Benjamin Busch, Marine corps veteran and actor on The Wire, will read from his new memoir, Dust to Dust, at 7 p.m. Monday, April 2, in a free Prairie Lights reading streamed live on the University of Iowa Writing University website www.writinguniversity.org.

Dust to Dust is an account of ordinary things: life and death, peace and war, the adventures of childhood and the revelations of adulthood. Busch—the son of celebrated novelist Frederick Busch, who was interim director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the 1970s—divides his account in elemental-themed chapters—water, metal, bone, blood—that weave a record of a pastoral childhood in rural New York; Marine training in North Carolina, Ukraine, and California; and deployment during the worst of the war in Iraq, as seen firsthand.

This is not primarily a war memoir. Busch writes about the resonance of a boyhood spent exploring rivers and woods, building forts, and testing the limits of safety. Most of all, he reflects on mortality: in a helicopter going down, wounded by shrapnel in Ramadi, and the fatalities of combat, but also dealing with the sudden death of parents back home.

For more information or special accommodations to attend this reading, call Jan Weissmiller at Prairie Lights, 319-337-2681.