Tim O?Brien, Vietnam veteran and award-winning author, lectured at Community College of Baltimore County-Catonsville Tuesday morning about “War, Truth, and Memory.”
“Squirrels are absolutists,” O?Brien told the filled auditorium. “Thinking human beings understand life is not black or white, but gray. Anyone who speaks in absolutes terrifies me.”
He said, however, his true purpose Tuesday was “to defend fiction.”
“The story is what is important,” O?Brien said. “Whole cultures and nations are built around a crucifixion, a Liberty Bell. Does it matter if Hamlet, Ahab or Huck Finn actually did everything they were said to do? I use my imagination. Instead of turning the mirror outward as a nonfiction writer would, I turned it inward. I don?t want to just reach the brain and the intellect, butthe stomach, the heart, the throat and the nape of the neck.”
O?Brien said that once he described a lieutenant carrying a letter from home in the first chapter of his book “The Things They Carried,” it was easy to get to the other burdens, the psychological and emotional things, that soldiers also carry ? and bring home in return.
The event was presented by CCBC?s Community Book Connection, a first-year collegewide initiative.
“The idea is to pick a book that can be studied across several disciplines on all the campuses,” said Carr Kizzier, an Essex campus English instructor filming a yearlong documentary about what community college students “carry.”
“We want to use the text to help build community across the colleges and in the community that surrounds us, too, with different events ? what you typically might expect at a four-year school,” Kizzier said.
Throughout the year, students from CCBC?s Catonsville, Dundalk and Essex campuses will visit the Vietnam War Memorial in D.C. and attend film series, workshops and other lectures on the Vietnam and Iraqi veteran experience.
In the spring, the Catonsville theater and dance groups perform similarly themed productions. The events are open to the public.
Jo-Ellen O?Dell brought her 11th grade honors English class from Catonsville to O?Brien?s lecture. They already read the “Red Badge of Courage” and “The Things They Carried.” Several students got their paperbacks signed by the author.
“It was very interesting to listen to such a professional, such an amazing writer talk about the process of writing,” said JoAnna Longo, a Catonsville high student.
IF YOU GO
Author Tim O?Brien, Vietnam veteran and award-winning author of “The Things They Carried” will discuss “War, Truth, and Memory” ? the relationships among war, memory, current events and the vital role of stories. The free lecture will be held at 12:20 p.m. today at Community College of Baltimore County-Essex, B Building Theatre, 7201 Rossville Blvd., Essex.
