I know many great writers. I know only a few who both write well and promote themselves well. Having nothing else to do for hours on end between missions I wrote until I was out of stories or until my fingers hurt from typing. Then I surfed the web, read literature websites and blogs and discovered where my material best fit, how to market myself to an audience, how to summarize, quickly, this different lens through which I could capture an image of the world: a Joycean language layered over Catch-22 scenarios in modern Iraq. Most importantly, I kept the work I wrote continually out in the hands of editors. I set goals, which magazines I wanted to be in. And I followed up, immediately, with leads, editors who liked something but wanted a little something different, other writers working on interesting projects, groups of writers in critique forums sharing and learning from each other. I developed networks. And the work I published in 2007, following my Army-style writers' retreat in 2005 and 2006, received a lot of attention. 40 or 50 things got published. Half a dozen were nominated for national awards. And, among those award nominees, "The Cabalfish" -- initially a story for which I didn't have high hopes -- now appears in the "Best of the Web - 2008" anthology from Dzanc Press.
I'm not promoting the military as a solution to other writers' needs for quiet and concentration. But I do not know where I will again find the time and the enforced monastic lifestyle to write so regularly and for such a long time with so much sensual and soul-wracking material to process. Serving in Iraq, for me, included the standard benefits sung by our country-and-western troubadors. But it also included the time to nourish my creative self. I'm not sure I would have survived without the outlet of writing. I'm not sure Iraq would have shaped me so surely had I not been engaged in a continuous dialogue with the experiences I had: writing them, editing them, sharing them as fictions or in the guise of fiction even when the base events were the very non-fictions I could not, would not, admit I had known.
If you'd like to read some of my work, see http://benjaminbuchholz.blogspot.com
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