The local veteran non-profit Mil Tree will be hosting a 6 PM reading tonight at the Joshua Tree VFW featuring the award-winning Brian O’Hare, the veteran author of the story collection Surrender, out now from Syracuse University Press.
Born in Pittsburgh the son of a Marine pilot, O’Hare went into the Naval Academy from ’84-88 before going headfirst into the Marine Corps as a supply officer, doing stints in Camp Lejeune, Okinawa, and the Persian Gulf War. After leaving the service, O’Hare had a brief acting career until 2015 when he finally decided to start writing short stories as homework for something longer form.
“The characters were reoccurring. I was like, ‘Wait, this is a unified world I’m creating. Then 7-8 years after that, I won the Syracuse University Press Veteran’s Writing Award. And to any veteran reading this who has any sort of thoughts to pursue this, I’d say absolutely do it. It’s transforming.”
In Surrender, O’Hare addresses the inherent mythology of the military while finding ways to subvert society’s expectations of the veteran stereotype while developing a new archetype in its wake. At tonight’s event he’ll read “The Mail Thief,” a story about a dysfunctional relationship between a Lieutenant and a Lance Corporal, who keeps stealing the Lieutenants mail, a federal crime. Yet, the Lance Corporal is a kid from the Bronx with nothing to read to pass the time, and the Lieutenant’s magazines he’s pilfering represent the unattainable outside world. While the Lieutenant is played for a fool, he appreciates the young Corporal’s nerve.
“The thing I like about that story, especially for a former Marine officer like me, is that people have an expectation, based on those archetypes, of the kind of book Surrender is, and the kind of stories I will be telling. And in reconciling the mythology with the reality, I like how ‘The Mail Thief’ subverts ideas like leadership, the archetypical tough marine, the alpha dog and the officer enlisted relationship. And it subverts the whole idea of what a war story is.”
The Mil Tree/Brian O’Hare reading is at 6 PM and free to the public tonight at the VFW Post 7264, located at 6402 Veterans Way in Joshua Tree.
