Writing Yourself Home: US Veterans, Creative Writing, and Social Activism

Abstract

(2010) earned the Rolf Kentner Prize of the Heidelberg Center for American Studies and was published in 2015. His latest project, Ceremonial Storytelling, explores civic rituals and post-9/11 firsthand narratives written by US soldiers and veterans. Usbeck currently serves as Research Scientist at the State Ethnographic Collections Saxony, Germany.

Empowering Female [Student] Veterans through Community Writing and Experiential Learning in the Classroom

“…Authentic publication prospects such as these motivated the female veterans to work diligently on their pieces to eventually share it with civilians who likely had limited knowledge about the female military experience, and to help explicate the diversity of military experience in general, through their writing. Veteran community writing groups have been proven effective due to their ability to nurture veterans' contact with civilian society and help veterans speak out about their experience without steering their writing through a particular political agenda or trying to mold their recollections to "align with a master narrative about what war [is] supposed to mean to US society" (Usbeck, 2018). Many of the female veterans who participated in the group already had authentic writing in process in the forms of blogs, partial memoir drafts, or collections of poems.…”