Benjamin Busch: Benjamin Busch

The author presents a personal narrative of his experience as an officer of the U.S. Marine Corps who fought in the Iraq War.

With the availability of e-books, we can now read a book without turning pages, without saving a place on a shelf for it afterward, but what is lost is the book as an object. An artifact of both writing and reading, a book is a physical representative of time like the trees from which it is made. The writer and the reader will both die, the mice will consume the papers they left in boxes. But the book will survive somewhere on some shelf. There, somebody will walk into the empty room, sit, and begin reading, and the book will change what they see outside. Even in its death, a book has matter, giving materiality to language and being substantial unto itself in a way that intangible memories and digital literature cannot be.

A personal narrative is presented which explores the author's experiences informing photographer Benjamin Busch about the death of his father, author Frederick Busch.

The author offers a personal narrative of a childhood experience in which he built a snow cave to escape expected punishment from his father for having eaten an entire box of the snack food Twinkies.

A personal narrative is presented which explores the author's experience of serving two tours of duty in the Iraq War as an infantry officer in the U.S. Marine Corps.