For many years, writers in the Boston area were able to attend summer writing workshops organized by the William T. Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at UMass Boston. (A long name, every word important.)
Many (but not all) of the Center’s founders and other workshop mentors had served in Vietnam; many (but not all) of the participants were either veterans or relatives of veterans. A lot of important mutual support—and important writing—flourished in those classrooms and auditoriums and courtyards.
I knew about the Joiner, and knew I needed it. As the daughter of a World War II veteran, and the wife of a Vietnam-era conscientious objector, I had carried around, for years, a complicated set of questions, contradictions, worries, old sorrows. But my teaching schedule conflicted with the workshop schedule, year after year.
Finally, after retiring from classroom teaching, I was lucky to catch the last five years of the workshops, to meet and work and talk with Fred Marchant, Martha Collins, Nguyen Ba Chung, Lady Borton, Danielle Legros Georges, Bruce Weigl, Kevin Bowen, Martin Espada, and visiting writers from Viet Nam. (That last group included women who had lived through the war years, with whom I was able to talk via Nguyen Ba Chung’s translations.) I began to sort things out with other peace activists, veterans of several different wars, and close relatives of veterans—all listening to each other and writing up a storm.
Those years in the workshops were enormously helpful to me, and I cherished what they meant to so many others. But then, mysteriously, UMass reduced its funding and redefined the guiding policy of the Center—and the writing workshops ceased to exist.
While they were still happening, and I was still directly involved, I wrote about the workshops themselves in two contexts:
First, I wrote posts for my blog about teaching, at ayeartothinkitover.com. Here are the links to a couple of those posts:
My father died the spring after my first summer at the Joiner. Grateful for the Joiner Center’s help in my preparation for that loss, help that was indirect but very real, I wrote about the workshops again, this time an essay for WBUR’s Cognoscenti series:
Years after the workshops ceased, many other writers besides me continue to miss their supportive, challenging, and centering environment. Our world needs much more of that kind of mutual and creative effort of both mind and heart. From the mentors, and from each other, we were learning ways our creative work could encompass profound challenges: war, racism, substance abuse. We could see the ways these troubles, and their broken narratives, cast shadows from generation to generation, and we were learning how to lighten those shadows.
Even before I attended my first Joiner workshop, I had been trying to write poems exploring what little I knew about my father’s experience, and the workshops helped me continue that with more traction and more clarity. But also—gradually, increasingly, and still—I’ve been drawn to focus on the impact of war on noncombatants—on wives (including my mother), children, even co-workers years later; but also on the women and children directly in harm’s way as a war thrashes through villages and cities.
Not all those poems have been published, but both my chapbooks, and both books, include poems seeking to understand the “social consequences” of war in various ways. In Stitching, my most recent book, the whole second section owes its existence to the Joiner.
Eventually I want to put some of those poems on this page, and also to write more about some writers whose work I’m still following, as all of us move forward, finding our way, the best we can, through the challenges of the present.
To the people I came to know through the Joiner workshops: if any of you find your way here, and read this, please hear and know my thanks!
Polly Brown / Poet 