- [Narrator] Live from your Public Media Studios, WVIA presents "Keystone Edition Arts" a public affairs program that goes beyond the headlines to address issues in Northeastern and central Pennsylvania.

This is "Keystone Edition Arts" and now Erika Funke.

- Welcome to Keystone Edition Arts and a program titled "The Veteran's Experience and the Expressive Arts."

to mark Memorial Day this month.

We have as our guests combat veterans and those who work with veterans and we're inviting you to join the conversation by calling 1-800-326-9842 sending an email to keystone@wvia.org or through social media at #Keystonearts.

To begin Paul Lazar takes us back to the civil war.

- [Paul] You may think of Memorial Day as the holiday that kicks off summer but do you know the history of Memorial Day ?

We can look to the Centre County community of Boalsburg, Pennsylvania for answers.

Boalsburg lays claim as the sign of the earliest observation of decoration day.

The precursor to Memorial Day , thanks to three women who in October of 1864, placed flowers on the graves of family members who were recently killed while serving in the union army during the civil war.

They also decorated the graves of veterans from the revolutionary war and war of 1812.

The three women, Emma Hunter, Elizabeth Meyer and Sophie Keller are commemorated with a bronze statue in the Boalsburg cemetery.

In 1868 three years after the civil war ended General John A. Logan the Commander of The Grand Army of the Republic declared that decoration day be observed on May 30th.

It is believed that date was chosen because flowers would be in bloom all over the country.

By the late 19th century the day was more commonly referred to as Memorial Day And in 1971 Memorial Day was declared a national holiday by an act of Congress.

An act that also designated the last Monday in may as the day to remember and honor those who have died in all American wars.

For Keystone Edition Arts I am Paul Lazar.

- Our prologue sounds a key theme that of remembering.

Remembering in the sense of not ever forgetting those who served but at the very same time the experience of veterans who are haunted by memories of traumatic times remembering against their will.

And to help us understand the role of the arts and what they can do in the lives of veterans, we're joined by Stephanie Wise Director Art Therapy Program at Marywood University in Scranton.

Lynn Estomin Award-winning videographer from Williamsport who works with veterans and veterans issues and Jennifer Pacanowski combat veteran, poet and facilitator of veterans workshops from the Lehigh valley.

Joseph Barna is a combat veteran from Freeland and he takes remembering as his duty.

He's won gold medals in the annual National Veterans Creative Arts competitions and he uses the power of words as his tool.

- My name is Joe Barna.

I'm a Marine veteran of the Korean War.

I served in Korea for 13 months 1952, 53.

I don't think many could have done what I did.

I'm not proud of it.

I mean, I never thought I'd do what I did in Korea but I had to because I wanted to live.

Many veterans come home they have scars.

Some scars on the inside some on the outside.

I worship the men with the scars on the inside.

And I try to speak to them.

I've written some stories about my experiences.

I tried to hold it in but I met a doctor one time and she had told me, "Joe, what you did don't ever be ashamed to talk about it because so many others could never do that.

So let it out it might help you."

So then I began writing.

I got involved with the creative arts up in Wilkesboro and I couldn't believe I won two gold medals last year.

And I was one of the 147 veterans who won gold medals out of 6,000 who took part in this contest.

They read my article he said "Why don't you write a book?"

The book is called "God Made Angels and Navy Corpsmen".

If someone is wounded in the Marine Corps on a mountain in Korea, you lay there and you bleed.

And the only person who could stop that blood from coming on on that Korean soil is if you have a lucky enough to have a navy corpsman near you the one that I had was 21 years old, he never got to be 22.

His name was John Kilmer and he stopped the bleeding.

He saved my life, July 1952.

I'm still here.

I owe him my life.

I owe him all the years I live.

And I'll never forget him.

I have written quite a bit of articles over the years and I do believe it helped me.

It helps the older, the veterans release some of the tension that they're holding back.

The devil that's in their mind.

I don't know how many more (indistinct) write but I still got a pen full of ink.

So I'm gonna go.

I'm gonna go till they blow caps over me.

I hope we have a better Memorial Day than we had last year because the VETS should not ever be forgotten.

