Captain Van brings concurrent global yet intimate perspectives on core conflicts and contradictions that our society navigates. Her inquiries bring truly singular literary form and voice to complex conversations that often exist beyond the gaze of dominant hegemonic thinking – about gender, the military, and the tectonic Venn diagram where those prismatic and often enigmatic identities meet. Outsider culture is insider culture, and vice versa in Van’s writing. She creates windows and doors within the confines of airless spaces, offering bracing inhalations of fresh air where such opportunities to breathe are least expected.
Murmurator Onophria Ixtlán
SCRY Magazine and S.C.R.Y. (Scry Creative Residencies) are delighted and honored to announce the inaugural SCRY Fellow, Reinetta “Van” Vaneendenburg (Captain, U.S. Navy, Ret.) who will be working in the field of Literature and Intermedia Art during Winter 2023. Captain Van brings concurrent global yet intimate perspectives on core conflicts and contradictions that our society navigates. Her inquiries bring truly singular literary form and voice to complex conversations that often exist beyond the gaze of dominant hegemonic thinking – about gender, the military, and the tectonic Venn diagram where those prismatic and often enigmatic identities meet. Outsider culture is insider culture, and vice versa in Van’s writing. She creates windows and doors within the confines of airless spaces, offering bracing inhalations of fresh air where such opportunities to breathe are least expected.
Interrupting categories and disturbing all cliches she encounters, Van’s work surrounds issues such as identity and historical perspective in hybrid forms. Her perspective is visual as well as verbal, and introduces image and graphics to her essays, poems, creative nonfiction, and hybrid form prose. Hers is a seasoned journey of surprises that she greets with curiosity as well as the searingly dry wit of concern.
For her SCRY residency, Captain Van is documenting the transition of women in uniform from support to warfighter roles, drawing on her own and others’ military experiences. Van served as an analyst and historian during her thirty-plus year naval career, retiring as a captain. Her contributions to society, national security, and literature form a substantial body of work in both the private and public worlds.
Van has an MS from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Creative Writing from Old Dominion University. She is a National Endowment for the Arts fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has presented a core workshop at &NOW at University of Washington.
A Jersey girl, she worked summers on Ford Motor Company’s assembly line and, after living oversees three times and visiting thirty countries, calls Norfolk, Virginia, home.
