Veteran Writers at The Old Stone House

I had the pleasure and good fortune to meet Peter Catapano at the Joe Bonham Project exhibition reception this past weekend and he told me about a reading he was co-hosting at The Old Stone House. Presented by Brooklyn Reading Works, the reading showcased the incredible writing talents of several young writers who are recent alumni of the NYU Veterans Writing Workshop and have been using their war experiences to inform their creative writing. It was an incredible evening and I am looking forward to hearing more from this group of great writers. A collection of their writing, "Fire and Forget", will be available in February, but you can pre-order the book here.

Maurice Decaul is a former Marine who served in Iraq in 2003. He is a poet, essayist and librettist.

Matt Gallagher is a Senior Fellow at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, and the author of the Iraq memoir, Kaboom.

Mariette Kalinowski served in the U.S. Marine Corps between 2002 and 2012, deploying twice in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. She studies fiction at Hunter College's MFA program.

Phil Klay is a Marine Corps veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a graduate of the MFA writing program at Hunter College.

Roy Scranton is an Iraq War veteran, and is the co-editor of Fire and Forget.

Drawing on Location at the Jalopy Theater

On Monday I took the day off from my photo job to draw Ernesto Gomez, Arturo Jugman, Walker Shepard, Jackson Lynch, and some others at the Jalopy Theater during the Brotherhood of the Jugband Blues recording session. The idea is to collect good drawings for the album artwork. It was slow going, since people move a considerable amount when they play instruments. They usually oscillate between two poses, and you have pick one and keep looking for the moment when they go back into the pose. It's a really fun and challenging way to draw.