Tim O'Brien

Today I attended a presentation given by the author Tim O'Brien. O'Brien is the author of If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, Going After Cacciato, and ,probably his most notable work, The Things They Carried. He opened up his presentation with a short story about his family. He then began to speak on how important the imagination is to writers and read off several examples of both good and bad ways to grasp the attention of audiences/readers. Throughout the presentation, he tied in several personal examples, and some of these were quite emotional. At the end of his speech, he used another very emotional example that he had used earlier but with a different twist. Overall, you could tell that O'Brien knew how to "get" to the audience by using examples, which I thought, were extremely powerful and real. At times, you could hear his voice tense up when he got to one of these examples and you could feel the audience tense up too. His experience and knowledge is beyond questioning and I think that he would be an interesting teacher to have (every now and then he teaches English here).