Ah, how well I remember the day when Michael deYoanna and I were shopping at the Fort Carson Post Exchange trying to decide if we needed to buy just one 1-terabyte hard drive to store the footage for our then-untitled documentary about injured veterans or if we should pony up and buy two just to be safe. Filming hadn’t started yet and, since neither of us had ever made a documentary, we had no idea how...

It’s been some time since I really listened to rock-n-roll. I’m not talking about turning up the radio when “Baba O’Reilly” comes on in the car. I’m talking about clearing all the inhabitants out of the house and cranking up the stereo—the old beast I bought off a former boss that’s one of the last of its kind, rigged with outlets for ten speakers of any wattage I can afford—and letting “L.A. Woman” shake pictures off the wall at about 200 decibels.

Have you done that l...

Hey, kid: did Santa get you a Kindle or a Nook or an iPad for Christmas? Because I’ve got just the thing to load it with: the newly released digital version of The Road to Kosovo, A Balkan Diary, my first book published in 1999, now newly edited and expanded exclusively for digital publication.

Throughout the years, I’ve heard from many people who either didn’t know this book existed or couldn’t get their hands on a copy. Since it was, for the most part, out of print, Westview Press...

We raised our e...

One of the many jobs writers have is identifying timelines, looking for openings and closings, beginnings and ends. Whether it’s with sentences, paragraphs, chapters, or the stories themselves, there are places for you to dive in and others where you must fade out. Any story is just an encapsulation of a period of time and no matter how much you’re enjoying it (or not, in some cases), there must be a time to put it to rest. Ending a chapter—both in life and in the craft of writing—can...

It’s somewhat baffling, because there is no connection whatsoever between the death of Chris Hondros, who was killed by mortar fire in the warm and pleasant spring of Libya, and snowfall. In fact, I have very few memories of Chris in the snow, and standing on my back porch watching it fall—clad in fleece pajamas with a glass of wine in my hand, my back to the scene...

“You know you don’t have to go, right?”

There was a quiet sincerity in his voice that brought me up short. That, and the fact that he was my boss, the editor of a small alternativ...

Guest post by Michael de Yoanna

If you told me I’d be riding a bicycle through a tropical storm in order to complete a film this summer, I would have said you were crazy. The film’s theme involves bicycling and how it helps veterans recover from their wounds. But attempting to be the director from the saddle of a bike, that’s another thing.

When my partner Greg Campbell and I began shooting this yet-to-be-named documentary film in late May, during a week-long veterans’ road cycle r...