Author Close Encounters in War Journal

The Italian Federation of Surgeons and Dentists releases the Manifesto “Doctors and Peace”

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By the Editors

The Italian Federation of Surgeons and Dentists (Federazione nazionale degli Ordini dei Medici Chirurghi e degli Odontoiatri) has published the Manifesto “Doctors and Peace” (Medici e Pace) during the Symposium Curare senza paura, which was held in Perugia on March, 12.

The Italian Manifesto appeared a few days after the European Council of Medical Orders (CEOM) released the statement Ethical and deontological issues in times of conflict.

The Italian Manifesto claims that health is a universal right that should be granted to everyone, for the equal distribution of medical services is a fundamental contribution to peace and fraternity.

The Close Encounters in War Journal salutes the initiative as an ethical response to the growing political instability that is triggering wars and causing suffering on a global scale.

“The Night of the Orange Light”: A Testimony from the Middle East

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By Shalindri Peiris

Rockets in the night sky in a picture taken by the author

It happened again. Less than a year later, I stood in the exact same spot and counted, through the window, the orange lights moving steadily toward me. They streaked across the sky with terrifying purpose. It is almost ironic that I grew up in a country ravaged by civil war for three decades and never once heard the sound of a bomb, yet here I was, feeling the walls tremble around me. The attempt to flee felt laughable from the very beginning.

All we could do was grip our packed bags and stand on the doorstep, praying to every god we knew that the orange lights slicing through the sky would not fall on us…

Read the full text in PDF

Call for Articles. Issue n. 9 (2026): Against War. Conflict Resolution, Peace, and Nonviolence

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The Editors of the Close Encounters in War Journal announce that the call for articles for Issue n. 9 (2026) is now open.

Issue n. 9 of the CEIWJ aims to investigate the interdependence of war and peace from the perspective of close encounters. The editors invite the submission of articles investigating the idea of peace, broadly understood, to include the absence of war but also being against war from a vast spectrum of theoretical and critical perspectives in the fields of Cultural History, Memory Studies, Modern Languages, Oral History, Philosophy of Language, Postcolonial Studies, Psychology, Religion, Social Sciences, Ethics, Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media Studies, Gender Studies, History of Art, History of Ideas, Curriculum Studies, Linguistics, and Trauma Studies.

The editors encourage the blending of different approaches. Contributions from established scholars, early-career researchers, doctoral students, and practitioners will be considered. Case studies that include different geographic areas and non-Western contexts are warmly welcome.

The editors of the CEIWJ invite the submission of abstracts of 250 words in English by 1 March 2026 to ceiwj@nutorevelli.org. The authors invited to submit their works will be required to send articles of 8,000-10,000 words (endnotes included, bibliographical references not included in word count), in English by 20 May 2026. All articles will undergo a process of double-blind peer review. We will notify you of the results of the review in September 2026. Final versions of revised articles will be submitted in autumn 2026. All manuscripts must adhere to the Journal’s style-sheet available at  https://closeencountersinwar.org/instruction-for-authors-submissions/.

Download the Call for Articles in PDF

“Boots”. A short story by DC Diamondopolous

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Common Creatives CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The same sun scorched downtown Los Angeles that had seared the Iraq desert. Army Private First Class Samantha Cummings stood at attention holding a stack of boxes, her  unwashed black hair slicked back in a ponytail and knotted military style. She stared out from Roberts Shoe Store onto Broadway, transfixed by a homeless man with hair and scraggly beard the color of ripe tomatoes. She’d only seen that hair color once before, on Staff Sergeant Daniel O’Conner.

      The man pushed his life in a shopping cart crammed with rags and stuffed trash bags. He glanced at Sam through the storefront window, his bloated face layered with dirt. His eyes had the meander of drink in them.

      Sam hoped hers didn’t. Since her return from Bagdad a year ago, her craving for alcohol sneaked up on her like an insurgent. Bathing took effort. She ate to exist. Friends disappeared. Her life started to look like the crusted bottom of her shot glass.

      The morning hangover began its retreat to the back of her head.

      The homeless man vanished down Broadway. She carried the boxes to the storeroom.

      In 2012, Sam passed as an everywoman: white, black, brown, Asian. She was a coffee colored Frappuccino. Frap. That’s what the soldiers nicknamed her. Her mother conceived her while on ecstasy during the days of big hair and shoulder pads. On Sam’s eighteenth birthday, she enlisted in the Army. She wanted a job and an education. But most of all she wanted to be part of a family…

Read the short story as a PDF

“Lioness”. Flash Fiction

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By Scott Rye

It wasn’t so much that Betty Lynn Campbell was pretty. She wasn’t. But there was something about her. On her best days, she bore a slight resemblance to a young Meryl Streep. Probably the Polish genes inherited from her mother. No, Betty Lynn wasn’t pretty. What she was, though, was a dude magnet. She was never going to be Homecoming Queen, but she was popular with the football players. Slut? Whore? Easy? Nobody ever used those words, exactly, when describing Betty Lynn. “Animal magnetism”, maybe. That’s what she had, they said. And it was true that she seemed to exude some sort of literal magnetism: Betty Lynn was unable to wear a watch because it would stop working within a day or two of putting it on. Doctors were at a loss to explain the phenomenon…

Read the full story here

Book Review: “The European Art Market and the First World War. Art, Capital, and the Decline of the Collecting Class, 1910-1925” by Maddalena Alvi, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2025

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By Gianluca Cinelli

The relationship between art and the First World War is often looked at by focusing on how the conflict encouraged the emergence of novel and original subjects and styles, both in literature and the arts. However, the aesthetic aspects only reveal one aspect of the relationship between armed conflicts and artistic activity. Maddalena Alvi, a young scholar at the University of Manchester, approached this topic from a different perspective. Instead of considering how the conflict affected the poetics and creativity of European artists, Alvi focuses on the art market, thus shifting the axis of the investigation to the field of cultural economy. This phrase means that culture, including art and its market, is part of the economic life of societies, and as such, it played a paramount role in the war economy between 1914 and 1918. Alvi’s book, therefore, focuses on the cultural and ideological implications of trading art in Europe between 1910 and 1925.

