Sweet Briar College’s creative writing program will sponsor a series of public readings to be held on the first Wednesday of each month. Aptly dubbed “First Wednesdays,” the events are a part of the College’s annual Writers Series.

The series begins at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 5 with Dave Griffith. Griffith, who is teaching creative non-fiction writing at Sweet Briar this fall, will read from his first book, “A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America” (Soft Skull Press, 2006).

Dave GriffithThe event will be held in the Wailes Lounge at the Florence Elston Inn and Conference Center. Admission is free.

Praised by Time Out Chicago magazine as a “massively forceful piece of criticism,” “A Good War is Hard to Find” was written in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and examines America’s love-hate relationship with violence.

“The idea for the book began with an essay I wrote about how Flannery O’Connor’s work – her whole oeuvre, in fact – seemed to speak to the ways in which something like Abu Ghraib can happen,” Griffith said. “It was just a hunch I had.”

Griffith, 31, admits to having a “literary crush” on O’Connor, a southern author whose work includes “The Life You Save May be Your Own” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” among others. The title of his book is a not-so-subtle homage to her.

“Her attention to the duplicitous nature of good, Christian folks in the South has, since the first time I read her, spoken to me, but not so much as a critique of religion but as an exploration of the way religion can be used as a justification or argument for the rightness of one’s actions,” Griffith said.

“So when the Abu Ghraib incident became public … I started doing research on the soldiers involved and started to pay close attention to the way it was being discussed in the media and in White House press conferences and Pentagon documents and among people on the street.

“I found that most people believed this was an isolated incident, a case of a ‘few bad apples.’ But the more and more research I did, the more this seemed not the case.”

According to the publisher’s Web site, Griffith’s book is written in the “tradition of Joan Didion’s ‘Salvador’ and Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved’ – a dramatic, experiential, first-person story from inside the mess and noise of the culture, inflected by a radical Catholic philosophy.”

Of the book, Sister Helen Prejean, author of “Dead Man Walking,” wrote, “Griffith offers gripping personal testimony to the difficulties of living out the Christian imperatives of love and forgiveness amid a culture that legitimizes government violence as the only ‘real’ way to establish social order.”

Griffith hopes his book will inspire self examination and conversation in readers, their families and friends.

“I hope that readers finish the book feeling that they’ve spent some time reflecting on their own experiences with and attitudes towards violence, and think about how those experiences and attitudes shape their perception of violence as a means of conflict resolution,” he said.

“I think it’s a big accomplishment if people take the book seriously enough to mention it to other people – even if they disagree with it.”

Griffith has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Notre Dame and a Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh, where he also was awarded the Scott Turow prize.

The lineup for the rest of the series is as follows:

7:30 p.m. Oct. 3, Wailes Lounge – John Casteen and Jennifer Chang.

7:30 p.m. Nov. 7, Wailes Lounge – Ed Schwartzchild and Elisa Albert

7:30 p.m. Dec. 5, Wailes Lounge – TBD, event to be organized by student literary club, The Inklings

7:30 p.m. Feb. 6, Pannell Gallery – TBD, event to be organized by student literary club, The Inklings

7:30 p.m. March 5, Pannell Gallery – Lia Purpura

7:30 p.m. April 2, Pannell Gallery – Jennifer Brice

For more information on First Wednesdays, contact Carrie Brown, associate professor of English and creative writing, at cbrown@sbc.edu or 381-6287.

– By Suzanne Ramsey, SBC staff writer