An Iraq War veteran clutched a piece of paper with both hands, about to read aloud the story of his wartime experience to two dozen strangers.
He stepped up to the lectern in a top-floor room of the MacArthur Museum of Military History, rested the paper on its lip and addressed the crowd.
"Thank you, good afternoon. My name is Justin Fisher," he started. "I'll be reading an excerpt from my essay, 'The Curse of Freedom.'"
Fisher, a member of the Arkansas Army National Guard, was one of four students enrolled in a new course held in conjunction with Pulaski Technical College and the MacArthur Museum that challenged veterans and service members to share stories from their military service through creative writing.
On April 25, Fisher, 34, and two other students presented excerpts from their personal essays during a panel that was part of the Arkansas Literary Festival.
In a steady, well-practiced voice, Fisher read his prose, describing for the group a day of heavy combat in Baghdad in 2004.
He talked about hearing the "screams of comrades being hit by explosions" as he ran through the city, trying to find a place to take cover. He said he witnessed a fellow soldier shoot a boy, about 10 years old, who was coming at his platoon with a grenade and "rage in his eyes."
And later, he recounted feeling no emotional connection to his surroundings, "no satisfaction or sadness, victory or defeat," and insisted he was just doing his job.
It was the first time he had written about his military service.
"I wanted to write about the people who ... we just did our jobs and came back," Fisher told the crowd after his reading. "Combat and deployment will change you because you're outside of your comfort zone, but I didn't have any adjustment issues. A lot of people were expecting me to need help, and I was like, 'I really don't.'"
"I did my job," he continued. "I went back to work. This is what I do."
A course description says the aim of the class, titled "Creative (Nonfiction) Writing for Veterans" is to establish a setting in which veterans feel comfortable sharing experiences from their military service.
Pat Hoy, one of two professors teaching the course, said writing their stories helped the students in this semester's class "make sense" of what they've experienced.
"It also equips them to enter into conversations with people like you about those experiences," Hoy said.
Besides Fisher, the crowd at the literary festival heard from Jake Tidmore, a U.S. Army veteran who served in the Vietnam War, and Roderick Billings, currently a staff sergeant in the Army.
Tidmore, 65, wrote about a cold evening in the mid-1970s when he hitchhiked the approximately 350 miles from Fort Polk, La., to see his wife and son in Little Rock.
Billings, 47, read an excerpt about his first deployment in 1990 to Saudi Arabia -- about his homesickness and isolation.
When asked during a question-and-answer period about how he chose the topic for his essay, Billings answered, "My story just picked me. I didn't pick it."
The idea for the course started with Hoy, an Army veteran from the Vietnam War who is a visiting English professor at Hendrix College in Conway and has taught writing at Harvard, New York University, and his alma mater, the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y. He asked the director of the MacArthur Museum last summer about establishing a local veterans writing workshop.
About the same time, the Arkansas Council for the Humanities made available a grant to fund something that would "give veterans a voice," said Paul Austin, the council's executive director. The grant was part of a nationwide initiative through the National Endowment for the Humanities called "Standing Together: The Humanities and the Experience of War."
Along with Rachel Miller, an instructor at Pulaski Tech who is on the staff at the MacArthur Museum, Hoy organized and taught the course for the first time this semester.
It wrapped up Thursday, when the students turned in the final drafts of their essays, and it will be offered again in the fall.
The course is offered free to veterans, service members or their spouses. Students who enroll through Pulaski Tech can receive three credit hours at no charge.
Though they expected enrollment to be low for its first semester, Miller said organizers are "hoping it will get a good response," on its second go-round. The two teachers want to enroll 10-15 students.
"When they told me they had four students, I was like, 'Four?'" Austin said. "But I was really impressed about what they had. And this is just the beginning."
Besides the course, Arkansas Humanities Council grants will fund a week-long veterans writing retreat at the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center in Piggott, and it will start a veterans writing workshop at North Arkansas College in Harrison.
The council will also soon hold a series of readings and discussions across the state centered on military writing.
Veterans-focused writing workshops are now offered by various organizations all over the country, and many contend that creative writing has mental and emotional benefits for those who have served in the armed forces.
The Veterans Health Administration, which has 150 medical centers and 1,400 clinics across the U.S., uses creative writing, as well as art, music, drama and dance as supplemental therapy for patients.
According to the Veterans Health Administration, the arts are used to distract and relax patients who have chronic illnesses, retrain brain cognition in those who have suffered traumatic brain injuries, motivate all patients to become engaged in treatment, provide emotional support, and offer an outlet for emotional expression.
"There are tons and tons of goals, objectives and cognitive benefits," said Alyssa Welch, a recreational therapist at Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System in Little Rock.
Austin, who is also a veteran, said he thinks the benefits go both ways.
The course can serve as an outlet to veterans and service members, like Fisher, who had never talked about their experiences with the larger community, he said. And the public can learn from what they have to say.
"I thought his voice was particularly important for people to hear," Austin said of Fisher's presentation.
"It's just a recognition that maybe the American public is not as engaged as they have been in the past with their soldiers. It's almost like we're removed from what these soldiers are doing at our behest, and this is the opportunity to give voice to those we haven't heard from before.
"I think we owe more to our veterans than simply telling them, 'Thank you for your service,'" he continued. "I think we owe a lot more. One of the things we owe them is our ear -- giving them the time and opportunity to talk to us."
Metro on 05/03/2015