Guest Post: Stephen Paul Register (MEANTIME: The Aesthetics of Soldiering)

STEPHEN PAUL REGISTER moved around often as a child in the American South. He settled in Nashville before joining the Tennessee National Guard. He was deployed to to Baghdad, Iraq and Kuwait for over 16 months from 2003 to 2004. He served in Hurricane Katrina relief efforts and also had the duty of supporting Border Patrol in Yuma, Arizona. Stephen attended Belmont University in Nashville from 2005 to 2008 where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Religion and the Arts. He then went on to Yale University to earn his Master of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School, where he graduated in 2011. He now lives with his wife Anna in Nashville.

Several months ago, I interviewed Stephen Paul Register about his memoir, MEANTIME: The Aesthetics of Soldiering, and invited him to do a guest post about the sudden surge in popularity of dystopian and post-apocalyptic literature and how he felt about it personally. Since he's spent time in situations and areas that many of us would see as dystopian, I was very interested in reading his thoughts on the matter. Since some of the books he mentions in the post are controversial, I thought this would fit well with Banned Books Week.

I hope you enjoy his guest post as much as I did.

Dystopias
by Stephen Register
What is the obsession with dystopias these days? The Hunger Games has become a hands-down dominator in the market recently (LeBron is even reading them), Nashville has recently invited Margaret Atwood to do a citywide speak on The Handmaid’s Tale (Nashville high schools have controversially made The Handmaid’s Tale a mandatory read for students this year—and The Handmaid’s Tale is not even Atwood’s most recent dystopian novel! Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood are much later dystopian releases), and the films Dredd and Total Recall are rereleases of dystopian films released within the past twenty years. (Questions of these films’ quality remain).

Author Interview: Stephen Paul Register (MEANTIME: The Aesthetics of Soldiering)

STEPHEN PAUL REGISTER moved around often as a child in the American South. He settled in Nashville before joining the Tennessee National Guard. He was deployed to to Baghdad, Iraq and Kuwait for over 16 months from 2003 to 2004. He served in Hurricane Katrina relief efforts and also had the duty of supporting Border Patrol in Yuma, Arizona. Stephen attended Belmont University in Nashville from 2005 to 2008 where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Religion and the Arts. He then went on to Yale University to earn his Master of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School, where he graduated in 2011. He now lives with his wife Anna in Nashville.

Stephen, thank you so much for stopping by the blog to answer questions about your book. Would you please tell us a little bit about MEANTIME: The Aesthetics of Soldiering in your own words?

This book is about what it means to be a soldier. If you really want to know what it means “to soldier” in the modern era, then MEANTIME is the book for you. The book is about me being deployed in three different capacities: as a warfighter in Iraq in the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom; as a sentry in support of U.S. Border Partol where we patrolled for illegal immigrants on the Arizona/Mexico border; and as a disaster relief aid worker in Gulfport, MS, where my unit was deployed just four days after hurricane Katrina devastated that place.

What inspired you to write MEANTIME?