From the day I graduated basic military training some 22 years ago, I struggled to write about the experience in a way that satisfied my literary standards. Needless to say, there were lots of starts and stops and banishments to the "bottom drawer." More recently, I encountered the same problem in writing about my combat service in Iraq. In essence, such experiences can’t easily be described in the conventional sense and often require use of that old standby, "You just had to be there."

Shortly before I wrote "The Fifth Week," I read a Kurt Vonnegut interview in which he discussed his own struggle to write about his World War II experiences - namely, the fire-bombing of Dresden - and his ultimate solution of manipulating fantasy and reality to produce the ingenious Slaughterhouse-Five. I soon found myself thinking back on those grueling and surreal weeks at boot camp and realized that any honest literary rendering absolutely needed an experimental approach.

What emerged was a story told using the rarely encountered first person plural, a point-of-view technique I had never used before or since. As I began to write, the approach felt so immediately correct that I finished "The Fifth Week" in a single day. The approach also allowed me to capture the essential elements of the experience: the indoctrination, the intense resocialization, the instillation of instinctive obedience, the blanket parties, the "breaking" of the individual and the washing out of the unfit. I should add that these elements were, and remain, necessary evils for any military unit -- take it from me, you do not want an unstable individual slipping through boot camp only to wind up turning wrenches on a nuclear warhead.

Anyway, if you’ve "been there" I hope the story rings true; if you haven’t, then I hope the rendering leaves you with some idea of what it means - for good or ill - to experience the breaking down of an individual into a member of a military unit.

Last Known Position won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Short Fiction in 2008. Mathews served in the U.S. Air Force and received an M.A. in Writing from John Hopkins University. See more of his work at www.jamesmathewsonline.com.

Hobson’s choice, the chicken or the egg, Catch 22, submitting an insurance claim. In "Anathema," physician and writer David Watts gives his own inimitable take to the absurd, tortured logic of submitting a health care claim and dealing with a narrow-minded, nameless, faceless bureaucrat at the other end of the telephone line.

Whether recounting the decline and death of a dear friend or meditating on the intersection of art and medicine, The Orange Wire Problem (978-1-58729-800-4) lays bare the nobility and weakness, generosity and churlishness of human nature. With disarming candor and the audacity to admit that practicing medicine can be a crazy thing, Watts fills each page with riveting details, moving accounts, or belly-laughs. As the stories in this work unfold, we are witness to the moral dilemmas and personal rewards of ministering to the sick. Whether the subject is the potential benefits of therapeutic deception or telling a child about death, Watts’s ear for the right word, the right tone, and the right detail never fails him. -Joe Parsons, editor, University of Iowa Press

"Henry could have shot all three of them from where he sat, wedged into the crotch of a maple, but he knew they wouldn't die. 'You missed,' they'd say, and then they'd kill him. If they weren't liars, they would admit there was no hiding from the Gestapo -- secret rooms, new identities, none of it worked -- but they were liars."

Samuel Ligon's short story "Germans" is ForeWord's Book Club selection for the week. Ligon is the author of a novel, Safe in Heaven Dead (HarperCollins) and he teaches writing at Eastern Washington University. Drift and Swerve, his collection of short stories published by Autumn House showcases his muscular prose, dark humor, and gritty intimacy with isolation.

Tracy Winn’s “Reflections on My Process”: 

The best part of writing a story, is probably the rush of thinking I’ve finished — that sizzle up the spine that comes with believing I have accomplished something. A closing sentence announces itself. I type. I see the circle of the story come around to meet itself. I hear closure in the rhythm of the final sentence slowing the pace of words, coming to a stop, coming into the station like a train, finding its long-anticipated point of rest. 

For a couple of days, I’ll walk around propped up by my secret success — there is a new story written and I’m the clever one who wrote it. I marvel at the characters I’ve brought to life in the story, savor the metaphors, and affectionately retrace the connections that bind it as a whole. In re-reading it, I might strengthen a phrase or two. However, I’m not really working to improve it, just hoping to feel again the tingle of accomplishment — the congratulatory pat to the ego — that goes with re-realizing I’ve made something new. 

