Notes from a Veterans-in-the-Arts Symposium

MEA2 event organizer Jason Poudrier, MEA founding president Travis L. Martin, and
current MEA president David. P. Ervin celebrate a successful veterans-in-the-arts
symposium  conducted May 14-17, 2015 at Cameron University, Lawton, Okla.
PHOTO: Military Experience & the Arts

More than 100 military veterans, writers, artists, scholars, therapists, and others assembled in the second Military Experience & the Arts Symposium (M.E.A.2.) May 14-17, 2015. The event was held at Cameron University, Lawton, Okla., near the Fort Sill military installation. Participants attended nearly 75 workshops, performances, meet-ups, and seminars on the communication of military experiences through expressive arts, including music, writing, dance, painting, and more.

The first such event was held 2012 in Richmond, Ky. Each symposium has been under the banner of Military Experience & the Arts, a Kentucky-based non-profit organization.

News reports about the event included this broadcast from ABC affiliate KSWO-TV Channel 7: "Veterans Create, Display Art." (See text, video at link.)

The Cameron campus was lush and green, the dirt red, and the weather relatively cool and blustery. (Wind conditions kept me off the on-campus disc golf course.) The region has gotten plenty of rain this year, and flash flood concerns were often as high as local waterways. Some friends from Wisconsin had to find hotel rooms at the last minute, after the cabin they'd reserved on Fort Sill turned about to be high and dry, but surrounded by a moat impassible to anything but tactical vehicles.

Still, to update that old Army saying about the weather and training: "If it's raining, we're still painting!"

While it was impossible to participate in every workshop or experience, I hope the following notes provide some sense of the talents and topics available at MEA2.

DAY 1:

Saw lots of friends from MEA1. Met friends I didn't know I knew already. ("Who I am depends on who you are and where we are ...") Met entirely new friends. Even friends who'd said they'd gotten published via venues identified at the Red Bull Rising blog. Oklahoma, in short, is a very friendly place. 

In the evening, former Marine and poet Suzanne Rancourt read from her work in a theater setting, and made me cry. And then, former Marine Roman Baca's Exit 12 Dance Company took the stage, and performed a ballet about motherhood and separation and deployment. They also made me cry. 

When the lights went up, the mother who commissioned/choreographed the piece was suddenly in the audience, as well as one of her two sons, who is stationed at nearby Fort Sill. And later, the troupe re-purposed a dance to an impromptu Native American flute performance by Albert Gray Eagle. 

"Magic" does not adequately describe all this.

DAY 2:

Made DIY comic books with Steve Gooch and Marc DiPaolo of Oklahoma City University, then learned about contemplative photography from Buddhist and Army veteran Tif Holmes from the non-profit Engage the Light of Lubbock, Texas. 

Wrote about the homefront through prompts suggested by Amber Jensen of South Dakota State University, a writer and Army National Guard family member, whom I first met back at Great Plains Writers' Conference 2014. 

Then, dinner with the jazz musicians of 77th Army Band ("The Pride of Fort Sill!"), followed by provoking insights about Military Sexual Trauma issues from Miette Wells, Phd., an Air Force veteran. 

Finally, video presentation from Ben Patton, grandson of WWII Gen. George S. Patton, and founder of "I Was There" Film Workshops. The latter uses digital film-making as a collaborative therapeutic intervention for people diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. 

So much energy here! So many sparks!

DAY 3:

Got the gouge on self-publishing from MEA president David P. Ervin (author of "Leaving the Wire: An Infantryman's Iraq"), then learned about flash non-fiction techniques from Rob Roensch of Red Earth MFA in Creative Writing at OCU. 

After lunch, Tara Leigh Tappert of The Arts and the Military blew my mind by academically connecting the Arts & Crafts movement with the origins of occupational therapy as a profession, and the establishment of craft shops U.S. military installations in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. Scholarship like that puts veterans and arts organizations such as MEA into historical context. "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again." 

Evening performances included readings of flash fiction by Veterans Writing Project Managing Editor Jerri Bell (from whom I learned lots of new sailor slang. Household-6 will be very pleased), and physical comedy (Masks! Mime! Puppets! Juggling!) from Hoosier Doug Berky. Berky's re-telling of the Korean fable, "The Tiger's Whisker," is a family-friendly tale of one family's journey of healing from PTSD. I hope to invite him to Iowa someday.

Bottom line: The Military Experience & the Arts Symposium 2 provided a unique opportunity to exchange insights on expressive arts techniques, tools, scholarship, advocacy, and healing on veterans issues—and encouraged veterans, students, educators, and arts practitioners to try new things.

Godspeed, and God bless! I can't wait to see what happens next!

