"Everywhere is War, Cf Marley and O'Connor"

The full name of this column, a tribute to Sinead

The full name of this column is “Everywhere is War, cf Marley and O’Connor,” but Substack doesn’t have room for it. I’m writing this exactly a week after we lost Sinead O’Connor/Shuhafa Sadaqat, who when she died was four years younger than I but felt like the mother we all should have had. Felt like the right moment to start writing this column of my own, in honor of the woman whose voice drew on trauma, exposed it and taught us all how to grow strong at the broken places.

If you thought this post was about O’Connor, though, you’re out of luck; it’s a Meet the Writer post.

I got this Substack account so I could read from it, stuff by folks I respect, especially friends like Karrie Higgins or Donna Minkowitz. The tagline I gave for the blog to come: “This is Chris’s Newsletter, a newsletter about matters military and political.” But I’m thinking my Substack voice needs to better integrate all of me, the writer I’ve been from the start and the threads that emerged, all of them different and the same. The author that emerges when you search for me in the library

My bio on Twitter, which is still how so many people find me; “Bronx -born Philadelphian. Author 'brilliant but disturbing' books @thenewpress and @mumblerspress.”Then it mentions my affiliations with the Military Law Task Force and the Center on Conscience and War, two orgs I volunteer for and first met in the 1990s when I was on staff at the ednow-shuttered Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors (CCCO).

My time at CCCO changed me, and eventually led to my first published book, I Ain’t Marching Anymore: Dissenters, Deserters and Objectors to America’s Wars. My other blog and Medium column focus on that book and the wide range of dissent within it, which I will undoubtedly address here. Below, my launch announcement, featuring someone I sometimes think of as the book’s godfather.

But by the time I got to Columbia Journalism School, which helped birth the book, I’d already written, as my MA thesis in creative writing, a magic-realist novel about Joan of Arc, which describes her possible rape by English soldiers, posits her voices be not of saints but survivors from multiple places and centuries. I now wish I’d sent it to Sinead, but it was already 30 years after her iconic SNL moment. By the time I went to J-school years later, I’d stopped thinking of myself as a novelist, despite having already written and presented about blue:season, which last year became my second published book.

In between that SNL moment and my Jehanne Darc had come my time at CCCO, which included co-founding a short-lived organization of survivors of military sexual trauma (during which I went back to therapy because the stories of survivors were crowding my head and had me walking into traffic). By 2006, when I got to Columbia, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were at a peak and I was writing as much about soldiers as I could get anyone to let me. That had included numerous TypePad and Blogspot columns easily found on the Wayback machine, including Book of Days and the J-school focused Crayons to Chaos. The latter is a riff on Eminem’s “Square Dance,” the former uses a tagline I tend to reference often even now:

"It takes me so long to read the 'paper,"
said to me a novelist one day hot as a firecracker,
"because I have to identify myself with everyone in it,
including the corpses, pal.'"

That’s John Berryman, who I loved before coming to terms with his racism, once thinking to dissertate about Marshall Mathers as Berryman’s creative offspring. Way out of my lane, and I knew it at the time. One of the many reasons I never applied for a Ph.D. but cast my lot with journalism instead. But the English-major part of me never went away entirely, and even those transitional blogs

This column is about claiming it all — the two books I’ve published, two I’m hoping to nurture now, and the music along the way.