Category Archives: Literary Criticism

Making WAVES: Depiction of Navy Women in a 1951 Recruiting Comic Book

Posted on July 31, 2018 by readersquest

In honor of yesterday’s 76th anniversary of the creation of the Navy Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), I thought I’d post about this 1951 WAVES recruiting comic book that I found in a file of women’s military recruiting … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Literary Criticism | 1 Comment

“Describe a barn…”

Posted on September 5, 2017 by readersquest

I always find the criticism of war literature on friend and colleague Peter Molin’s blog Time Now thought-provoking, and one of his posts this week challenged me to some personal reflection. A subsequent e-mail exchange provoked me into writing about … Continue reading →

Posted in Fiction, Literary Criticism, Stories, Writing Life | 3 Comments

The Matriarch of Contemporary Women Veterans’ Literature

Posted on January 27, 2016 by readersquest

Since Cara Hoffman wrote her op-ed “The Things She Carried” for the New York Times in 2014, critics have either pointed out the “absence” of women veterans’ narratives in the canon of war literature, or wondered what female authors today’s women … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

War, Leadership, and Love: The Contemporary Romance Novels of Army Officer Jessica Scott

Posted on September 4, 2015 by readersquest

Summer of 1976. I’m eleven years old, and I’ve just finished sixth grade. I’ve read everything that the librarian in charge of the little one-room public library in a small town in West Virginia thinks is suitable for a good … Continue reading →

Posted in Fiction, Literary Criticism | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Writing Life: I Want to Smack Sam Sacks

Posted on August 26, 2015 by readersquest

This post is mostly not about the writing of women veterans; please forgive the digression. In 2005, a couple of weeks into my first semester of the Writing Program at the Johns Hopkins University, my mother-in-law asked to read some of my … Continue reading →

Posted in Fiction, In the News, Literary Criticism, Writing Life | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments