Lauren Kay Johnson with Eric McMillan

Seattle’s own Lauren Kay Johnson shares her memoir of life as both the child of a veteran and one herself. She be joined in conversation by fellow writer and veteran Eric McMillan. In The Fine Art of Camouflage, Lauren Kay Johnson details how she was just seven when she first experienced a sacrifice of war as her mother, a nurse in the Army Reserves, deployed in support of Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. A decade later, in the wake of 9/11, Lauren signed her own military contract and deployed to a small Afghan province with a non-combat nation-building team. Through her role as the team's information operations officer—the filter between the U.S. military and the Afghan and international publics—and through interviews and letters from her mother’s service, Lauren investigates the role of information in war and in interpersonal relationships, often wrestling with the truth in stories we read and hear from the media and official sources, and in those stories we tell ourselves and our families. A powerful generational coming-of-age narrative against the backdrop of war, The Fine Art of Camouflage reveals the impact from a child’s perspective of watching her mother leave and return home to a hero’s welcome to that of a young idealist volunteering to deploy to Afghanistan who, war-worn, eventually questions her place in the war, the military, and her family history—and their place within her. Lauren Kay Johnson’s work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Glamour, and several anthologies. and she has lectured at schools, conferences, and veteran centers across the country, including the Association of Writers and Writing Programs national conference, the Boston Book Festival, and the University of Iowa. A graduate of Emerson College’s Writing, Literature, and Publishing program, she serves as a writing consultant with GrubStreet and lives with her husband and two-year-old twin daughters in Seattle. Eric McMillan served two combat tours in Iraq, where he was a rifle company commander during the Surge in 2007-2008. A short-story writer, his work has appeared in One Story, New England Review, and The Iowa Review, where he was the winner of the Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award for veteran writing. He lives in Seattle and continues his service in the U.S. Army Reserves.

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Website: https://go.evvnt.com/1621294-0

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