Once upon a time this was a big, lovely site with excerpts from my books and articles, but then a terrible dragon named ServerCrash swept over our virtual domain and annihilated it. Since then, we’ve been rebuilding, and this is a step on the way. Clicking on the hyperlinks below will lead you to more content.
Most of my writing deals with understanding violence — the physical violence of war, the structural violence inherent to capitalism, and the mental violence of stressed human beings — to help us overcome it and bring peace. I began my writing career as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco, then joined the Special Forces to write a book about the Vietnam War. A World of Hurt won a Rinehart Foundation Award for its portrayal of the psychological roots of war: the blocked sexuality and need for paternal approval that attract men to the military.
I followed it with a young-adult novel, CD-Ring, the story of a boy learning about the futility of violence and the need for peaceful communication.
My new novel, Summer Snow, is set amid this current war as an American warrior falls in love with a Sufi Muslim and learns from her an alternative to the military mentality. Its theme is that higher consciousness is more effective than violence and that women may be more able than men to lead us there. It’s published by Avatar, and the first three chapters are serialized on ShatterColors.
My forthcoming book is a return to journalism. Radical Peace: Personal Stories of Refusing War tells the first-person experiences of war resisters, deserters, and peace activists in Iraq, Afghanistan, North America, and Europe. It’s a narrative journey along diverse paths of nonviolence, the true stories of people who have moved beyond demonstrations and petitions into direct action, defying the government’s laws and impeding its capacity to wage war. The book is due out in early 2010 from TrineDay.
Articles you may enjoy:
“German Jewish Community Begins Again”
“The Tenor of Our Times”
“Sedition, Subversion, Sabotage”
“Wolf Country”
I also teach creative writing and was a Fulbright professor at universities in Germany, where I’m currently living.
I hope you find something good to read here. We’ve had to disable the comments section because of spam, but you can reach me at william-dot-hathaway-at-ewetel-dot-net.