The New York Times‘s Cecilia Capuzzi Simon recently highlighted the community-building, therapeutic outreach of Military Experience and the Arts in her article, WARRIOR VOICES: Veterans learn to write the words they could not speak. 

In the article, Simon features work from several MEA authors, including Micah Owen, holding these examples up alongside other veteran authors and communities such as Veterans Writing Project’s Ronn Capps and Kate Hoit, and Army of Dude’s Alex Horton:

Mr. Owen’s story for the class — his first attempt at writing, beyond song lyrics — is a dramatic account of his convoy being ambushed in Fallujah. It was published in the first volume of Mr. Martin’s Journal of Military Experience, and it was the first time Mr. Owen’s family had heard about his military service. “I hardly ever spoke about it with them,” he says. “This was a way for my family to know what I had done.”

After reading the story, his mother cried. Mr. Owen urged his father, a Vietnam veteran, to write down the experiences he had never spoken of. At first his father balked. But in the second volume of the journal, there are two Owen essays, one by father and one by son.

he article discusses the use of writing and art as a means of healing in the wake of recent wars with a specific focus on the communities being forged out of the common purpose of creative expression…Read more.