They've gotta be remembered for the honor they earned.

- Thank you, Joseph Barna very much.

Stephanie Wise has dedicated her career to working with individuals who've experienced significant trauma in their lives.

Veterans, survivors of natural disasters and the children and first responders of 9/11.

She's written widely and she's committed to working with students as Director of Art Therapy at Marywood University in Scranton.

Welcome Stephanie - Thank you - So good to have you with us.

We've just heard Joseph Barna talk about the wounds of war physical and the inside the self damage Mr. Barna served in Korea before the term PTSD was even used.

And yet you may have recognized some of the things he was speaking about.

- Absolutely, he was talking about the devil in the mind and how to keep it at bay.

And what is so moving about his story is his connection to the young soldier, John Kilner who literally saved his life and how Joseph Barna went on for the rest of his life to honor that relationship and to also work on his own issues, coming out of a war where he felt he had done things that he wished he hadn't had to do but he did to survive.

And so writing really provided him with a crucial means to restore healing into his own life.

And really what's so remarkable about it is that this restoration of meaning provided him with kind of a post-traumatic growth which is really the opportunity to add new meaning and purpose and it keeps him going and he's very optimistic and he's a beautiful human.

- Yeah, beautifully said, Stephanie.

And you mentioned about writing and healing there... We can go back to the World War I and we know the poet, Wilfred Owen who was in the hospital and he was writing and there wasn't a program in art therapy there for him in Scotland.

But what about, how did the arts become incorporated into treatment of things like the four(indistinct) of PTSD and PTSD?

- Well, as humans we've always used art to try to understand our world to express ourselves, to master the world.

And so it's almost a biological drive.

And in the sense of if we just look at the history of the language for instance of trauma, we see that it's roots started in the discussion around the idea of hysteria in the late 1800s And the language has changed over time.

And we have many different labels for it.

War neuroses, homesickness, soldier's heart shell shock, thousand-yard stare we've known about this but we haven't understood it.

And then after World War II psychiatry really was developing and the soldiers that were hospitalized provided a large group of people at one time who had been together who were displaying certain kinds of symptoms and a collection of symptoms.

And then we moved sort of into the 1960s and 70's, the rise of feminism and the whole concept of the syndromes that people were experiencing that they couldn't understand the intrusive terrifying perceptions, the obsessional preoccupations, hyper-vigilance all those kinds of things.

People started to really look at them as being related across the span of trauma.

So for instance, rape trauma syndrome was a label for people who had experienced that, battered women syndrome, abused child syndrome those kinds of things and Vietnam veterans syndrome.

And they noticed that there were things going on that were similar across these syndromes.

And so they started to classify these cluster of symptoms.

And in 1980, The American Psychiatric Association labeled it as post-traumatic stress disorder.

We're 40 years out from that which seems incredible.

And at this point we're looking much more at the neuro-biological impact of trauma on people.

And we're understanding in therapeutic terms, not to say what's wrong with a person, we've understood that for a long time but rather what happened to you - And Stephanie, you have with a colleague developed a way of using group therapy to help and in a way that is kind of a breakthrough process.

Can you just briefly tell us about what you've discovered by working together?

- Yes, Emily Nash and I have been working together for well over 15 years as co facilitators, co-therapists what we found is in treatment of group therapy for trauma, that it's far more efficient and effective to have two leaders working together and being able to model for the clients how to interact with one another, how to agree, disagree provide a kind of modeling.

And we base this concept the idea of co-attunement.

And what that really means is a deeply felt capacity to actively and appropriately resonate with one another.

We do that together.

We've worked on this with each other for many, many years.

We're kind of like a tuning fork and we get in-tune with each other.

And by doing that, it helps the therapist as well because the therapists are more inoculated against vicarious traumatization and working with populations of people who have been traumatized.

I mean, the work itself can really be hazardous for people if there's not good self-care or if you're working alone, we always say four eyes are better than two eyes.

So we work that way.

- Well, Stephanie, thank you and you pass it on to your students at Marywood.

And that's very important for young folk going out into the field to work this way.

And you have told a story that's wonderful and is powerful about experiencing in Georgia a veteran who has taken the risk of writing and his wife is in the audience.

