Stegner Fellows - Literary Event Response

This past Wednesday (April 24) I attended the final Stegner Fellows reading. The event paired together one poet and one prose writer, who chose pieces of their work to share with us. Hugh Martin, a veteran of the Iraq War read first. His poems about the war were sharp with humor and self-awareness. Many of the poems were from his book So How Was the War? and dealt with the presiding trauma of acting as a soldier in the military––whether on the ground in Afghanistan or at a university in the United States.

My favorite poem concerned the weight and burden of war. Titled "50 Caliber Scarf" this poem described Martin's experience with war firsts: the first time he set foot overseas, the first time he felt the desert sands, and the first time he unwound his 50 caliber cartridge chain and lifted the weight of it up onto his shoulders. Characteristic of Martin's somber humor, he wrote about how one of his team members fashioned the chain as a scarf and modeled it accordingly. The poems all in some way melded together trauma, military pride and amusement.

Monique Wentzel read the first portion of her piece titled Modern Speedwash. Her story explored the classic thought-experiment of alternate universes, probing at the regretful question: 'what if I had made a different choice, what would my life look like now?' The female protagonist in this story falls through a washing machine into a different world––a world where she married her college sweetheart, bore children and painted. Throughout this intriguing narrative, Wentzel attempts to get at the enduring and unique qualities of a person, unchangeable despite circumstance or alternate realities. Although she only read a portion of the short story, I found myself captivated, at the mercy of this character's struggle with her identity. 

Ultimately both Stegner Fellows, did not shy away from hard questions. Martin and Wentzel unflinchingly put into perspective the regrets of the human condition.