Doonesbury's 'The Sandbox' Goes Into Archive Status

Excerpt from the 2006 announcement of "The Sandbox" project, then located on Doonesbury.com

"The Sandbox," a digest of mil-blogs and other original military writing, was recently placed into archive-only mode, back-dated to April 30, 2014. While for much of its run, "The Sandbox" appeared on the Slate magazine website, the content is now located on servers maintained by the Washington Post.

The site was created in October 2006 by Garry Trudeau, creator of the "Doonesbury" comic strip. Trudeau has used his art and multimedia platforms to consistently illuminate challenges faced by military personnel and their families, including: multiple deployments and separations; Improvised Explosive Devices; Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder; Traumatic Brain Injury; Military Sexual Trauma; "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", and more. While new posts will no longer appear on the site, the content will be maintained indefinitely as a first-person testament to how military service members and families answered their country's call, and how they weathered those challenges with character and humor.

According to the April 30 post: "The Sandbox contains over 800 posts by more than 150 contributors. It is a vast body of work—the equivalent of three-and-a-half Lord of the Rings trilogies. You will be rewarded for roaming and exploring its depths." The final blog-post also features Doonesbury cartoons, photographs, and videos from its nearly 8-year history.

In 2007, some "Sandbox" content was published in a hardcopy anthology.

Content from the Red Bull Rising blog appeared on "The Sandbox" between 2010 and 2014. (Here's a list.)

In a post-script, editor David Stanford writes, "The Sandbox has been one of the most satisfying projects of my 35-year career as an editor. To all who contributed, thank you, for your service and your words. I am grateful for the friendships made here. Onward!"

'Scintilla' Publishes Special 'Literature of War' Issue

With their Spring 2014 issue of "Scintilla," editors of the on-line literary magazine published their first collection of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry dedicated to a single topic. The "Literature of War: At Home and Abroad" issue features writers with both direct and indirect experience with the military.

Founded in 2011, the magazine is published twice yearly, and is available to readers FREE online here.

In the new issue's introduction, Editor Tim Lepczyk calls it the "best [...] most challenging issue we’ve published."

He writes:

[...] I’m in awe of the meaning these writers have brought forth, the vision, painful at times, that they have shared. For many of us, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have played out in a vacuum. If Vietnam was the first televised war, what were, what are these wars? The overlooked? The distant?

[...] Of the twenty-two writers whose work we published, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq mean different things. For some, there may be overlap, and for others, their viewpoints may be diametrically opposed. What we have though are the ways in which people have been affected. We have stories. We have poems. They add to the larger narrative, and perhaps, together, create meaning.

The short stories in the issue are risk-taking, format-breaking, and invite multiple readings. For example, Robert Wallace's "A Brief History of the Universe" is a consciousness-bending and -blending tale that reveals itself to be less about homecoming, and more about the nuclear bonds between soldiers. It's "Thelma and Louise" meets "Band of Brothers," by way of "Rashomon."

In the issue's singular non-fiction feature, New York Air National Guard airman Julio A. Olivencia's "Fine Dirt and Dead Birds," the writer offers an impressionistic series of scenes, ranging from a ho-hum homecoming to cruising down Bagram's notorious Disney Drive at rush hour.

Olivencia's observations of war as a daily routine may take some readers by surprise. This is neither adrenalin-fueled action nor over-the-top service comedy:

"Me and Teddy found the perfect song for driving down Disney in the morning," Mike says, as we pull onto the main drag of Bagram Airfield. We start the morning crawl with "Shiny Happy People" coming out of the speaker in the cup holder.

For some, war is hell. For others, it's a commute.

It is in the issue's center-mass of 23 poems, however, that readers will encounter a rapid-fire salvo of hard-hitting—and sometimes humorous—provocations and perspectives.

Two poems—"Non-Combat Related Incidents and Other Lies" by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, and "Private" by Adam Berlin—indelibly engage the topic of sexual assault in U.S. military ranks. These are words that should be read, and discussed widely.

In his editorial, Lepczyk mentions that he was partly inspired to produce the war-themed issue as early as "Scintilla" No. 2, when the publication featured a poem by U.S. Army veteran Paul David Adkins. That poem was "War Story #164: Explaining Why I Brought to Iraq But Couldn’t Open Weldon Kees’ Collected Poems."

Three more of Adkins' poems are featured in the "Literature of War" issue. Adkins' work often seems rooted in a low reality of TOC dispatches and SIGACT reports, which explode into the consideration of things more sublime. His "Iraqi Army Unit on Camp Striker, Baghdad Iraq," for example, offers a gritty, sh--ty little anecdote—the circumstances of which might be recognizable to anyone involved in training host-nation forces.

