The Writer's Center and the National Intrepid Center of Excellence

The Writer's Center Provides Program Support To National Endowment for the Arts' Operation Homecoming Writing Program at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center

Expressive writing will be part of healing protocol for returning troops

“Trauma comes through the senses, and art can heal through the senses,” said an audience member at the recent National Summit: Arts in Healing for Warriors at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

For the first time, the National Endowment for the Arts’ critically acclaimed Operation Homecoming writing program will take place in a clinical setting as part of a formal medical protocol to help heal service members at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE) at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The NICoE is a new facility that provides an interdisciplinary team assessment in a holistic, patient- and family-centered environment, and is dedicated to providing care to service members and their families dealing with the signature wounds from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Psychological Health (PH) conditions.

Over a year-long pilot phase, Operation Homecoming at the NICoE will consist of two elements: an expressive writing workshop for troops as part of their clinical rehabilitation, and a more informal four-week creative writing and storytelling series for service members and their families at the Fisher House, the residence for families and patients at Walter Reed. These creative writing sessions will be led by writers with military experience or previous experience working with the military community. After the pilot phase, Operation Homecoming at the NICoE will be evaluated for possible replication at other rehabilitation centers around the country.

Operation Homecoming is a landmark partnership between the NEA and the Department of Defense. The program is being conducted with programmatic support from The Writer’s Center. Operation Homecoming has been sponsored by a partnership with NEA and The Boeing Company since its inception in 2004. The Boeing Company will support Operation Homecoming programs at Fisher House.

“The National Endowment for the Arts is honored to partner with the Department of Defense to incorporate Operation Homecoming creative writing workshops into sessions with patients and families at this state-of-the-art healing center,” said NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman. “There are strong indications that expressive writing and other forms of arts engagement can play an important role in improving the health and well-being of service men and women. Now it’s our duty to test and advance those practices that prove to be most effective, and a world class treatment and research institute like the NICoE is exactly the place to do just that.”
“Art makes a difference in the quality of life for our wounded warriors and those around them,” said Rear Admiral Alton L. Stocks, Commander of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. “Operation Homecoming will be a welcome addition to NICoE’s innovative treatments for returning troops and a positive expressive outlet for their families.”

Operation Homecoming writing workshops will be integrated into the NICoE’s groundbreaking, interdisciplinary approach to working with patients and their families. This holistic approach ranges from physical and neurological exams, to family evaluation, nutrition, alternative medicine, and art therapy. The NICoE’s Healing Arts program uses art therapies such as visual arts, mask making, and other art forms to give troops a creative outlet for their experiences.

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience was created in 2004 by the NEA to help U.S. troops and their families write about their wartime experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, and stateside. Between 2004 and 2009, Operation Homecoming conducted more than 60 writing workshops for troops and veterans at military installations, writers centers, and military medical centers. A global call for submissions from troops and families resulted in an anthology and an archive housed at the Library of Congress. The program produced educational resources on creative writing, and inspired two award-winning documentaries.

For more information, visit www.operationhomecoming.gov

About the National Endowment for the Arts

The National Endowment for the Arts was established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. To date, the NEA has awarded more than $4 billion to support artistic excellence, creativity, and innovation for the benefit of individuals and communities. The NEA extends its work through partnerships with state arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the philanthropic sector. To join the discussion on how art works, visit the NEA at www.arts.org.

About The Writer’s Center

The Writer's Center cultivates the creation, publication, presentation, and dissemination of literary work. We are an independent literary organization with a global reach, rooted in a dynamic community of writers. As one of the premier centers of our kind in the country, we believe the craft of writing is open to people of all backgrounds and ages. Writing is interdisciplinary and unique among the arts for its ability to touch on all aspects of the human experience. It enriches our lives and opens doors to knowledge and understanding. Visit our Web site at www.writer.org. The Writer's Center is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cafritz Foundation, The Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, and by a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Writer's Center gratefully acknowledges assistance received from the Cultural Alliance of Greater Washington's Business Volunteers for the Arts Program.

Jim Mathews on the Importance of a Clear 'Inciting Incident'

Have you ever started reading a short story (or started writing one) where the prose is flawless and the characters believable but halfway through you realize…you’re just reading flawless prose with believable characters? I mean, don’t we already have that in real life (give or take a flaw)? And isn’t that why people turn to fiction? To get something they can’t get from life? Or from a well-written newspaper article?

Chances are what’s probably missing is a clear “inciting incident,” the precise moment where your protagonist’s routine is interrupted, setting him or her on an upward path of tension and complication, toward that all important climax and, one hopes, a fully satisfying denouement. In other words, a plot.

If you consider the Aristotelian plot model – or “bell curve on acid” as a workshop instructor once termed it – the inciting incident should occur early, at the starting edge of the curve, at a point where the story’s tension separates from the linear and spikes upward on a jagged ascent to the climax. It is the break from the routine, the ordinary. More important, it signals to your readers that they are not going to be reading a character study or even a flawless character study, but a story. They are going to read about a character whose life or immediate circumstances have dramatically changed. Everything that happened before the inciting incident is the “ordinary world” (the world we all share and know and read about in newspapers) while everything that happens after the inciting incident is the fiction we crave to escape from the ordinary world.

One prime benefit of a crystal clear inciting incident is that when you do begin to apply flesh and add background to your characters, even their routine (whether in flashbacks or exposition) takes on added heft for the reader.

In my workshop, through reading assignments and critiques, we spend time learning to spot the inciting incident and then ask, is it in the right place? Has the writer waited too long to introduce it? Has the writer given readers a clear picture of what’s different about the protagonist’s today (the extraordinary) compared to his or her yesterday (the ordinary)?

Being the clumsy writer that I am, I usually stumble upon my inciting incident halfway through a story draft – which explains a Rubbermaid container in my den filled with, er, story drafts! Try not to make this mistake. In a short story, the absolute best place for the inciting incident is, in my opinion, the very first sentence or at least the first paragraph; for a novel, your readers should at least get a whiff of it in the first paragraph or by the end of the first chapter.

Here’s a great example of an inciting incident from the T. Coraghessan Boyle’s short story, “King Bee”:

"In the mail that morning there were two solicitations for life insurance, a coupon from the local car wash promising “100% Brushless Wash,” four bills, three advertising flyers, and a death threat from his ex-son, Anthony."

What you’ve just read is the story’s first sentence, complete with a clear and compelling (if disturbing) inciting incident. Boyle could have spent several paragraphs describing a day in the life of Ken -- Anthony’s father and our intrepid protagonist -- perhaps by showing him shuffle down the driveway in bathrobe and slippers, grumbling about his neighbor’s shabby lawn, casting a wave at his wife who is hunched over a patch of petunias in the front garden. We would have read it, of course, because Boyle’s such an exquisite craftsman. But that would have been time and energy wasted on the ordinary world and Boyle understands we’ve come to him to escape all that. So he immediately delivers the moment where Ken’s ordinary world has ended and his new normal begins.

But what about a much longer work? Here’s another Boyle opening (full disclosure--I’ve been a rabid Boyle fan ever since I figured out how to pronounce his middle name!) from his novel The Tortilla Curtain:

"Afterward, he tried to reduce it to abstract terms, an accident in a world of accidents, the collision of opposing forces – the bumper of his car and the frail scrambling hunched-over form of a dark little man with a wild look in his eye – but he wasn’t very successful. This wasn’t a statistic in an actuarial table tucked away in a drawer somewhere, this wasn’t random and impersonal. It had happened to him, Delaney Mossbacher, of 32 Pinon Drive, Arroyo Blanco Estates, a liberal humanist with an unblemished driving record and a freshly waxed Japanese car with personalized plates, and it shook him to the core. Everywhere he turned he saw those red-flecked eyes, the rictus of the mouth, the rotten teeth and the incongruous shock of gray in the heavy black brush of a mustache – they infested his dreams, cut through his waking hours like a window on another reality. He saw his victim in a book of stamps at the post office, reflected in the blameless glass panels of the gently closing twin doors at Jordan’s elementary school, staring up at him from his omelette aux fines herbes at Emilio’s in the shank of the evening.

The whole thing had happened so quickly…"

Again, Boyle could have spent more time showing us Delaney’s life, perhaps introduce his wife in a scene or his spoiled kids or insufferably nosey neighbors, but that’s Delaney’s ordinary world and, no matter how well-written, what fun would that be?

