July 23, 2022

E Pluribus Unum, launch day has come

Posted by Valerie Bonham under Germany, History, Military, Non-fiction day | Tags: , , , , , , , , , |
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Launch day has arrived for E Pluribus Unum: GRAICE Under Pressure, another anthology produced by the Museum of the American Military Family.

E Pluribus Unum: GRAICE Under Pressure joins two other books from the Museum. One, Schooling With Uncle Sam, is a first-person memoir collection of DoD schooling with the overseas American military. The other, On Freedom’s Frontier, gathered first-person recollections of American military service on the tank-defended, and land-mine-infested border between West and East Germany–the Iron Curtain. All three books were shepherded by Circe Olson Woessner, the Museum’s executive director.

To quote from the Museum’s press release,

“The motto, E Pluribus Unum, means ‘out of many, one.’ The museum’s latest project E Pluribus Unum: GRAICE Under Pressure — gives title and substance to a newly-released multi-faceted study exploring if the many do indeed become one,” Dr. Circe Olson Woessner, Executive Director of the Museum of the American Military Family (MAMF) explains. “E Pluribus Unum: GRAICE under Pressure curates, in one volume, stories from hundreds of military-connected individuals based on their service experience seen through the lenses of GRAICE (Gender; Religion; rAce; Identity; Culture; and Ethnicity.).”

In writing E Pluribus Unum, none of us writers knew how the others approached the writing prompts or how they explained the way military life affected their experiences of the GRAICEs. Each of us expanded on our experiences.

My essays are:

  • Supply Train
  • Boxes
  • Tl;dr: One Hundred Years of War
  • Translating Mil-speak to Civilianese
  • The Military: It’s Another World
  • Army of One
  • Gender: Brains, Brawn, or Both?
  • No Atheists in Foxholes v. Keep Your God Out Of My Foxhole
  • Race, in One Person’s Military Experience
  • Who Are Military People?
  • E Pluribus Unum.

A group of similar essays were written by my co-writer-in-residence, Connie Kinsey, a Marine Corps brat. Scattered between the essays are the book’s illustrations, conceived and produced by “the son of a world traveling family,” Brandon Palma who founded 8thDayCreate.

To polish the book, Amy Hines Woody, an anthropologist and an Air Force retiree, wrote the introduction. Anthropological PhD candidates, K.T. Hanson and Chelsea E. Hunter, put under a sociological microscope raw survey data collected online by the Museum from self-selected respondents. They added fifty pages of survey analysis to the over two hundred pages of first-person experiences. The anonymity of the surveys provided the analysts with much candid information.

Despite pride shown by many of the contributors, E Pluribus Unum is not a hoo-rah rubber-stamp of military life. Likewise, the book is not an invective-laden tirade. It is an authentic look by people with something to say about their lives, either in uniform or close to uniformed personnel.

For those with an interest in what takes place behind the installation fence, I hope you enjoy the book.

E Pluribus Unum: GRAICE Under Pressure
 

June 24, 2022

E Pluribus Unum: a book about the military and families

Posted by Valerie Bonham under Book covers, Military, Non-fiction day, Publishing | Tags: , , , , , , |
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I’ve been silent here a while, but <she says, brightly> I have an excuse! I contributed to a book.

For the past year and a half I’ve been writing essays for an examination of gender, race, identity, culture, and ethnicity in the military family for a publication by the Museum of the American Military Family. The museum is near Albuquerque, New Mexico, but we writers are scattered across the country.

The book, E Pluribus Unum: GRAICE Under Pressure, is an examination of gender, religion, race, identity, culture, and ethnicity in the military family.

The project, led by Dr. Circe Olson Woessner, founder and director of the Museum, is in the final stages and should be released in July of this year. I’m happy to have been a writer in residence as a part of the project.

E Pluribus Unum: GRAICE Under Pressure
 

June 24, 2022

BSP, aka, blatant self-promotion

Posted by Valerie Bonham under Military, Non-fiction day, On writing | Tags: , , , , , , , , |
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My publisher recently asked what I’d like readers to know about me from my writing. The question was a new slant on my writing’s purpose. I suppose the chief “about me” revelations would be repeated cups of tea, and a succession of cat companions.

Otherwise, anything the reader learns about me from a piece is a byproduct not the focus. The purpose of my essays and stories is either the illumination of the topic, or finding a reader’s connection to it. During brainstorming, one question is what can my writing generate within the reader that gives that reader a tingle.

“I know that.”
“I did that!”
“Omigosh. That’s what I remember, too.”

Of course, such reader identification only happens among those who have shared those types of experiences. For readers who haven’t undergone similar events, my hope is to pique interest.

“Well, that’s another way to look at it.”
“Really? I’ve never even heard anything like that.”
“Who knew?”

There’s always the risk of the “You’re nuts!” reaction, but that’s just the price of going for the big bucks.