Their colonel met our colonel inside
the TOC to build
     a partnership.
His troops waited outside,
lit fires by their Humvees,
cooked chow and laughed.
Sparks swirled as if they conjured a genie.

They acted like they never used
a porta-john before.
Each Soldier filed in twice,
emerged doubled
with guffaws. [...]

In keeping with the oral tradition of "war stories" maintained by soldiers everywhere, the poem builds to a spectacularly scatological pay-off. This is a poem to pass around the barracks ... or the next staff meeting.

There is differently dark humor to be found elsewhere in the issue. In "Iraq Reflection," for example, Charity Winters delivers some clever wordplay and poetic construction using acronyms such as "IEDs and EFPs." To this reader, when viewed as a whole, the poem becomes a calligram, taking on the distinctive shape of a concave plate of copper—a component of the deadly Explosively Formed Penetrators (E.F.P.) mentioned in the work.

There is poignancy and pride to be found as well. In "Hanging Gardens," Massachusetts-based Iraqi-American writer Nora Alsahlwhi writes evocatively of her family's home country:

I write about Iraq
when her skin was
carmine, perfumed with
freshly picked celosias
wild pear petals in the morning,
and crushed saffron by noon [...]

I write about Iraq
when missiles began to rain down
on doctors treating the diseased
and politics ravaged villages
full of hardworking descendants
of Nebuchadnezzar, and Sargon the Great [...]

Provocative, poetic, poignant, Scintilla's foray into the literature of war deserves the considered attentions of both our citizens and our soldiers. Give your eyes time to adjust. Let the issue serve as an illumination round, parachute-floating briefly overhead, casting shadows so that we may see others—and have others see us. We are frozen for this moment.

When it gets dark, we shall start moving again.

*****

Note: "Scintilla" No. 6 also features "leaving empty," a poem by the writer of the Red Bull Rising blog. The poem regards the 2001 destruction by the Taliban of two giant statues of the Buddha located in Afghanistan's Bamiyan Province. In 2009, the Iowa National Guard's 2nd Brigade Combat Team (B.C.T.), 34th Infantry "Red Bull" Division (2-34th BCT) was preparing for a deployment that included that province. The mission changed before the unit arrived in country.

Vietnam to Today, 'Doonesbury' Tells Soldiers' Stories

During Operation Desert Storm—when I was a young lad going to school for my country—I carried in my cargo pocket a laminated Doonesbury comic strip, clipped out of a newspaper. (I've mentioned this in a blog-post before.) Doonesbury is written and drawn by Garry Trudeau. In my Desert Storm favorite, a Vietnam veteran was telling war stories to new soldiers. One of the soldiers asks, "Really, you shot your own officers?"

"Just the dumb ones," replies the character B.D. "Lieutenants mostly."

For me, who was then himself studying to be a young Army leader, the Doonesbury comic was the equivalent to that quote from "Patton" (1970). In that movie, the famous general tells of the ancient Roman practice of reminding its heroes that "all glory is fleeting."

Earlier this year, the 65-year-old Trudeau announced the daily strip would be going on extended hiatus, so that he could focus on other projects—including the successful Internet-TV series "Alpha House."

Parallel to that announcement came news that "The Sandbox," a Doonesbury-sponsored digest of first-person military writing about Iraq and Afghanistan, would soon cease publication of new content. The digest started in October 2006, when the practice of mil-blogging was just gaining recognition and popularity.

Even though new content will soon cease, plans call for The Sandbox to remain on-line indefinitely as an archive of veterans' perspectives of Iraq and Afghanistan. (A 2007 print collection, "Doonesbury.com's The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan," continues to be available via booksellers.)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Trudeau has long used comics to communicate stories to provoke and educate non-military audiences about the realities of war, service, and deployment. His character B.D. started out in the Vietnam War, served in the Gulf War, and lost a leg in the Iraq War. The more-recent character Leo "Toggle" DeLuca was injured in an ambush in Iraq, where he lost an eye and now has difficulty speaking. B.D.'s close friend Ray Hightower was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D.). Melissa "Mel" Wheeler is an Army sergeant and a survivor of Military Sexual Trauma (M.S.T.). Her best friend is Roz, a soldier who happens to be gay.

Vietnam War-era Doonesbury comics are being re-run on weekdays 

during Garry Trudeau's extended hiatus. Many resonate with readers

given present-day situations.

