Exploring Emotions Through Storytelling

On Friday the 1st of August, I received my medal. That was for 2nd place in the “Short Story – Military Experience” entry for the Veterans Administration Creative Writing Competition. It was presented to me at the VA Outpatient clinic in Loveland by Ms. Kimberly DeSantis, one of several Creative Arts Therapists.

I’d submitted a story titled the “Second-Best Meal I’ve ever Eaten.” I didn’t expect it to even place, much less take second. But it did. here’s the link to it: The Kindness of Strangers.

It pushed me to make two entries this year.

One is “My first MiG.” It’s a story told me by a man who was a navigator on a WB-50. He told of how during the Cold War, they were intercepted by MiG’s while on a Weather Patrol. Read it here.

The other is in the inspirational category and is Flag Call. Flag Call is something I always felt honored to be part of. It was a daily ceremony of raising our colors at the beginning to the day and an almost Holy moment. Read it here.

But I’m going to take the opportunity here to talk a little about writing as a therapy. For years, I’ve billed that my writing is what I call autobiographical fiction. What that means, is it happened. But I’ll damned if I admit to it.

But with a lot of us things happen, and we sweep them under the rug. Once in a while we pick up the corner of the rug and peek at them. But they stay under the rug. And it’s as simple as this. You sweep enough stuff under the rug, and you start tripping over it.

And the only way to get rid of it is to bring it out into the open. We have to look at it, and move it to the trash.

Writing helps do that. I created Sheriff Will Diaz as a sort of alter ego. I ran him through all the fears, hopes, sins, the who gamut through. I used him to explore events in my life.

We do the same in the VA writers’ groups. A therapist who’s usually also a writer tosses out “Writers Prompts.” Sometimes, those are in the form a picture. We’re supposed to look at it and whatever comes to mind, we write about. Some people, like me, write short stories. Other’s Poetry.

Or we get an actual prompt and we write about that.

Without saying it (after all, the VA is a government outfit), they tap into James 5:16 which states “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. ” (NLT).

I hate the use of the word “Sins.” It isn’t always what we did wrong that we need to deal with. It’s stuff that happened to us that keeps us awake nights and haunts our dreams and waking hours. And that’s almost always the stuff we swept under the rug and refused to deal with.

So we walk back and forth across it every day.

We trip over it.

We fall.

We skin our knees.

And we do it again and again.

That’s what writing as therapy is about. it allows us to drag the stuff out in a safe setting and to look at it. We read the pain to our fellow writers. We express it in words.

Sometimes we get it out from under the rug and dump it in the trash.

Sometimes it goes back under the rug.

But looking at it is the first step.

Talking about it is second.

And eventually, whatever it is, it will lose its power over you.

And you just might start looking at it differently.

That’s what happened in the writing of my first novel, The Cross and the Badge. The event that is related in one chapter is one hundred percent true. It was one of the worse traffic accidents I ever saw. And despite a fictional person relating it, everything that happened is exactly the way I wrote it. And while I was writing it, something interesting happened.

I’ve always suspected writers are all a little crazy. That’s very true when you’re holding your life up in the mirror. And it’s even worse if you’re writing it through the eyes of someone else. What happened next almost proves the point.

I’d intended for that chapter to end with Will just crying his eyes out. Instead, Pastor Morgan nods and then asked an interesting question, “How did that night change you as a human being?”

I didn’t mean for that question to be asked.

I deleted it, and guess what?

I typed in the same question.

I stopped, looked at it, and decided someone wanted an answer.

That event changed me in profound ways. I’d been ready to hang up law enforcement forever. I was thinking I wasn’t making any difference.

That night I saw I was.

And almost five years later, the legacy of that night would have an interesting twist. On a spring night at Fort Riley, Kansas, I saved the life of a four-year-old girl.

What I realized in the course of the writing was this. If I’d pushed it through and deleted the question? Instead of wondering about the answer, would I have ended up free of the pain of that night? Would I have realized that night changed me? That it put me a collision course with someone who needed my help?

Writing about it helped me connect the dots and see there was good that came out that night.

The Gospel according to M.A.S.H. – A Letter to Melanie

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If you’re a Veteran in crisis or concerned about one, connect with our caring, qualified Veterans Crisis Line responders for confidential help. Many of them are Veterans themselves. This service is private, free, and available 24/7.

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