The Book Festival you can enjoy in the bath. Interviews, Readings and Rambling chat. Journalist James Kidd talks to (not at the same time): Hanya Yanagihara, Gary Younge, Richard Russo, Tom Drury, David Mitchell, Michel Faber, LS Hilton, DBC Pierre, Sloane Crosley, Karen Joy Fowler, Vendela Vida, David Gates, Laura Lippman, Tomas Gonzalez. Amit Chaudhuri. New episode: Amanda Coe.
https://thiswritinglife.podbean.com
Episode 12 - Brian Turner Part 4
In the final part of my epic conversation with the American soldier-poet Brian Turner, our attention turned to the question: does writing help confront trauma and the violence he has witnessed and indeed participated in.
----more----Other subjects include:
- 'Sergeant Turner' vs Brian Turner: Poet
- the part of Turner and his colleagues that died in Iraq
- the rise of ISIS in Iraq
- how do you live with the experiences he has had
- how do I be happy
- love and a reading about his wife from My Life as a Foreign Country
- transitioning from war poet to poet
- can you leave the war behind?
- trying to understand the 'enemy'
- the time Turner was almost killed
- writing about torture and Turner's complicity with this
- can poems change people's attitude to torture, Guantanamo etc
- Iraq and the news cycle
- art, empathy, sharing and understanding
- 'The historians are wrong. We have decades ahead of us, just with Iraq'
- why Sweden has taken more Iraqi refugees than US
- is Turner a political writer?
- 'There could be a lot more troubling of the water'
- Turner on the future of Iraq
- on returning to Baghdad in 2012