And for the very first time, finally she gets it.

She resonates with him and that's a healing moment.

And some people call that maybe witnessing but Lynn Estomin is an award-winning creator of documentaries who might be considered a witness, someone who witnesses because she's just retired from the art department at Lycoming College in Williamsport.

And she's been working with veteran centered organizations especially warrior writers for over a decade.

And yet she teaches veterans the skills they might need media design, photography to produce their own work and that's a wonderful double feature.

We welcome you Lynn and we hope our viewers have seen your pieces here on WVIATV.

Many of your films address important social issues.

And we wondered how it is you got so dedicated to working with veterans.

- Well in a lot of ways, I was an activist before I considered myself to be a serious artist.

My first artwork was probably making very elaborate four and five and six color silk screen, antiwar posters and banners during the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War.

And from there, it just became a way to take my photography and my video skills and my silk screen skills and use them to promote causes that I was passionate about.

- Well then what about the power of giving the skills to the veterans themselves.

Helping them work to create their own videos and their own photography?

How do you see that unfolding and the impact?

- I think that that is far more important than someone outside trying to tell the story, the power of people telling their own stories and making those connections with people who might not understand otherwise is what makes a lot of veteran arts organizations so important.

(indistinct) writers provides a safe space and a place where veterans can talk among themselves and deal with issues that other people don't understand.

And as an artist who's spent a lot of time with veterans, my parents were both veterans, my husband's a veteran but I will never fully understand the issues that they deal with day-to-day.

And that's why putting a camera, putting a microphone in the hands of a veteran and allowing them to have the skills to tell their own story is so important.

Bidding, making artwork, any of that can really be a moving experience.

A quick story was I recently did a warrior writers digital storytelling workshop in Philadelphia that was both veterans, American veterans of the Iraq war and Iraqi refugees and working together with them, giving them the skills so that they could make their own short videos tell their own stories and interact with each other was just an incredibly powerful experience for me, for all of the participants and for the people who have seen it.

And if you would like to see their story, they're available on the warrior writers website at www.(indistinct)writers.org.

- We have a sense of another piece that you have have on your website.

And it's a movement piece with women and movement and we have a little clip of it here.

- Narrator] "I have PTSD" there I said it, I know it mostly sounds like Alzheimer's but that's not it, it's not it at all.

I am not merely forgetful of my old self.

My old self was destroyed.

- Yet we have the sense that the body is foundational.

And we know we're gonna turn to Jenny who's going to tell us about that too.

But these are different modalities that you work with and you have seen courage in and (indistinct) call it another kind of courage.

So just briefly we have only a few seconds but what is the courage that you see in these veterans?

- It's a courage to tell the public what they don't want to hear and what they really need to hear.

Another kind of courage is a series of veterans speaking their mind.

Speaking their incredibly powerful writing at the Dodge Poetry Festival.

And actually Jenny, who you're gonna meet is in both of those films.

(indistinct) - We'll send them to your website Lynn, most definitely.

Thank you so much.

And Jenny Pacanowski, a poet, playwright, Founder and Director of Women Veterans Empowered and Thriving which is a reintegration program using writing and performance in its work with veterans.

She studied with Shakespeare and Company and (indistinct) a program that approaches healing through the works of Shakespeare.

And we wish we could talk with her more about that.

Welcome back to the WVIA Studios, Jenny.

To provide some context just give us a brief overview of your service experience so people get a sense of what you're talking out of.

- I served in the army as a combat medic.

I did a medical support for convoys in Iraq in 2004.

So the front lines - Wow and some of the things you write from come from that time that is just, you don't pull any punches.

You've spoken about coming home from a tour of duty and it's not just coming home geographically or to a family but it's also coming home some way to a sense of who you are or who you were or trying to figure that all out.

And I wonder in a certain sense you say that there is a division.

There's a military culture and a civilian culture and where do you come home to and how do you bridge that.

Tell us about those cultures.

- The military culture has a very specific language a very specific structure and very specific trainings to make us the best soldiers that we can possibly be or Marines or airmen or Coasties, the military members.

And then we transition back into the civilian world.

