Actor, director, and Pushcart Prize nominee Benjamin Busch discusses his memoir of his childhood as the son of celebrated novelist Frederick Busch up to his time spent serving as a U.S. Marine.

About Dust to Dust:

Benjamin Busch's extraordinary memoir, Dust to Dust "is a wonderful book, original in concept and stunningly written," says Ward Just, "a breathtaking meditation on loss and remembrance, dust to dust." Busch, the son of the esteemed novelist Frederick Busch, has had a singular life of varied accomplishments: an actor who played Officer Anthony Colicchio on The Wire, a writer twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, a guest commentator on NPR's All Things Considered, and a writer/director whose short film, Bright, has garnered dozens of film festival awards. But, perhaps most unexpectedly given his upbringing as the child of two ardently liberal intellectuals, Busch is a decorated United States Marine Corps Infantry Officer who served two combat tours in Iraq. That conundrum of identity is at the heart of Dust to Dust, an unusual, absorbing contemplation on war and peace, childhood and adulthood, life and death.

The childhood Busch recounts was in many ways idyllic—an adventurous rural boyhood, replete with wandering in the woods. His parents, fresh from Vietnam War protests, would not allow him to have a toy gun, but that did not prevent him from building forts, organizing war games among his friends, and melting crayons into bullets. His parents had no intention of raising a soldier, Busch says, but somehow they did. In chapters arranged thematically—water, metal, stone, blood—rather than chronologically, he progresses in each from childhood to adulthood, writing movingly of his parents, wilderness, danger, war, death, and the past that shaped him as both an atypical warrior and a man.

About James Peterson:

About Benjamin Busch:

Benjamin Busch was born in Manhattan in 1968 and grew up in rural New York State. He is an actor, a photographer, a film director, and a U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer who served two combat tours in Iraq. He played the role of Officer Anthony Colicchio on the HBO series The Wire and has appeared on Homicide, The West Wing, and Generation Kill. His writing has been featured in Harper's and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He has also been a guest commentator on NPR's All Things Considered. He lives on a farm in Michigan with his wife and two daughters.

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