Hosted by NCW Public Libraries, this recurring series gives local authors a chance to connect with their audience.

On Wednesday, Oct 4, Air Force veteran Lauren Kay Johnson will be at the Wenatchee Public Library to discuss her memoir, The Fine Art of Camouflage. Lauren is looking forward to connecting with local veterans, so please plan to stop by for the reading and stick around afterwards to chat.

About The Fine Art of Camouflage:
Lauren Kay Johnson is just seven when she first experiences a sacrifice of war as her mother, a nurse in the Army Reserves, deploys in support of Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. A decade later, in the wake of 9/11, Lauren signs her own military contract and deploys to a small Afghan province with a non-combat nation-building team. Through her role as the team’s information operations officer—the filter between the U.S. military and the Afghan and international publics—and through interviews and letters from her mother’s service, Lauren investigates the role of information in war and in interpersonal relationships, often wrestling with the truth in stories we read and hear from the media and official sources, and in those stories we tell ourselves and our families.

A powerful generational coming-of-age narrative against the backdrop of war, The Fine Art of Camouflage reveals the impact from a child’s perspective of watching her mother leave and return home to a hero’s welcome to that of a young idealist volunteering to deploy to Afghanistan who, war-worn, eventually questions her place in the war, the military, and her family history—and their place within her.

About Lauren K Johnson:
An Afghanistan veteran and former military public affairs officer, Lauren Kay Johnson’s writing has been featured in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Boston Globe Magazine, Glamour, Yale Medicine Magazine, and elsewhere. Her writing and interviews have been used in the creation of dance and theater productions, and she has lectured at schools, conferences, and veteran centers across the country, including the Association of Writers and Writing Programs national conference, the Boston Book Festival, and the University of Iowa. Lauren is a writing consultant with GrubStreet, an editor at the Wrath-Bearing Tree literary journal, and a Program Director for IGNITE Worldwide, a Seattle-based non-profit that aims to combat the gender imbalance in STEM fields. She lives with her husband, twin daughters, and two fat cats outside Seattle.