Donald Anderson – författare

In Quagmire you’ll find a range of voices-men and women, military and civilian-and a range of perspectives from the homeland, the combat zone, and war’s aftermath. These personal responses to war in Iraq and Afghanistan have been selected from War, Literature & the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities to mark the thirtieth anniversary of its inaugural publication. The responses cover approximately fifteen years of the United States’ conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and demonstrate the aftermath of war and the degreed ripples that extend beyond soldiers to families and friends, lovers, hometowns, even pets.As citizens, Pablo Neruda advised, we have an obligation to “come and see the blood in the streets.” To ignore what we do in war and what war does to us is to move willfully toward ignorance. To ignore such reminders imperils ourselves, our communities, and our nation.

We are where we've been and what we've read, aren't we? Where else do we get the experience we need to evocatively live? In Fragments of a Mortal Mind, Donald Anderson confronts language and employs language to try to make sense, as we all do, of life.In this contemporary commonplace book, readers are also faced with some of the larger issues of human existence: war, memory, trauma, family, mortality, religion, fear, joy, ugliness, and occasional beauty.  At once a memoir, a reading journal, and a nonfiction novel, Fragments of a Mortal Mind is a pertinent and timely conversation. Collage on this scale, charting the interior construction of thought over a lifetime, boggles the mind in its artistry and shows us how stream-of-consciousness and the art of fragmentation have evolved and merged into one another in ways that renew them both.Although this work is comprised of fragments, this is, in fact, long-form thinking a way of thinking and perceiving the world that is desperately needed in our time.