Not every inciting incident has to be as intense as a death threat or hit-and- run (unless you’re Boyle, of course!). And there are always exceptions to every rule – especially in fiction. But a clear inciting incident is usually key to a good read – and the start of an extraordinary relationship with your reader.

James Mathews is the workshop leader for Building a Page Turner, which will take place Wednesdays from 7-9:30 p.m. at TWC from 10/19 to 12/7. You can sign up for his workshop here.

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James Mathews is a graduate of The Johns Hopkins University Master of Arts in Writing program. He is the author of Last Known Position, a short story collection and winner of the 2008 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. His fiction has appeared in many literary journals. He is also the recipient of a number of fiction awards, including three Maryland State Arts Council grants (1999, 2006, and 2010). His Web site is www.jamesmathewsonline.com.

The Writer's Toolbox: Your Writer Questions Answered

So here's this week's question (and if you have questions you'd like answered by workshop leaders or our favorite writers, let me know by e-mailing me at kyle.semmel@writer.org).

How do I get a publisher or an agent for a collection of short stories?

James Mathews, alum, workshop leader, and author of the Katherine Anne Porter prize-winning collection Last Known Position:

One of the best tracks to follow for a collection is to first get as many stories as possible published individually - in literary or other competitive journals. This greatly increases your chances of landing a publisher or agent as it demonstrates the prose has already been, in a sense, peer-reviewed.

Matthew Pitt, Spring 2011 Emerging Writer Fellow (who'll be reading at Story/Stereo on March 4). He will also lead a one-day short fiction workshop at TWC called "Openers, for Openers":

There’s no short answer to this. But the shortest answer I know—write/revise with unwavering dedication, and be lucky, and have a completed novel in your drawer—seems both true and glib. A longer answer is the "how" differs from writer to writer, project to project, and is a moving target, depending on what particular agents and publishers are seeking at a given time.

So here's a beginning strategy. Read a lot of collections, from publishers large and small. Not only to support fellow writers, but to absorb as much about voice, craft and technique as possible. Think about the collections/writers on your shelves you most admire, or feel your work most resembles. See if they mention their agents in the acknowledgments. If so, query those agents. If you admire a collection with a small publisher, go to the website: many modest-sized publishers will allow writers to submit portions of their work at specified times. Others will hold contests, offering monetary prizes, travel grants, and, best of all, publication.

Leslie Pietrzyk, another alumni-turned-workshop leader at TWC, Pietrzyk has published two critically acclaimed novels, Pears on A Willow Tree, and A Year and a Day:

Story collections are notoriously hard to sell, so make sure your stories have been published first in excellent journals. Most agents aren’t interested in story collections (unless you also have a novel), but you can enter your ms. in contests run by small/university presses. Best list of legit contests: http://www.pw.org/content/writing_contests_0 Best database of small presses to query: http://www.pw.org/small_presses?apage=* And if you want to look for an agent to query anyway, here’s a good place to begin: http://www.agentquery.com/

Leslie blogs at Work-in-Progress.

Last Known Position: An Interview with James Mathews

This post originally appeared on Jan. 19, 2009. I'm re-posting it because tomorrow James Mathews will be part of the Muse of Fire roundtable discussion at The Writer's Center. (He was also the workshop leader of the Operation Homecoming workshop that just concluded.) Tomorrow's event should be terrific. In addition to Mathews, others included in the program are Jon Peede of the NEA, poet/activist Writer's Center board member, and author of the recent memoir The Fifth Inning E. Ethelbert Miller, and two members of the workshop: Bob Johnson and Carolyn Schapper. It should be a great time. The screening starts at 7p.m. and the documentary runs about 50 minutes. For more information or to register for this free event, click here.

How many years did it take for you to write Last Known Position? And did you consciously sit down to write a collection?

Most of the stories were written after September 2001. Following the 9/11 attacks, I found myself activated for long stretches which is why many of the stories deal with military characters and subjects. Because of these similarities, I anticipated pulling them into a collection but I don’t think I wrote any individual story with the idea that it had to connect with another. Also, although each of the stories is self-contained, they examine desperate characters under extreme pressure – sometimes to the point of lunacy – which was reflective of where I was creatively.

