Veteran Writers' Workshop

Military veterans and the military adjacent have had multiple experiences worth writing about. Often putting these experiences into words to form a narrative arc within personal essays and other forms of writing can accomplish several objectives, from helping family members and people back home better understand what they’ve gone through, to even helping sort out the complex emotions that can accompany serving in the military, whether at home or abroad. In this course, you ’ll learn how to express your experiences as coherent narratives, for personal essays and other forms of writing, determining how best to tell stories from your time serving, whether as memoir, opinion pieces, factual reporting, personal essay or a creative piece, and what level of emotion to include. We will cover ways to improve description, set a sense of place, examine the role of dialogue, including internal dialogue, how to explain a scene to those unfamiliar with what you plan to describe as well as how to connect emotionally with readers as you create a compelling narrative that will pull them through the page and keep them wanting to know more. With the use of lectures, conversations, short paired readings and writing assignments, along with group script readings and analysis through this fast-paced three-hour practical workshops, you will get firsthand experience writing personal essays and other works that can stand on their own or become part of a much larger project.