Watermark Books and Cafe

Watermark Books & Cafe is pleased to welcome Benjamin Busch for a reading and signing of DUST TO DUST.  Benjamin Busch’s extraordinary memoir, DUST TO DUST “is a wonderful book, original in concept and stunningly written,” says Ward Just, “a breathtaking meditation on loss and remembrance, dust to dust.” Busch, the son of the esteemed novelist Frederick Busch, has had a singular life of varied accomplishments: an actor who played Officer Anthony Colicchio on The Wire, a writer twice-nominated for the Pushcart Prize, a guest commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered, and a writer/director whose short film, Bright, has garnered dozens of film festival awards. But, perhaps most unexpectedly given his upbringing as the child of two ardently liberal intellectuals, Busch is a decorated United States Marine Corps Infantry Officer who served two combat tours in Iraq. That conundrum of identity is at the heart of DUST TO DUST, an unusual, absorbing contemplation on war and peace, childhood and adulthood, life and death. The childhood Busch recounts was in many ways idyllic—an adventurous rural boyhood, replete with wandering in the woods. His parents, fresh from Vietnam War protests, would not allow him to have a toy gun, but that did not prevent him from building forts, organizing war games among his friends, and melting crayons into bullets. His parents had no intention of raising a soldier, Busch says, but somehow they did. In chapters arranged thematically—water, metal, stone, blood— rather than chronologically, he progresses in each from childhood to adulthood, writing movingly of his parents, wilderness, danger, war, death, and the past that shaped him as both an atypical warrior and a man. DUST TO DUST “is a memoir of the themes at my center,” says Busch, “the concern with impermanence and mortality, the fascination with rock, bone, and water, my need for the adventure of exploration, the confrontation with death, and death. It is a deep examination of the vision I have had of my environment, as a child, a son, a father, an artist, and as a military commander. This book reveals my formative and mature moments to be entirely intertwined, the strangeness of my disparate interests never leaving me estranged. It is my examination of my place, the human place, in a world largely indifferent to our struggle.” “Elegiac, funny, wistful, deep, and wonderfully human, DUST TO DUST moved me to laughter and tears, sometimes simultaneously,” praises Karl Marlantes, bestselling author of Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War. “After reading this book, you will want to go outside and really look at our world.” Mary Karr, bestselling author of The Liar’s Club, adds, “This brave soldier with his singular sensibility…builds us a fort we’re loath to leave.” - A Conversation with Benjamin Busch Q: You have confessed that you are not an avid reader, which begs the question: why write a book? A: That’s an excellent question. I’m a terrible hypocrite. It’s not that I have an aversion to reading, but rather that I have an inability to sit still for it. Despite moments of meditation throughout the book, it paints my life as largely kinetic, exploratory, and full of movement. That physical restlessness has kept me from reading much. My parents were constant readers so I understood that books were the entrancing medium of eternal record and could sustain memory, thought and observation. A book is able transfer all that live motion, as if adventure and exertion can be stored in language. That was a revelation to me. Writing gave me the ability to tell everyone where I was while I wasn’t sitting still. Q: Why did you choose to write your memoir now, at this point in your life? A: When I lost my parents I suddenly realized that they had taken all of their memories with them. They held the family archive in their minds, the details of my own childhood as well as theirs. The most important witnesses to my youth were gone. No one but my parents could remember my first steps, not even me, and I found photographs of me in places I can’t identify. My mother always knew the facts and my father always knew the stories. There are many pieces of my past missing that I had relied on their constancy to preserve. At some point, we become the last record of us. I felt that I was near that point. My mother had told me that my first real sentence was delivered early one morning from my crib. I stood and said, “I wake up”, and I think this book says the same thing over forty years later. Q: As the son of an acclaimed novelist, Frederick Busch, how do you think his writing has influenced your own? How do you think your styles differ? A: I truly don’t know. I grew up with his voice, surrounded by his particular attention to language. He used words as a solution for almost everything. I don’t know that our styles are similar but he certainly established the formative literate environment from which I emerged. My father loved writing toward the part where people spoke, and then writing what was said. In writing this memoir I was very much a nonfiction purist with respect to dialog. I write more toward the eye, establishing scene and view. I only quote when I can truly remember the exact language of a conversation so there is almost no dialog in the entire memoir. The first and last words I use in the book are quotes from my father so his voice remains mingled with my own. Q: You have a very nature-immersed childhood in Upstate New York, as you describe in many of the chapters of DUST TO DUST, but later turned to filmmaking, photography, writing – how do you reconcile your childhood love of the natural world with the very un-natural construction of creating art? A: My work in art mostly seeks to recreate the natural world while doing the impossible which is to control it. I am a very visual writer interested