Getting to this point of completion has challenged me deeply. My process is messy and slow and inefficient. It usually begins when I notice a quirk of reality like a blind man hitchhiking, or a small child in expensive clothes giving the finger to passersby in a park, or a solar eclipse reproduced precisely, in miniature on the sidewalk a hundred times through holes in the leaves of a sickly little tree. The wind shakes the leaves and all the tiny eclipses projected on the ground, dance, igniting in me a sense of wonder, attracting my imagination and inspiring me to begin something. I write little blocks of a story — a paragraph or a scene to each block — not knowing the story’s shape or where they will fit into the flow of the piece. I move them around to discover what their proximity provokes. Then I write in my notebook about what I see in front of me, naming the possibilities of what happens in what order, adding new blocks and discarding those that seem less vital. 

My process resembles what my great grandmother did when her edema was bad. She’d take up residence in her rocker, crochet hook in hand, her ankles swelling over the tops of her lace-up heels. She’d pile completed afghan squares at her feet. Each square had its own color scheme and logic, but eventually it would need to connect to its abutters, need to be sewn in so the assemblage would make a sensible and pleasing whole. Similarly, the blocks of my story must be hooked in and smoothed until seamless. So when that ultimate sentence arrives for me, my relief and delight at having finished overwhelms my better judgment. The fox of forgetfulness steals in and pilfers all memory of other times I’ve “finished” a story. 

The illusion of completion can last for quite a while, during which the story sits on my desk. Or, even worse, the story gets sent to some journal with a contest deadline approaching. You’ll notice the passive voice in the last sentence — as if I play no part in acting on the assumption that the story is finished. But written work demands an audience as fervently as the visual or performing arts. The story needs to create a reaction in someone other than its writer. So begins the second stage in the process of creation. I share the work with a trusted reader or two. They challenge my assumptions. They ask questions that reveal their misunderstanding of a key component of the story. I rewrite. Time passes. I get to know the story a little better. I collect a few rapid rejections from periodicals. Eventually, the reasons cited for rejection, the passage of time, and the questions asked by my writer friends crack the illusion that the story has arrived. 

Time passing allows for a certain distance from the work. I begin to see only everything wrong with it. Before you can say “solar eclipse,” the story has become a poor limp thing, dead in the water, an embarrassment to its maker, and I wonder how I could ever have been so thoroughly deluded as to show it to anybody, never mind sending it off to garner praise and awards. If I am lucky and smart at this point, I will hear my former teacher, Tracy Daugherty saying, “You have a beautiful problem.” His words remind me that the reactions the piece has elicited from my trusted readers are not all bad. They’ve recognized something vital in there that might still be released. If I climb back into the story, sharpening images, clarifying the shape and intent — those intangibles that have begun to reveal themselves more clearly to me — I might still rescue it. 

I forget every time that the real ending — the final sentence that replaces all impostors — won’t make its appearance until the story has been tempered like glass or steel by readers’ reactions, by time, and by revision. Inspiration must be followed by challenge. And the story can’t really be completed until after time has passed - long enough for me to know the story so well that I can solve my “beautiful problem.”

This week, ForeWord’s Book Club features poems that tell stories. Of course, fans of Robert Service might say that the only good poems are those that tell stories – they might also say that the only good poet is a dead one. Sigh. Yes, it is sometimes hard to believe that storytelling was poetry’s original intent. In Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s poem, “Fence,” the story is one you’ve no doubt heard. You may even have seen the movie. And that common knowledge contributes to the cinematic sensation of wide angle shifting to close-up and back again, an effect that brings the reader closer and closer and closer to the crime.

Midge Raymond introduces her short story, “The Ecstatic Cry,” from the collection, Forgetting English (Eastern Washington University Press):

Like many of the stories in Forgetting English, “The Ecstatic Cry” addresses the themes of loneliness and isolation — and it does so almost to an extreme because the story is set way down at the bottom of the world. And it’s perhaps because of this — the extremity of the setting, the nearly complete desolation — that the story’s narrator is able to forge a connection that in more ordinary circumstances would have been difficult, if not impossible, for her to make.

