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Dripping Springs native writes new book about his fight against ISIS

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Dripping Springs native Warren Stoddard fought ISIS in Syria. Three years later, he published a book about it.

Stoddard was born and raised in Dripping Springs, going on to attend Texas State University in nearby San Marcos. Although he wanted to join the military, football injuries prevented him from enlisting. Instead, he found another way to serve, discovering an old Reddit thread with an email address for the YPG, a Kurdish militia.

Following his graduation in the summer of 2018, Stoddard traveled to Syria to join the YPG in their fight against the Islamic State. He first fought against ISIS in Hajin (along the Euphrates River) and was later wounded in action in Deir ez-Zor, returning to the U.S. within the year.

Back on American soil, Stoddard focused his energy on writing, publishing numerous short stories. His short story "The Way of the World" was the winner of the 2018 Gates-Thomas Prize for Fiction, and "When This Plane Lands" was listed as Notable Literary Nonfiction in Best American Essays: 2021.

His first book and motorcycle-oriented western, No Birds in Yesterday, was published in March.

However, Stoddard’s real passion project came with the publication of his second book, A Good Place on the Banks of the Euphrates, in late November. The book is the first and only published literary fiction concerning the YPG’s war in Syria.

A Good Place tells the story of international volunteers through intertwined works of short fiction, memoir, and journal entries from Stoddard’s time in Syria. It explores what calls humans to war, and what war, no matter how just the cause, does to those who fight it.

For him, this was a way to ensure the Syrian civil war was not forgotten. “If you don’t really have anything in literature, it doesn’t really exist in history,” he explained. “Especially nowadays, we’ve gotten into this isolationist mode in the United States where it’s ‘not my backyard, not my problem.’ I wanted people to realize what’s going on out there and be informed.”

While he intended the project to be informative, Stoddard said the project was a form of catharsis for him.

“Writing it was kind of like a weight-shedding experience, reliving specific thoughts and thought processes,” he explained. “It was kinda therapeutic, in a sense, to be fully in it for so long again.”

Although Stoddard tried to return to Syria in October of 2019, he has been unable to return thus far.

In the meantime, Stoddard said he plans to continue writing literature about war, continuing to inform his readers about various conflicts.

“I’d like to write something about Afrin or the Turkish occupation,” he said. “No one seems to really understand the entire history and all the really terrible things that have gone on between Turkey and the Kurds.”

“I don’t know if it’s that people have grown apathetic because they see so many bad things in the news or what, but we all need to realize that these things concern us,” Stoddard added.

For more information, visit warrenstoddard.com.

San Marcos Record

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P.O. Box 1109, San Marcos, TX 78666