Much writing is meant to be informative, educational, or enlightening — all of which are pretty much in the same vein: revealing something to the reader. In this piece, the main revelation is that I write from a need to write. “Chatty Cathy syndrome,” according to my dad. Talking, writing, photographing: they’re all communication.

In school, midway through the last century, my early writing was composed of notes to a junior high friend. They were much like this—short essays. That hasn’t changed. At the time, my writing topics were then-current junior high concerns, usually composed during a teacher’s lecture. My inner voice drowned out anything the teacher had to say. Today, my chatter on Facebook takes the place of my earlier note-passing. Before Facebook, I’d gone through desktop publishing, Yahoo groups discussions, blogging, and a hot second on MySpace. I haven’t branched out to Patreon or Substack because they seem to require a lot of adult focus and dedication. Unfortunately, a part of me is still in junior high. Perhaps, for entertainment value, I should share more cat pictures.

Minka-doo loves me when she’s feeling snackish.
 

October 21, 2021

Keeping in practice

Posted by Valerie Bonham under Germany, Military, Non-fiction day | Tags: , , , |
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Hmmmm, looks as if the back-end WordPress format has changed again. I suppose I’m happy that I’m only learning a new format arrangement and am not going through the adjustments during the change from an agrarian society to an urban one, but not every time I seem to log on?

I’m not quite “back” yet to regular blogging, but I sense progress. Not that it matters, but I’ve been trying for the past week to blog from my iPad. Unfortunately (for me), the iPad is a geriatric version that will no longer update past version 12.something.something. I believe 14.something.something is the present version.

Because of iPadish geriatritude, I wasn’t able to gain access to this blog until I fired up the PC. The PC is even antiqueier than the iPad, but, miraculously, it still works, for which I honor the cyber gods and all their little cyber-minions. <burns an old floppy disk as a sacrifice> Maybe Santa will be kind to me at Christmas and surprise me with a new portable device? One can only hope.

“Life” marches on, but I wish it would stop stepping on my toes. In between grandchild-minding and virus-dodging (I had a just-before-we-knew-about-it brush with The Smell-Stealing Help-I’m-drowning Virus and don’t want to repeat that experience — get your shots!), I’ve been working on essays for the Museum of American Military Families (MAMF), located in Tijeras, New Mexico

This coming winter, MAMF will be publishing a book looking at the concept of E Pluribus Unum as it plays out among the personnel affiliated with the American armed services. The topic I’m working on at the moment is “code.” The military services have so many ways that codes affect the lives of servicemembers, DoD civilians, contractors and their families, from actual codes to everyday language. I take a look at the everyday language given that the actual codes are, like, secret ‘n’ stuff. Shhhh.

1978 — Walking our cat near the East German border.

Regarding codes, this photo of me and Pippin Baby (no one put Pippin Baby in a corner; he traveled) reminds me of the radio transmissions of in-the-clear spoken numbers that we used to occasionally pick up on the car radio while driving around Cold War Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. The transmissions had a kind of Twilight Zone feel to them as Someone, Somewhere, with a very flat voice was doing nothing but reading numbers into the void of the radio wave frequencies: “Two. Seven. Five. Nine. Three. One. One. One. Six. …” They went on and on. Boring, yet fascinating.

If you still listen to the radio and ever come across someone on an obscure frequency reading numbers (apparently the practice isn’t completely obsolete), you’ll know what you’re listening to: Code.

 

July 26, 2021

Not dead yet

Posted by Valerie Bonham under Bermuda, Military, Non-fiction day, On writing, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , |
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Hello, hello, hello. It’s been a while. Nothing earth-shattering from me; just a new blog post to keep the blog alive and make some use of last January’s renewal fee for the URL. Sometimes, life throws you a curve that takes the starch right out of you. Later on, though, you brave up, open WordPress to blog again, only to find that the whole blogging interface is redesigned. There goes some of that starch you’d regained. Where is everything? Cheers to me making more than one blog post before this time next year.

I’m sitting here, chilling while watching the Olympics (yay, Bermuda!). Other than being a sofa athlete, I’m getting back to writing. My current project is as a writer-in-residence with the Museum of American Military Families. I’m working on a series of essays for the Museum’s GRAICE Project. Along with the essays, I’m planning to improve my blogging habit, provided this interface doesn’t send me in search of chocolate too often. Me investing in a new Dummies book may be around the corner.

Fwiw, neither Covid nor physical dying were ever in play for me or anyone else in the family concerning my starchlessly curved hiatus. (Btw, go get your vaccination!) The blog post title is just a quotation from the souvenir t-shirt I have from a years-ago performance of Monte Python’s Spamalot.

If you’re reading this, thanks.

In honour of Bermuda’s gold medal, here’s a snap from the last time I was there: yellowfin tuna in the panoramic tank at the Bermuda Aquarium.