Eastern Michigan University will host “Narrative of War in Life, Literature, and Film” on Wednesday, Nov. 19, at 6:30 p.m. in the EMU Student Center Auditorium. The free public event will feature National Book Award-winning author and Iraq War veteran Phil Klay alongside Professor Stacey Peebles, a scholar of war literature and film, in an evening of dialogue exploring how stories shape public understanding of war, memory, and conflict.
Presented by JNT: The Journal of Narrative Theory, the program will bring together perspectives from both creative writing and literary scholarship while inviting audience participation through an extended question-and-answer session.
Building bridges through storytelling
For Dr. John Staunton and Dr. Christine Neufeld, Professors of English at Eastern Michigan University and co-editors of JNT: The Journal of Narrative Theory, the event represents years of planning and a desire to connect scholarship with the wider community.
“Since joining JNT as co-editor in January 2024, I’ve been looking for ways to connect the work of JNT to our broader campus and regional community, to locate the way that narrative and story more broadly shapes our experiences and ways of being in community together,” Staunton said. “One project in particular has been of interest: a symposium on ‘Narratives of War’ and ‘Veterans’ Stories.’ We have a sizable veteran community at EMU—students, faculty and staff—and the university is regularly recognized as a top veteran friendly institution. But their experiences are not always visible to the larger campus community.”
Moving the annual JNT Dialogue from the spring to the fall made it possible to bring those long-standing goals together.
“So, when we made the decision this summer to move our annual JNT Dialogue event to the Fall semester, we finally had an opportunity to bring together those long-term interests,” Neufeld explained. “We at first were trying to plan the event around Veterans Day but the schedule for us at EMU and the speakers didn’t quite line up, but we were able to secure the week following and get two top speakers—Phil Klay and Stacey Peebles.”
Related: Current Magazine’s calendar
A conversation for our current moment
Staunton believes the discussion is especially timely because modern conflicts continue to shape everyday life in ways that are often difficult to understand.
“Right now, we find ourselves in the midst of what Stacey Peebles and others have called ‘forever wars,’ conflicts which are marked by ‘a lack of delineation’ of time and space, and that seem to go on and on,” he said. “In her book, ‘The War Comes with You: Enduring War in Life, Fiction, and Fantasy,’ Peebles examines how fiction, film, and even news accounts of contemporary conflicts—whether pro- or anti-war—all wrestle with how to tell these stories when the experiences are fragmented and seemingly endless in the ways war ‘seems always to find ways to renew itself.’ Phil Klay’s fiction approaches the challenge of that fragmentation by drawing from his experience as a veteran of the Iraq War, addressing the ‘civil-military’ divide that continues to separate us in our understanding of America’s Wars.”
Dialogue, not lecture
Rather than presenting a traditional lecture, organizers have designed the evening to encourage conversation between the speakers and the audience.
“I just had a conversation with Phil and Stacey last week to discuss just this question,” Staunton said. “They are both keen on making sure that the event is a true dialogue between them and with plenty of opportunity for questions from the audience. Our plan is to have each keynote speaker talk a bit about the evening’s theme from their respective vantage points as writer/veteran and scholar/critic. Then, they’ll engage in conversation together, and finally there will be lots of time for audience members to ask questions of both keynote speakers.”
Stories that command attention
Although Staunton initially encountered Klay’s work through Peebles’ scholarship, he quickly understood why the author’s writing has earned widespread acclaim.
“But once I picked it up, I knew why she began her study with a consideration of his work,” Staunton said. “I was hooked from the opening story. The stories command attention in their style, characters and themes in a way that some critics compare to Tim O’Brien’s writing about the Vietnam War. As a relative outsider to this world… I found that the range of different characters and experiences in the stories was especially powerful and illuminating.”
The stories, he added, reveal how military conflicts continue to affect American society long after the fighting ends.
“There are definitely some hard moments in the fiction,” Staunton said, “but I think readers will come away as I did, with a sense that they’ve been invited to listen to something important they thought they might be able to avoid or ignore.”
How do you tell a true war story?
One of the central themes of the evening will be the challenge of communicating experiences that often seem impossible to describe.
“There’s a question that comes up in a lot of literature about war: ‘How do you tell a true war story?'” Staunton said. He pointed to lines from Klay’s story Bodies: “‘For a long time I was angry. I didn’t want to talk about Iraq….if [people] pressed, I’d tell them lies.’ And ‘There are two ways to tell the story. Funny or sad….Either way it’s the same story.’ Those lines capture that dilemma that we hope Stacey and Phil will be able to explore with the audience. Given the often extraordinary and violent experiences and circumstances of war, how do you tell that in a way others can even understand?”
Staunton believes literature and film remain essential tools for helping people understand the enduring consequences of war.
“This is something that I think the event itself is hoping to explore in detail, and I will defer to Stacey and Phil as the experts,” he said. “But I think what the audience will find is an introduction to how that all works and why it’s important. One thing that we… believe of course is that however we hope to achieve some understanding about the realities and lasting impacts of modern conflict it will almost certainly be through story. That’s not new, of course. We see this in the great epics of antiquity… But contemporary narratives in literature and film—even the sagas of the MCU—expand the way that we come to understand just how enduring those conflicts are.”
JNT’s mission beyond campus
Since 2010, JNT has hosted annual public dialogues that bring nationally recognized scholars and writers to Ypsilanti.
“We are especially interested in speakers who cross typically disparate fields, whether in terms of approach, discipline or research focus,” Neufeld said. “We think it is important for students at EMU and for members of the local community to have access to these noted figures right here in Ypsilanti. Previous topics have ranged from ‘Neurodiversity and Narrative’; ‘Detroit as Narrative Space’; ‘Archival Stories and Ancestral Imaginations’; and ‘Video Games and Narrative,’ just to name a few of our most recent events.”
Open to the entire community
Although hosted at EMU, organizers hope the audience extends well beyond campus.
“The event is free and open to the public,” Staunton said. “And for this event in particular we welcome veterans and their families, book lovers, film enthusiasts (which are of course are not mutually exclusive groups!). Since we are both English professors, we of course always expect that EMU students and faculty will attend, but we always plan for our events to have broad appeal to the larger community. Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Southeast Michigan community members and faculty and students from other institutions are all welcome.”
Looking ahead
While the discussion was not designed around current geopolitical events, Staunton expects the conversation will naturally resonate with contemporary audiences.
“We did not intend for the event to particularly address the current ongoing conflict in Iran or Ukraine, or other specific current events,” he said. “But I imagine those could be on the minds of many folks in the audience and on the stage. Throughout the evening, I think the audience will be reminded about the unheard stories of the veterans and others impacted by conflict in their communities, to think about how, for all of us, in the words of Stacey’s book, ‘the war comes with you.'”
Narrative of War in Life, Literature, and Film will take place Wednesday, Nov. 19, at 6:30 p.m. in the Eastern Michigan University Student Center Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public and features Phil Klay and Professor Stacey Peebles in a dialogue examining how literature, film, and storytelling deepen public understanding of war and its lasting human impact.
Donna Marie Iadipaolo is a writer, journalist, and State of Michigan certified teacher, since 1990. She has written for national publications like The Village Voice, Ear Magazine of New Music, Insurance & Technology, and TheStreet.
She is now writing locally for many publications, including Current Magazine, Ann Arbor Family, and the Ann Arbor Independent. Her undergraduate degree is from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she graduated with an honors bachelor’s degree and three teacher certificate majors: mathematics, social sciences, English. She also earned three graduate degrees in Master of Science, Master of Arts, and Education Specialist Degree.