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The Legacy of the Second World War in the Memory of Italian Americans

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Memo-AmIt Oral History Project

The Memo-AmIt project, realised by Dr Gianluca Cinelli and Dr Patrizia Piredda as a part of the MemoGen Project with the support of the Ragusa Foundation (New York), is collecting video interviews with Italian Americans born between 1965 and 1985, to understand how the legacy of the conflict has influenced the identity and self-perception of the Italian American community, how it has imprinted the narrative of the war within families and smaller communities, and how it has contributed to reshaping the perception of Italy in post-war America.

Italian American soldiers played a fundamental role in transforming the image of Italians in the United States. In addition, many Italian Americans could reconnect with their ancestral origins by fighting in Italy. Finally, the direct involvement of the second-generation Americans in the Vietnam War influenced the connection between the third generation and the Second World War.

People born approximately between 1965 and 1985 who identify as Italian Americans and want to participate as interviewees can visit the website of the Memo-AmIt project and get in touch with Dr Gianluca Cinelli (giancin77@yahoo.it) for further information.

The corpus of video interviews will constitute a relevant source for understanding Italian-American relations from 1945 to the present day. The interviews will explore themes such as the importance of grandparents’ legacy for personal development and moral education, immigration, integration, multiculturalism, ethical values, the role of education in the development of critical thinking, the damaging effects of propaganda and fake news, the perception of Italy and the legacy of other American wars (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan) and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Finally, the concepts of freedom and democracy as bridges between the past and present are explored.

Today, in the face of the international crisis that the Western world is experiencing, oral history focused on the topicality of the Second World War and its legacy can provide valuable insights to understand and re-evaluate the point of view of Italian Americans, their self-perception and the meaning of Italy in their cultural imagination. Recording video interviews will allow us to investigate a target group that scholars have not considered in previous oral history projects regarding the legacy of the Second World War. Memo-AmIt, therefore, represents an important step in the exploration of the cultural ties between Americans and Italians in relation to one of the major historical events of the twentieth century, which shaped the relations between the two countries and their cultures for decades.

“Shared in Shards”:  Fragments from the War in Ukraine.

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Review of Oksana Maksymchuk’s Still City, Diary of an Invasion

By Sarah Montin

“Are they there yet?” is the question haunting Oksana Maksymchuk’s debut collection in English which chronicles the period just before and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Exiled in the US since the 1990’s, author of two poetry collections in Ukrainian and the celebrated co-translator of Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk and The Voices of Babyn Yar by Marianna Kiyanovska, Oksana Maksymchuk returned to her hometown of Lviv just before Russia launched its “special operation” on 24th February 2022. Poised for war, Maksymchuk’s poetic Diary of an Invasion is frozen in the expectation of violence, hushed in the anxiogenic stillness of “things to come/waiting to be unwrapped” (When a Missile Finds a Home).

“Snow is a strange white word” wrote British war poet Isaac Rosenberg as he learned of Great Britain’s entrance in the war in August 1914 and witnessed the winter of the world closing in: “Ice and frost and snow / From earth to sky / This summer land does know / No man knows why” (On Receiving the First News of the War).

More than a hundred years later, the cover of Still City, featuring snow-laden roofs against a white sky and a drone-like bird frozen mid-air suggests in the same manner the looming Homeric “white ruin” of war under the false serenity of snow. It also materializes the force lines that shape the collection (and perhaps war poetry in general) – namely the symbolic and formal dialectic between stillness and movement, expansion and concentration, abstraction and figuration…

Continue reading the review here

The Legacy of the Vietnam War in a Poem: “Market Day” by Karly Randolph Pitman

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When I visit my parents in the Cleveland suburbs, my 81-year-old father and I go to the West Side Market. The market is a Cleveland landmark, and has served produce, meats, bakery items, and prepared foods in an old, beautiful brick building for over a hundred years.

My dad goes to the market every week to pick up his beef, a loaf of wheat bread, and a treat or two – shrimp dip, gyro sandwiches, or apple strudel. He wears his “Vietnam Vet” baseball hat and people come up to thank him for his service – a strong contrast to his experience coming home from the war in 1970.

I’d long wanted to honor my dad and his war experience by writing a poem about our market trips. Then a few years ago, I worked with a therapist who asked me a surprising question – “Did you know you carry your dad’s fear from the war in your nervous system?” That left me weeping in the truth of it, and in relief. And it left me wondering what I could do to help ease our pain…

Read the full story and Market Day poem here

Karly Randolph Pitman is a writer, teacher, poet, presenter, and mental health facilitator who helps people nurture a more compassionate relationship with their struggles. She creates books, courses, presentations and trainings to bring insight to our human vulnerabilities, especially food suffering like overeating. In addition to her healing work, Karly is a published poet, writes a reader supported poetry newsletter, O Nobly Born, offers writing and mindfulness workshops to nurture self-awareness and self-compassion, and works with teens as a teacher and tutor. She lives in Austin, Texas with her family where she takes her sweet dog on leisurely bike rides and creates as much as possible with her hands. In all she remains in awe of the human heart.