Fiction is a place where people can meet, where they take the time to very seriously examine and think about the experiences of other people and abou….

And that was my homecoming. It was fine, I guess. Getting back feels like your first breath after nearly drowning. Even if it hurts, it's good..

I think in America, especially today, our relationship to war is incredible distant. Yet narratives of war have such a primal power in this culture. ….

It's not so much the question that offends me; it's that the people asking it don't seem to respect the moral seriousness of the question..

There are two ways to tell the story. Funny or sad. Guys like it funny, with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you get to the end. Girls like….

Fiction offered me tools that allowed me to approach a wider variety of issues than the events of my own life would..

Part of the reason I'm writing it is to try to figure out what that is myself. It's not like I came back from Iraq and said, "We need to have a conve….

Veteran art creates a meeting place between veterans and civilians, or simply between veterans with different experiences..

Our country regularly uses military force, but only a fraction of Americans serve in the military. This means fewer and fewer people have a direct li….

I've worked hard to remember it...The problem is I'm not sure what's real memory and what's my brain filling in details, like a guy whose heart stops….

Writing fiction means putting a lot of what you believe about the world at risk, because you have to follow your characters..

I wrote some weird magical realism stories that are probably on some hard drive somewhere, and if I ever uncover that hard drive, I'll burn it. I tri….

Sin is a lonely thing, a worm wrapped around the soul, shielding it from love, from joy, from communion with fellow men and with God. The sense that ….

War is too strange to be processed alone..

The part of the strangeness of coming back from the war is the way we talk about it. We try to have a discussion about the war that doesn't turn into….