in transferring a visual sense of place with as little writing as possible so I hope that readers can really see the places I recall. This is all memoir and prose could do for my past what film and photography could not. This book puts you inside my head. Q: You have written that DUST TO DUST is not a war memoir – how did you find the balance between depicting your experiences at war with your civilian life? A: I don’t consider the book a war memoir. It is so much larger than that. The war is unavoidably a significant part of the book, but only the pieces of that experience related to the narrative established by the rest of my life were included. There are about 100 pages spread through the book that relate to military training and my two combat tours in Iraq which, together, spanned 16 years of my life. The other 200 pages are about life itself. War removed the distance between me and tragedy. I went from rumors of mortality to direct confrontation with death. It changed my perception of the living world, having witnessed such violent destruction, seeing ruin actively take place. Most of us probably confront this later in our lives and by surprise because of how long the beliefs of childhood endure. The book is about belief, and about truth…and how they change with our growing up. The trajectory that our lives move on continually tilts our perspective on our past. The balance between civilian and military content was defined by avoiding redundancy in either. The stories seemed to know where the gravity was and the past and present, war and home, found equilibrium by rubbing against each other. Q: Was it difficult to portray a soldier for movies and television, after having served actively in the military? A: It was strange to act like myself sometimes. The artificial environment of film takes away so much of the authentic feelings of combat and military life that imposing a believable performance when nothing is at stake feels unnatural. It was harder to do than I had expected. But that is acting. Q: Describe the significance of the title of your memoir. A: The book is very much about our passage through the elements, seeing ourselves in the earth around us, our origin and our end. We rise from dust and we end in dust, but during our lives we are something more than our composition. Our thoughts, visions, memories, and love all exist above matter and it is that immaterial element that this memoir tries to capture. Q: Mary Karr wrote about DUST TO DUST: “Every religious practice I know contains a facet in which knowledge of your own mortality draws you closer to the ultimate truth. Now this brave soldier with his singular sensibility renders for us a life born of that wisdom.” Does religion factor into your meditations on mortality in this book? A: Deep memoir is a reckoning with origins, aftermath and endurance. The dead have an afterlife in our memories. For a time, we are the survivors. Memory is an emotional place, haunted and as close to heaven as the living get on earth. By remembering my childhood, I returned there, walked my paths through the forest, waded in the rivers, laid stones in the walls of forts. I lived as a child again in those moments. I was able to spend time with my parents as if they were not gone. Isn’t that what we hope heaven is? I never speak directly of religion in this book but it speaks to everything faith does. A pastor read an advanced copy and said that it was the most spiritual book he had ever read. I am uncertain where the line between the secular and the spiritual is, but this book is built of life and afterlife and I think many people considering mortality, loss, and the human spirit will have much to think about as they read it. Early Praise: “Busch carries us on a haunting, humorous, and poignant journey.” — Publishers Weekly “From a charmed childhood as the son of novelist Frederick Busch, to two medal-strewn tours of duty as a marine in Iraq, to work as an actor who played a cop on The Wire, Busch has a life story well worth hearing.” — Library Journal Seasonal Roundup “Elegiac, funny, wistful, deep, and wonderfully human, Dust to Dust moved me to laughter and tears, sometimes simultaneously. . . . After reading this book, you will want to go outside and really look at our world.” — Karl Marlantes, bestselling author of Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War “Dust to Dust is a wonderful book, original in concept and stunningly written, a soldier’s memoir that is about soldiering and much else besides. The last two dozen pages are a tour de force, a breathtaking meditation on loss and remembrance, dust to dust.” — Ward Just “Busch is a brilliant prose stylist for whom every pause counts, a man of three worlds—the heart, the mind, the earth. Dust to Dust is a stunning literary work about this mysterious trinity, and a return to home.” — Doug Stanton, bestselling author of Horse Soldiers and In Harm's Way “Every religious practice I know contains a facet in which knowledge of your own mortality draws you closer to the ultimate truth. Now this brave soldier with his singular sensibility renders for us a life borne of that wisdom. Benjamin Busch was molded into one of Camus’s perfect men: alert in the instant with a clear-eyed view of contingency and reflexes to act. In Dust to Dust, he builds us a fort we’re loath to leave.” — Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club, Cherry, and Lit “Throughout his elemental memoir, Benjamin Busch digs into the earth. . . . The power of the language comes from his attention to the coarse and fine detail of the material world as he encounters it with a shovel, a gun, or his hands. . . . Busch is a poet with the soul of a civil engineer, and for as long as his body sustains him, he is the perfect soldier. I loved every page of this mesmerizing book.” — Bonnie Jo Campbell, bestselling author of Once Upon a River