Roundtable: Surviving and Writing the Pandemic in a Community Writing Group for Veterans

Across the United States veterans’ writing groups have provided spaces for veterans to write about war and military service, reflect, heal, release stress, and create work that they share with family, fellow veterans, and sometimes larger audiences, in the form of public readings, literary journals, and book publications. In this roundtable, a multivoiced narrative that includes two civilian writing group leader voices and three veterans’ voices, we describe how our long-standing veterans’ writing group adjusted to the realities of the pandemic and continued to encourage our members to write and stay connected to each other. Our goal in this piece is to consider how writing and community have been possible (or not) during the pandemic and to explore the variables that enabled and limited us as writers. What emerges from these narratives is the struggle to continue writing and reflecting amid the collective trauma and material change of the pandemic, but also how specific life circumstances, professional and familial obligations, and health conditions dictated how pandemic isolation and threats functioned differently in our lives.