Elliott on soldiers

After reading with Stephen Elliott the other night I was talking to my editor friend Jeanne about his interesting literary style: short declarative sentences and an amazingly open emotional quality. Just now I ran across a piece on Huffington Post in which Elliott describes his quest to find out more about two dead soldiers, one who was among the first casualties of the Iraq war, another who made it home with such emotional and spiritual damage that he hung himself in the basement of his parents' home.

Unfortunately something is messed up with the Huffington Post design such that there are no paragraph breaks in the story, but if you can handle that and just keep reading, it's not only well worth it for the content but it shows the same qualities that struck me about the very different piece Elliott read Wednesday night at the Best Sex Writing event.