Writing War in the Classroom: Words After War at Canisius College

by Brian Castner

4 min readJan 5, 2015

A version of this blog post first appeared at Poets & Writers Magazine.

We’re all still learning how to come home from a war. Veterans struggle to readjust, civilians and family wonder how to welcome back their changed loved ones. We shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves; Odysseus had trouble too.

This truism of history still applies: every veteran saw their own war, had their own individual experience, were exposed to their own proportion of terror and transcendence, deal with their own mix of pride and regret. It follows, then, that no one national program or strategy will best welcome home all these men and women.

For some veterans, though, writing helps. Trauma therapy for some, but for most just a human need to share an experience with others. The same could be said for the country at large, of course; narrative helps all of us make sense of our lives.

Students discuss their work during a Words After War writing workshop.

Inclusivity. This is what spurs Words After War to organize workshops and events around the country. Rather than focusing on writing for a small circle of military peers, we instead creates opportunities for veterans and civilians to speak to each other. It’s an effort to bridge the civilian-military divide, one story at a time.

This past semester, with additional support from Poets & Writers, I led a Words After War workshop on the campus of Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. On Tuesday evenings, war was a lens through which to read and write and think about the same topics that have always preoccupied writers. Many traditional workshops use this lens model, we simply considered violence and its aftermath instead of environmentalism or realism or faith or any other typical construct.

There is no good writing without good reading, so we started each session with Whitman or Hemingway or Vonnegut or Klay (who visited our class just weeks before he won the National Book Award). We studied classics, but also new work from Siobhan Fallon and Brian Turner and Hassan Blasim and two post-Vietnam books, Qais Akbar Omar’s A Fort of Nine Towers and Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story. What better way to start than to put great sentences — and moving sentences, jarring sentences, and imperfect sentences, too — in everyone’s ears? An ice-breaker, for the workshopping that followed.

I’d like to think that the strength of our program is to be found in the stories we wrote and the precision and quality of the feedback we provided each other. To judge our success in bridging the civilian-military divide, we could parse the demographics of our group (five veterans/six non-, four women/seven men, three graduates of creative writing programs, three retirees, a lawyer, a photographer, a poet, an anthropology professor, a magazine editor, an author of four books, one that had not written in decades), but I’d rather examine the work we produced.

Brian Castner, author and writing instructor, leads the group in discussion.

Some stories you would expect from a veteran writing group — a nighttime raid in Afghanistan, a day on the gunnery range in basic training — but most may surprise. A dying grandmother who keeps a secret to the end. A son with nightmares while his father fights in Iraq. Travels in Korea. A meditation in a snow-filled graveyard. We workshopped prose poems and flash fiction and chapters from novels and a Civil war biography told through letters. Some stories had a military connection, but plenty did not; grief and love are grief and love, after all.

In short, a veteran writing workshop looks a lot like any other serious literary class, because at the end of the day, we’re all just trying to produce good writing, Hemingway’s one true sentence.