In a time- and mind-bending twist, during the extended hiatus, the daily Doonesbury strip now features classic runs from the 1970s. Last week, the strip told the story of B.D.'s arrival in Vietnam. "I arrived in Vietnam yesterday and I must say, I love it," B.D. writes home. "I'm stationed at Firebase Bundy in the Delta and I've got my own bunker and machine gun!!" Suddenly, a heck of a firefight opens up overhead. "Well, have to run now. Much love, B.D."

That reminded me of mil-blogging.

It doesn't take much to see other parallels there, of writing letters from downrange, of communicating truths through humor, of finding yourself and your country stuck in a foreign place, uncomfortable and under fire.

I hope Trudeau keeps telling his stories as long as he can. Our democracy and soldiers are well-served by truth-tellers, even those armed with a sense of snark. I can also hope, however, that my daughter and son will one day read Doonesbury—whether those from Vietnam or the Gulf War or Iraq—and maybe not understand as many of the jokes as I did.

Before and after Afghanistan, my buddy Archer and I used to continually quote the 2004 Battlestar Galactica TV series, which was itself a nod to the concept of eternal return: "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again." What does it say that we recognize ourselves and our wars in some funny pages first published more than four decades ago?

While I no longer wear a uniform, I now keep that favorite Doonesbury strip in my journalist go-bag. It reminds me of the good old days, and keeps me humble. Even though history may not repeat itself, after all, it sure does rhyme upon occasion.

All this has happened before.

And all glory is fleeting.

Doonesbury's Mil-blog Digest to Cease Operations Soon

After seven years of presenting original writing from military service members—and reposting content from their blogs—the editor of Doonesbury's "The Sandbox" warned this week that the website will cease publishing new content "at some point in the not-too-distant future."

At the same time, editor David Stanford issued a call for past and potential contributors to share some last thoughts on war and coming home:

[B]efore we get to that moment I would like to extend an (urgent) invitation to everyone who has posted on the site over the past seven years: If there is one more story you’ve been meaning to tell, one final reflection on your deployment, or your reintegration, or anything else—please send it to me soon at themanagement@doonesbury.com. [...]

And if you are a deployed soldier, returned vet, caregiver, or family member, and you have been meaning to write something for The Sandbox; well, it’s not too late. But it will be soon...

Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau has long been a supporter of military veterans, and has regularly illuminated stories involving deployments, PTSD, MST, and other difficult topics for non-military audiences. Those efforts include platforms such as "The Sandbox."

Launched in October 2006, the Doonesbury website billed itself as a "GWOT hot wash, straight from the wire." Where once mil-bloggers offered a first-person alternative to war zone journalism, however, observers have noted a general trend away from blogging in recent years. In a possible parallel, the annual Milblogging.com conference was placed on hiatus last year, along with its related "Milbloggie" awards. That said, the Milblogging.com index continues to add new military blogs on a regular basis, and regularly posts items about military blogs and social media.

Plans call for the "The Sandbox" site to be made into a permanent on-line archive. A 2007 print collection, "Doonesbury.com's The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan," also continues to be available via booksellers.

In Eastern Iowa, Two Exhibits Explore Military Themes

Two current art exhibits in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, present a mix of difficult and challenging images related to military service.

Dan Eldon's "Touching Hands"

The first, an exhibit of the photojournalism of Dan Eldon, depicts the U.S. military in 1990s Somalia, along with scenes of poverty, starvation, and violence. The 23-year-old Eldon was one of four journalists stoned to death by a Somali mob, shortly before the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu. That battle was later depicted in both the book and movie "Blackhawk Down."

Eldon's multimedia journals have themselves been talked about as potential feature-film material.

The Eldon photos are part of the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art's' ongoing series "The Restless Nation: American Art from the Collection." Alongside artwork on themes of "The Nation Votes" and the "The Nation Settles," Eldon's work explores a theme of "The Nation Wars." Approximately 20 photos are presented.

Photo: Survivors Empowered Through Art, Inc.

The second Cedar Rapids exhibit opened this week at the recently renovated Veterans Memorial Building. There, a Wisconsin-based organization called Survivors Empowered Through Art (SETA) presents a collection of artwork related to sexual assault in the military.

Featured in the exhibit is "Stepping Stones," a path of internally lit glass blocks, on which are illuminated the words and works of survivors of Military Sexual Trauma.

“Our art shows both the struggles of being sexual assault survivors and the journey to healing,” SETA founder Rachel Beauchene recently told the LaCrosse (Wis.) Tribune. “We hope to raise awareness about the epidemic of sexual assault in the military as well as the long-term effects of sexual trauma."

“The art encourages viewers to see sexual assault through a different perspective,” she said.

For more information about the life and work of Dan Eldon, including some on-line photographs, visit here.

For more information about SETA, visit the website here. A Facebook page is here.