As a biologist, she has chosen to work in one of the most remote locations on the planet — yet when she encounters an unexpected visitor, she is forced to confront not only the stranger on her island but the way she has lived her life until that moment. It’s this short- lived connection that opens her up to the possibilities within herself, within her life — the notion that, like the penguins she studies, survival is a not only about instinct but about adaptation.”

Midge Raymond’s award-winning stories have appeared in the American Literary Review, Indiana Review, Ontario Review, Bellevue Literary Review, North American Review, and the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. In 2007, she won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. Visit her online at www.ForgettingEnglish.com.

This week, the ForeWord Book Club offers an excerpt from Literature and War: Conversations With Israeli and Palestinian Writers by Runo Isaksen, translated by Kari Dickson (Interlink, 978-1-56656-730-5).

Author David Grossman, in his absorbing interview titled "In Morality’s Catastrophe Zone," says:

"I felt that I would never understand my own life-as a Jew, an Israeli, a father, a man, a lover, an author-unless I understood how I would have behaved there, in Shoah. And I wanted to write from two perspectives, from the Jew’s, but also from the murderer’s. It was crucial for me as a Jew to understand how I would have dealt with the total denial of my individuality and humanity in those conditions. But at the same time to try to understand how a normal person can become a murderer, what processes you have to go through to start killing."

The entire interview with Grossman will be available for one week only.

Join ForeWord next Friday at BookExpo America to meet the editors and authors of five extraordinary new books.

University of Nebraska editor Tom Swanson presents Ted Kooser’s new memoir, Lights on a Ground of Darkness: An Evocation of a Place and Time (September)

Pleasure Boat Studio’s publisher, Jack Estes, presents a mystery by debut author Michael Burke, Swan Dive (September).

Other Press publisher Judith Gurewich presents a new book of essays, Black Suit, Worn Once $45, by Michael Greenberg (September).

Jim Minz, editor at Baen presents The Stoneholding: Legacy of the Stone Harp: Book One by debut authors James G. Anderson & Mark Sebanc (September).

Overlook Press editor Juliet Grames will speak about When Autumn Leaves, a work of literary fiction by debut author Amy Foster (October).

The editor’s pitch session will be held on Friday, May 29, at 11 a.m. in Room 1E15. A panel discussion with the authors will be held in the afternoon, at 3:30 p.m., at the Downtown Stage.

ForeWord’s editor-in-chief, Heather Shaw, was chosen this year to host the Indie Editor’s Buzz panel at BookExpo America. Shaw invited five independent publishers to each present a title at BEA that they feel will have wide appeal--there’s a debut mystery, a memoir by Ted Kooser, a debut novel, a book of essays by Michael Greenberg, and a debut fantasy. The editor’s pitch session will be held on Friday, May 29, at 11 a.m. in Room 1E15. A panel discussion with the authors will be held on Saturday, May 30, at 3:30 p.m. at the Downtown Stage.

In the weeks leading up to BEA, the ForeWord Book Club will showcase each of the “Buzz” books. On this final week, we’d like to present a debut mystery from Pleasure Boat Studio, Swan Dive by Michael Burke, to be published in September.

Swan Dive (978-1-929355-50-1) focuses on “Blue” Heron, a down-and-out detective with a roaming eye who gets much too involved in a complex business deal, a deal which results in embezzlement, swindling, sexual misconduct, and murder. Along the way, Blue discovers a great deal about himself while trying to understand the subterfuge. For a smart-guy detective, he is extremely naïve and innocent. You might even say he’s rather stupid. One of his problems is that he often gets too entranced with whatever woman is nearest to be able to concentrate on the job he’s being paid to do. That makes for trouble.

This is a first novel by Michael Burke, best known as a sculptor and graphic artist. The son of philosopher Kenneth Burke, he has shown here a remarkable ability to connect contemporary life with ancient mythology. The result is sexy, thought-provoking, insightful, and a damned good read. Burke lives and works in New York City, and he is already well along on the next “Blue” Heron novel, another myth-based mystery with intrigue, lust, and more than one good laugh.