And even though we came from the civilian world, we no longer... 'cause our were so malleable between 18 and 24, we were very structured.

So then going into the civilian culture, we no longer understand the language or can no longer speak as clearly with the civilians about our experience.

Specific examples are our jobs, sergeants have management but if we go into a job interview and say, "Well I was a Sergeant and I was in charge of 20 people."

It doesn't necessarily translate as well as our experiences.

A lot of people will be like, "oh, I can't imagine that" But we can imagine struggle and trauma so we can meet each other in the middle of telling our stories.

And that's how we do the performances at Women Veterans Empowered and Thriving.

We speak our stories and then we invite the audience to also tell theirs or tell us what they were doing while we were away.

And we speak to all experiences not just the combat experience.

We are not measuring our trauma, I had a woman come up to me at a performance once and she said, "Oh well, I was just raped.

It's nothing compared to your experience."

So what I'm really trying to ignite is that empathy and that bridging the gap or building a bridge of communication through the military culture to the civilian culture - With the arts as the means.

- Yes the writing as the vehicle, we start in the writing workshops, we secure the space with breathing techniques using skills and community agreements to rebuild within ourselves and then share.

'Cause when I started this work, I was essentially gutting myself on stage walking home and trying to pick the pieces up or mold myself back together.

And it was so challenging.

It would take me weeks or months.

So I wanted to create a program that would bring us all together so that we can not only share our experiences within ourselves and then also with the community but know how to rebuild ourselves from within.

Hearing those voices within that says, "I'm kind, I'm compassionate, I'm the expert of my experience" all of our community agreements, creating boundaries, things that we didn't necessarily learn to take care of ourselves in the military.

We learned selfless service to look here and here and throw ourselves on the grenade.

But when did we learn to build ourselves up and then serve our community?

So that's what we're really implementing.

And then also bridging the gap between veterans and civilians.

- You mentioned the grenade and the last time you were here to talk with us on radio, you read a poem called "I Remember" and it seems autobiographical.

And you take us to a medical unit where there's a Marine dying and you're observing the doctors and you have a friend with you and you learn the story of how the Marine was critically wounded.

And you take us through with beats of, I remember it's like a refrain, like a throbbing headache, I remember - Or a heartbeat - Or heartbeat yes.

- That's where a lot of my poetry comes from that heartbeat.

The heartbeat of the earth, the heartbeat of my words.

And it brings me into my body.

So as I breathe and express the words I could release it from myself.

And I don't want anyone else to carry the burden or myself but release it.

- Wow and it's a very powerful poem because this young man has thrown himself on a grenade and you help us, you challenge us though.

You point your finger at the end of the poem you don't make it easy for the reader.

You say, "Would you do that?"

And so you give us responsibility too with your work right?

- Yes there is a civic duty.

Technically everyone voted for every single war that was ever started or that we went to.

So there is a civic duty to show up to bear witness to be part of the veterans journey.

And often people say why would I be affected there's a lot of laws going through about military sexual trauma and the trials being outside the military instead of inside the military.

And the reason for that is where are those predators going?

Why do you care?

Because if they're not persecute prosecuted in the military they're returning to your communities.

So it's very important that we pass these things and we are active in what happens to veterans because it affects all of us.

- And you are doing your best to, as Stephanie is training new students to go out into the field, you're training facilitators to spread this work that you've been developing throughout the region and throughout the country.

- Yes we're trying to develop a veteran employment program.

So not only do the veterans get paid to be facilitators but also paid to perform.

Because to tell your story is difficult and with courage.

And it is also something that you can do to get paid for.

And so often organizations forget that.

Their stories are not free.

This is a talent, this is a skill.

They work on writing it.

They work on presenting it.

So we pay our veterans.

- Well we could go round and round and hear more.

I want to thank our guests, Stephanie Wise, Lynn Estomin and Jenny Pacanowski and you for watching and a very special thanks to Joseph Barno whom we saw in the video earlier in the program.

We've collected a variety of resources so you can learn more about the topics and the organizations we covered on the program.

This list will also be on our website.

So for more information on the topic including links to our guests, please visit wvia.org/keystone and click on Keystone Edition Arts, thank you.

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