It’s not like Danny Lawrence to pass up free education, so signing up for a complimentary writing workshop was a no-brainer.
The U.S. Navy retiree saw the Veterans Summer Writing Workshop at UC Santa Barbara as an opportunity to work on writing skills, something that could come in handy while pursing his MBA at UC Santa Diego.
Getting away to Santa Barbara for a few days of free on-campus food and board didn’t sound bad, either.
What Lawrence hadn’t foreseen was falling into a kind of support group when he arrived.
“I didn’t expect that,” he told Noozhawk this week. “I try to take advantage of everything offered to me. Every veteran has a different story, different background.”
Lawrence joined 27 other student veterans from across the UC System for the inaugural five-day workshop designed to aid in the transition from military to civilian life through narrative writing.
The pilot workshop — happening Saturday through Thursday — is the brainchild of Susan Derwin, director of UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and a professor in the Comparative Literature and Germanic and Slavic Studies departments.
She has hosted a similar quarter-long course for veterans the past four years, drawing from her experience teaching narrative writing as healing.
For the veterans, she said, it’s much more about providing tools to reintegrate them in their new roles as nontraditional college students.
That’s why she applied for a grant through the UC President’s Public Partnerships in the Humanities, gaining support from all 10 UC campuses.
Five instructors experienced with teaching veterans also came on board to guide one of three groups of students, many of which discovered the workshop from fliers or campus Veterans Affairs representatives.
During morning sessions, student veterans talk about the effectiveness of essays they’re written from prompts such as “write about an evocative item of military service.”
Afternoons are reserved for writing and evenings for social events.
“I think it’s going really well,” Derwin said. “It’s an amazing thing to bring veterans together. Writing really is a good outlet.”
After serving as an Army medic for 12 years, Jason Burdick is in his fourth year studying history at UCLA. Already he counts the veteran connections as valuable.
“As an academic writer, it’s very different,” Burdick said of the narrative-writing style. “The support has been overwhelming.”
Derwin said the goal would be to expand the workshop to other campuses as a model that could be replicated nationwide.
“I’d do it again,” Burdick said, sharing the opinion of many fellow veteran students.
— Noozhawk staff writer Gina Potthoff can be reached at gpotthoff@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.