Author Maxine Hong Kingston on Working With Veterans

So writing became a container that could hold all my pain. It was like writing was a vessel and I could just keep putting more pain in that vessel and writing could hold it all. Writing could… writing didn’t tell me to get over it, get better, get married again. Writing just said tell me more, give me more of your pain, I’m here to receive it and it was such a gift to find writing. Pauline Laurent

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I know that they are writing for themselves but I always held it up as a standard of an ideal that the writer’s job is to communicate. And, I tell them, “No diary writing”, “No, private writing.” These are public acts of communication. And you must tell the story so that you can give it to another person. That you can — and when you read it aloud, there’s mouth to ear transmission. And, we are communicating. And, this way we make connections with others and, we also build the community around us. These soldiers come out of war alienated from everyone. They’re alienated from their families, from our country, from themselves. And, this communication helps them build a community and a family around them. Maxine Hong Kingston

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I think writing is incredibly transformative. I think it allows us to speak the unspoken. To take things that we have experienced and to make them real, because when they are floating around in our heads they are not really real, they are intangible and by writing our stories down we make what happened to us and what we experienced real. And how that transforms you, And Maxine has said this before in our writing group, where she’s said, “tell the truth and so make peace”. She says that by telling your story you revisit the past and transform the present and it’s true. Sean Brown 

interview https://billmoyers.com/content/author-maxine-hong-kingston/