ForeWord's editor-in-chief, Heather Shaw, was chosen this year to host the Indie Editor's Buzz panel at BookExpo America. Shaw invited five independent publishers to each present a title at BEA that they feel will have wide appeal--there's a debut mystery, a memoir by Ted Kooser, a debut novel, a book of essays by Michael Greenberg, and a debut fantasy. The editor's pitch session will be held on Friday, May 29, at 11 a.m. in Room 1E15. A panel discussion with the authors will be held on Saturday, May 30, at 3:30 p.m. at the Downtown Stage.

In the weeks leading up to BEA, the ForeWord Book Club will showcase each of the "Buzz" books. This fourth week, we’re introducing one of America’s most popular and bestselling songwriters, Amy Foster, and her debut novel: When Autumn Leaves (The Overlook Press).

In Avening, a tiny town on the Pacific coast, it’s hard not to believe in magic. This is a town where the shoes in the window always fit, where you can buy a love potion at the corner shop, and where the woods at the outskirts of town just might be the door to another world. And, of course, there’s Autumn, Avening’s beloved resident witch. When Autumn receives news that she’s been promoted to a higher coven, she also learns she has to replace herself. But who in Avening is in tune enough with her own personal magic to take over the huge responsibility of town witch? Is it shy Ellie, who is used to thinking of herself as invisible? Beautiful, charismatic Nina, who is hiding a dark secret past? Stella, the clumsy loud-mouth whose grandmother trained her in Appalachian healing?

Autumn has a list of thirteen women and men who just might have what it takes-but how can she get them to open their eyes to the magic in their lives? This endlessly surprising and heart-warming debut is the story of coming to terms with the magical things we take for granted everyday-our friends, our community, and, most of all, ourselves.

The daughter of Grammy award winning producer David Foster, Amy Foster has written songs for Josh Groban, Diana Krall, Eric Benet, Michael Buble, Destiny’s Child, and Andrea Bocelli, who performed her song at the 2006 Olympics.

An excerpt of When Autumn Leaves is available for one week at the ForeWord Book Club.

ForeWord's editor-in-chief, Heather Shaw, was chosen this year to host the Indie Editor's Buzz panel at BookExpo America. Shaw invited five independent publishers to each present a title at BEA that they feel will have wide appeal--there's a debut mystery, a memoir by Ted Kooser, a debut novel, a book of essays by Michael Greenberg, and a debut fantasy. The editor's pitch session will be held on Saturday, May 30, at 11 a.m. in Room 1E15. A panel discussion with the authors will be held on Saturday, May 30, at 3:30 p.m. at the Downtown Stage.

In the weeks leading up to BEA, the ForeWord Book Club will be showcasing each of the "Buzz" books. This third week, we’re introducing Ted Kooser’s Lights on a Ground of Darkness (Bison Books/University of Nebraska, 978-0-8032-2642-5).

"Like the yellow, pink, and blue irises that had been transplanted from house to house over the years, the stories of poet Ted Kooser’s family had been handed down until, as his mother lay ill and dying, he felt an urgency to write them down. With a poet’s eye for detail, Kooser captures the beauty of the landscape and the vibrancy of his mother’s Iowa family, the Mosers, in precise, evocative language.

"The center of the family’s love is Kooser’s uncle, Elvy, a victim of cerebral palsy. Elvy’s joys are fishing, playing pinochle, and drinking soda from the ice chest at his father’s roadside Standard Oil station. Kooser’s grandparents, their kin, and the activities and pleasures of this extended family spin out and around the armature of Elvy’s blessed life.

"Kooser has said that writing this book was the most important work he has ever undertaken because it was his attempt to keep these beloved people alive against the relentless erosion of time."

Ted Kooser, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and former U.S. poet laureate, is Presidential Professor of the University of Nebraska. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Valentines (Nebraska 2008) and The Blizzard Voices (available in a Bison Books edition). His award-winning prose book, Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps, is also available in a Bison Books edition.

An excerpt from Kooser’s Lights on a Ground of Darkness is available for download for one week only.