The story "The Fifth Week" strikes me as a wonderfully innovative short story. Much is packed within its few pages, and readers are left feeling a sense of sadness and frustration for the lives of the characters. But you still manage to make this story funny. How important is the "comic" to your work as a fiction writer?

“The Fifth Week” was actually the only story in the collection that I finished prior to 2001. The setting is the fifth week of basic military training (“boot camp”) which entails the breakdown of the individual and the formation of a team mentality. It can be a brutal physical and mental experience, but it’s also necessary given the nature of the job itself. Just to give you an idea how it can affect people, my flight experienced two suicide attempts during the first two weeks. I felt bad for these individuals, but I also knew that some of these guys could be working with nukes one day so, in a way, you’d rather they crack there than in the field. Anyway, I set out to describe the experience as I remembered it and soon realized that describing it in a story left me at a loss because it’s definitely one of those things that can’t really be described but has to be experienced to be understood. I tried coming at it in a more experimental fashion, using present tense and the ‘we’ narrative and it clicked with me right away.

One of the great things about using humor as a writer – especially the darker variety - is the ability to tap into a character’s subconscious tendencies to be funny. The best humor – I think – is humor that the characters themselves are completely unaware of, but is clear to the reader. It’s important, of course, not to slip into mocking the character because that’s when the curtain drops and the writer intrudes. I don’t always succeed at this, but I’m always shooting for a ‘less writer, more character’ presentation.

Each war of the last century has its storytellers--Ernest Hemingway, James Jones, Norman Mailer, Tim O'Brien, Richard Currey, etc. These writers portrayed lives involved in war. How important is it that the Iraq War finds its storytellers?

Very important. Again, I think there are feelings and issues that can best be conveyed by veterans who have been there, done that. I don’t mean to suggest that gifted non-veterans can’t capture something of value when writing about war or characters in a war setting. I just think there’s an element of the human condition– at least as it relates to combat – that is best conveyed by those who see it and live it, especially after they’ve had time to reflect and understand the experience better. Real-time journaling has its place and there have already been good pieces written, but I really look forward to veterans taking a serious look back on the experience and rendering it into fiction.

You can already see the effects of non-vets trying to convey the experience on film. I’ve personally seen little value in the Iraq war movies that have been made to date. The veterans in these films are usually portrayed as either brutes to be mocked or pawns to be pitied. Very few of the veterans I’ve come across – regardless of their own personal view of the war – would be inclined to take such a cardboard approach to the experience.

What is the difficulty in writing about a war in which the country is currently involved?

Again, I think it’s a question of distance. Some of the best presentations of war are usually written years after the conflict ended. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (10 years after), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (16 years), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (24 years), Richard Currey’s Fatal Light (15 years), and Tobias Wolfe’s In Pharoah’s Army (21 years). I’m sure there are exceptions, but I also think it’s a line-up few can argue with.

There are certain experiences that I’ve had while deployed to Iraq that I can imagine using in a longer work, but it will take time to process them.

What makes writing about the Iraq War different than, say, Vietnam?


Based on conversations with Vietnam vets, I would say that the differences are minimal. Any wartime experience is harsh. When I was deployed in 2003, my ‘home’ was a tent, no running water, no privacy, questionable food, harsh weather, hostile population, and whole lot of “hurry up and wait.” That pretty much sums up most vets’ experience. I think when any writer-veteran observes human behavior under these circumstances – and also while engaged in combat – certain aspects of character and behavior are formed that are especially applicable to good fiction, regardless of whether the setting is a desert or a jungle.

Can you tell us a little about the genesis for the title story: "Last Known Position: 2,000 Feet above the Earth and Descending"?

The first scene in that story describes a horse which has jumped off a cliff and landed in a tree. There the horse is suspended several hundred feet above the ground. My wife’s uncle – who grew up in Peru – told me he had witnessed just such an event as a boy. When I asked him whatever happened to the horse, he said he couldn’t remember but added that “it probably didn’t end well.” I took that small anecdote and ran with it which made for an enjoyable writing experience and, hopefully, a worthy story.

Can you tell us what it was like to win the Katherine Anne Porter Prize?

