Dr. Marshall Alcorn, professor of English at George Washington University has in the past taught my novel The Second Tour (TST), and thought Art As Therapy would make a good “last minute” addition to the class. Here is what he emailed me today:

“But anyway, talking to my class I could not avoid talking about you and your experiences with writing TST and so I finally today assigned your essay “Art as Therapy:  The Biography of a Novel.”

I am most appreciative of Dr. Alcorn and look forward to hearing about the class response.

The class is taught by History professors Dan Clayton and Nathan Matlock together with English professor Tom Bowie. Radio host Rick Crandall serves as moderator.

I am particularly honored that my novel is included among the following fine texts:

This marks the continuance of my long-held dream of placing this book in literature classes.

English 4040 is an Honors Seminar course open only to first-semester senior honors candidates in English literature. The course is designed to provide exceptional students in the major with opportunities to study literature, literary theory, and cultural criticism in a two-semester seminar format that culminates in a final Honors thesis written in consultation with faculty advisors. The program is particularly committed to developing thinking, writing, and research skills for students wishing to pursue graduate work in English or pursue other professional fields such as law or medicine.

Beginning in the first semester of their senior year, Honors students take a sequence of two courses — English 4040 and 4250. Both seminars are writing-intensive; the first, English 4040, assists students in formulating plans for the thesis. In English 4250, students work directly with their advisors and finish their honors thesis by the end of the second semester of the senior year.

This adoption is for a “study group” and on-going class titled Psychoanalytic Perspective on Literature in their advanced curriculum program. The class is led by Dr. Robert Winer; however, Dr. Marshall Alcorn, professor of English at George Washington University, will be responsible for teaching The Second Tour.

The course will explore psychoanalytic perspectives on fiction, considering both what the analyst can learn about the human condition from the author and the understandings that psychoanalysis can bring to the text.

How cool is this! I can’t wait until they tell me how screwed up the author is.

My background is in English literature so it felt a lot like being back in school. The students were bright, fully engaged and had obviously read and internalized the material. All in all, I thought the event was a huge success.

In fact, the whole experience was an absolute honor for me personally, as well as a tremendous opportunity. It marked the first time I was welcomed into a speaking engagement as a writer, first and foremost, and then as a veteran. That felt really good.

I think The Second Tour has now been launched about as well as can be expected for a self-published novel, so I suspect I’ll now disengage from it somewhat and allow it to sink or swim on its own. And that’s a good thing.

Oh, by the way, I obviously survived placing myself in the hands of airline pilots and their mechanical toys. But I sure didn’t appreciate being patted down — my crotch is my business is how I look at it.

My background is in English literature and I have read these other works, which I place in high esteem. I read The Heart of Darkness for a lit class my freshman year in 1970, got an A on my paper and was called into the professor’s office to discuss it. He was impressed with the paper because no one before me had compared The Heart of Darkness to one’s war experience. In 1979, Apocalypse Now was released, a Vietnam War film that uses The Heart of Darkness as its metaphorical backdrop.

The Things They Carried is the Vietnam War novel against which all Vietnam War novels are measured. It will be interesting to see how The Second Tour stacks up.

So, this is an absolute honor and tremendous opportunity for me personally, although I have to admit up front it scares the absolute pants off me to place my life in the hands of pilots and their mechanical devices.

Dr. Scott is a professor of sociology and hightly decorated Vietnam Veteran. The course was titled Military and Society, and my book, The Second Tour, was used in the final section called “Aftermath,” designed to demonstrate some of the effects of war on individuals and, by extension, society in general.

I couldn’t have enjoyed myself more, nor asked for a better response. As usual, the students, the professor, and other members of the faculty were all fabulous. They were respectful and courteous to a fault, and just downright fun to be around. Several asked questions that got to the heart of the book and, thus, to me.

As I’ve mentioned in earlier news reports, this opportunity has been an absolute honor and award for me personally. Our nation’s Top Gun cadets in the Air Force were exposed to the ground-war perspective of both myself and my book’s narrator, a low-level Marine. Dr. Scott’s is an unusual and perhaps unprecedented teaching approach for the educational benefit of our future Air Force leadership.

I am very hopeful I’ll be invited back for a fifth time, for the 2012 Fall semester.

A class of about forty-five students will take the seminar which will be held on Tuesday nights from 6 pm to 9 pm  during the spring 2012 semester. The first two hours of the seminar are open to the public and cover WWII, Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf Wars. I will speak during the first Vietnam War panel, probably in early April.

How does that commercial go? “I’m so excited, I just can’t hide it.” Something like that <grin>.

