Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace

National Book Award Winner Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, and The Fifth Book of Peace, has been leading writing-and-meditation workshops for veterans for more than a decade. The practice of meditating together, writing stories and poems, and then reading their works aloud has been extremely healing for these individuals and has produced some extraordinary writing - Tolstoy-like descriptions of battle scenes, Hemingway-esque flashbacks, and gripping accounts of growing up in military families, serving as medics in the thick of war, coming home to homelessness, and finally doing the work to experience first-hand the deep transformation that is possible when one truly comes to grips with one's whole past.