Great satisfaction for sure, especially after learning that Tom Franklin – a writer whom I admire – was the judge. I’ve been publishing my stories individually for years, but this gave me a chance to see a collection in print. My understanding is that the runner-up for the KAP Prize went on to win the Drue Heinz Literature competition so I feel like I was definitely up against some good competition.


About:
James Mathews grew up in El Paso, Texas as well as a variety of Army bases throughout the country. After active service in the U.S. Air Force, he settled in Maryland with his wife and children.

His fiction has been published in numerous literary magazines including The Florida Review, the Northwest Review, the Greensboro Review, Carolina Quarterly, the Wisconsin Review, the South Carolina Review, and a dozen others. He has been awarded two Maryland State Arts Council Grants for fiction and a number of other awards including the Carolina Quarterly’s Charles B. Wood Award for Distinguished Fiction. He can be found online at www.jamesmathewsonline.com.

The Writer’s Center to Offer Operation Homecoming Writing Workshop to Military Personnel and Their families

Author James Mathews to encourage troops and veterans to share their wartime experiences

Who better to tell the story of the armed forces than the U.S. troops and veterans who have served? That’s the idea behind a free, six-week prose-writing workshop for active duty troops, veterans, and their dependents hosted by The Writer’s Center from April 6 – May 18. The workshops are part of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, a groundbreaking program that documents and preserves the wartime experiences of men and women in uniform and their families. In this latest phase of the program, Operation Homecoming will hold writing workshops for veterans as well as active duty troops at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centers, military hospitals, and affiliated centers in communities around the country. Operation Homecoming is conducted in partnership with the Department of Defense, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Operation Homecoming is made possible by The Boeing Company.

Guest instructor James Mathews, a longtime member of The Writer’s Center, will teach the workshops. Mathews has been deployed overseas a number of times, including two stints in the Middle East and Iraq. And those experiences he explores through his own prizewinning fiction. For Mathews, the opportunity to lead this workshop is a chance to do something for the military community of which he has long played an active role. “I think there are feelings and issues that can best be conveyed by veterans who have been there, done that,” he says.

The workshop will focus primarily on the elements of fiction as a way of conveying this experience, but non-fiction writing is also welcome. Mathews says: “We will explore ways to approach the subject, variations on re-emerging literary themes, and how to make one's own stories ring beyond the personal and particular and reflect a wider emotional range. Topics of interest will include plot, structure, story and character development through action and dialogue, uses of language, and the infusion of tension and conflict, in particular as these elements relate to military themes and settings.”

To help workshop participants give voice to their experiences, each will receive an Operation Homecoming writer’s guide with samples of wartime writing by veterans and civilians along with a CD of audio recordings of war literature from the Civil War to the Vietnam War. Each participant also will receive a copy of the documentary film Muse of Fire, which chronicles the Operation Homecoming writing process with participants and their writing instructors. Workshop host sites will receive copies of the anthology Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families (Random House, 2006/University of Chicago Press, 2008) for use as reference materials during the workshops. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own writings to the workshops.

Since 2004, the NEA Operation Homecoming writing program has collected the stories of U.S. military personnel and their families. With support from The Boeing Company, Operation Homecoming has brought more than 60 writing workshops to troops at more than 30 domestic and overseas military installations from Camp Pendleton in California to USS Carl Vinson in the Persian Gulf and Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. Among the original workshop teachers are distinguished writers Tobias Wolff, Jeff Shaara, Marilyn Nelson, Richard Bausch, Bobbie Ann Mason, Joe Haldeman, Richard Currey Mark Bowden, and E. Ethelbert Miller.


What: Operation Homecoming Writing Workshop
When: April 6-May 18, 2009 (6 sessions); 7:00-9:30 (no meeting April 20)
Where: The Writer’s Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, MD 20815
Workshop leader: James Mathews, Iraq War veteran and Katherine Anne Porter Prize-winning author of the collection Last Known Position.
Who: The workshop is designed for armed service members currently serving in the military, military veterans, and dependents of military service men and women (veterans or active duty). The workshop will benefit active duty and reservist service-members, as well as veterans, who currently reside in the Bethesda area.
Registration: This workshop is limited to 16 participants who will be selected on a first come, first served basis.

Interested individuals can register by calling The Writer’s Center at 301.654.8664. We encourage anyone with questions about the workshop to contact us.