Telling War: Soldiers' Accounts of Wartime Experiences

FAIN: AV-255508-17

Corporation of Gonzaga University (Spokane, WA 99258-1774)
Lisa Ellen Silvestri Wehr (Project Director: November 2016 to December 2019)
Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton (Co Project Director: May 2017 to December 2019)

A semester-long training course and two discussion groups on soldiers’ accounts of their battlefield experiences in World War I and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Telling War, a project of Gonzaga University’s Center for Public Humanities, juxtaposes two eras of conflict, WWI and the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, as a framework and impetus for public dialogue. Telling War begins with the voices of Veterans by looking at “user-generated content” from WWI as well as Iraq & Afghanistan (i.e., letters, e-mails, poems, postcards, etchings, photos, songs, and videos). Using these frontline dispatches as a starting point, Veterans and community members will consider what modes of communication they used during their deployments and how those shaped what they could talk about, to whom, when, and where. A semester-long preparatory program will train discussion leaders to use a variety of humanities texts, art, and music to promote meaningful dialogue about the war experience. Discussion sessions will explore diverse methods of storytelling to draw out participants’ personal narratives through papermaking, podcasting, and the use of social media.