A Veterans Day Reading and Talk by Gerald A. McCarthy

Gerald McCarthy enlisted in the Marines at 17 and volunteered for Vietnam. After the war he went AWOL, then to civilian jails and military brigs and finally to a Navy psychiatric ward, where he witnessed patient suicides. Medically discharged, he returned home to upstate New York and piecework in shoe factories. Written in two voices—one lucid, one dreamlike—his memoir delivers a jump-cut narrative of his troubled adolescence, his wartime experiences and his struggle to come unstuck from his own life.

Gerald McCarthy earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. The recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Writers Union, and the New York State Council on the Arts, he has been a visiting artist at The American Academy in Rome and is Professor of English emeritus, St. Thomas Aquinas College, Sparkill, New York.

The author of four volumes of poetry (War Story, Shoetown, Trouble Light and Door in the Wall), his poetry and prose have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including: New Letters, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, Consequence Forum, The National Catholic Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and North Dakota Review; The New Anthology of American Poetry: Postmodernisms 1950-Present (Rutgers), Dismantling Glory and American War Poetry (Columbia), Radical Visions (Georgia), From Both Sides Now (Scribner’s), and Carrying the Darkness (Texas Tech).