I was one of the speakers on The Vietnam War and Memory panel. My presentation covered three areas. I talked about my work, mostly focusing on The Second Tour, but also including several short stories. I covered the concept of war & memory, emphasizing the possibility that memory, especially war memory, is flawed and shouldn’t, perhaps, be trusted. And I offered my thoughts on what we should have learned from the Vietnam War.

The symposium was videotaped by OMNI Media Services located in Broomfield, Colorado. To watch the video, see my War Stories for Beer: Video Presentation elsewhere on this site.

To read the paper, access the WLA website at http://wlajournal.com/23_1/23_1_symposium.html and click on my name. If you also click on Thomas G. Bowie’s article, you can read his reflections on the symposium, reflections that include a paragraph describing his take-away points from my presentation.

Dr. Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., professor of English, and Director of Undergraduate Studies, has adopted the book for use in his 2012 spring semester graduate course titled Literature and Medicine.

This marks the beginning of a long-held dream of mine, to place The Second Tour in literature classes all across the country.

Anyway, I finished it on a Saturday morning and had a term paper due on Monday, so I rushed to the library to see what I could find on Cape Cod, which wasn’t much. Now the library at OU is really two libraries. There’s the original, and there’s the newly-built, greatly-expanded, remodeled part. The original houses an area we called The Stacks because it contains stacks and stacks of books and other  material on shelves from floor to ceiling (which is very low) with little room for browsing. It is a dimly-lit spooky area popular among students seeking privacy for necking, hiding out, whatever. Thoreau’s work was in The Stacks, and I found myself immersed in his journals. I got so engrossed that I lost track of time and often found myself nodding off to sleep. Long story short, I spent the entire day and all that night in The Stacks reading Thoreau’s journals.

I have to preface what I’m going to say next by admitting that I believe in ghosts, so at one point in the middle of the night I became aware that Thoreau was sitting next to me helping me to achieve a better understanding of Cape Cod. More than likely it was a dream, but nevertheless the experience taught me that long after death, writers can “speak” to readers across vast gulfs of time. So it was at that point that I knew for sure I wanted to be a writer, because literature can achieve for the writer a form of immortality.

By the way, I got an “A” on that term paper, and sure wish I kept a copy of it.

One reason I wrote TST was to showcase heroism, but also to warn of the villainy residing within each of us. I used to have nightmares about my war experiences, and sometimes still do, but mostly I now dream of living long enough to see The Second Tour taught in literature classes all across the country. That would be a good thing, not solely for me but for all the students that would take away the various lessons this novel offers. I have therefore concentrated my marketing efforts with that goal in mind and have met with tangential success in that, although unusual in the case of a novel, The Second Tour has been adopted for use in non-literature courses at the following universities:

By Dr. Wilbur J. Scott, professor of behavioral sciences at the US Air Force Academy, for his course titled Military & Society. The book is a case study of PTSD in the making, and is used in his course section called “Aftermath.” Dr. Scott is author of the book Vietnam Veterans Since the War: The Politics of PTSD, Agent Orange, and the National Memorial;

By Dr. Peter Berres, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Kentucky, for use in an interdisciplinary course titled Vietnam: The Interplay of War & Culture. The course is offered in the University’s Discovery Seminar Program, a premier offering for undergraduate students along with the Honors Program; and (soon I’m told)

By Mr. Nathan Matlock, Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Regis University in Denver, Colorado, for an upcoming course on the History of the Vietnam War.

Additionally, it might be relevant that I have a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of Oklahoma, plus two years of graduate-level work. I have been previously published in print and on-line journals, most notably Connecticut Review and War, Literature & the Arts. I also sometimes speak at conferences and seminars regarding The Second Tour and my other work, most recently at Regis University, and at the U.S. Air Force Academy. At Regis I have spoken to Dr. Dan Clayton’s history seminar titled The Cold War, and am a regular participant in his Stories From Wartime seminar, an interdisciplinary course co-taught with Dr. Tom Bowie, director of the Honors Program and offered through the Center for the Study of War Experience. At the Academy I have spoken to Dr. Scott’s classes and at last fall’s War Literature symposium sponsored by the English department’s War, Literature and the Arts journal.

Professor, I would appreciate it if you would please browse my website to see if The Second Tour is something you or one of your colleagues would consider adopting. If so, I would be very happy to send you a copy. The novel has gotten pretty good reviews from Midwest Book Review and from the Military Writers Society of America. Several Readers Comments can be found on Amazon.

Thank you, take care, and I hope to hear from you, Terry

Terry P. Rizzuti

http://thesecondtour.com