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Brothers and Sisters Like These – An Evening of Readings By U.S. Veterans – by Veterans Healing Farm
May 27, 2022 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm EDT
Donation
From the stage of the Veterans Healing Farm in Hendersonville, NC, we invite you to hear the stories from the men and women who served our country in the Vietnam War, Gulf War, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom. This fundraising event will be a very special evening for everyone. We hope you can attend.
Brothers and Sisters Like These
In 2014, a group of Vietnam combat veterans began meeting at the Charles George VAMC to participate in a novel creative writing program. The focus was on capturing their stories through narrative and poetry to find the voices war had taken from them. There was hope to reclaim a sense of their shared humanity, build camaraderie and find some degree of healing.
In 2017, a staged reading of the veterans’ work, Brothers Like These, was hosted at the Asheville Community Theatre. Eighteen of the veterans read their work to a captivated audience. The evening was a watershed moment in underscoring the healing value of bearing witness. The men’s lives began to take on new meaning.
Since its premier, additional readings have been staged at Appalachian State University and other venues across North Carolina, and the book, Brothers Like These, published by St. Andrews University Press, remains the Press’s best seller. The creative writing initiative at Charles George VAMC is ongoing, and efforts are underway to spread the work beyond those walls.
A majority of the veterans continue to meet monthly, compelled not only by the healing they’ve experienced but also because of the powerful collateral benefits of their healing among their families and communities. They’ve become fierce champions for the work.
The Veterans Healing Farm was founded in 2014 to enhance the mental, emotional, and physical well-being of our nation’s veterans through agri-therapy and community. Through organic farming, beekeeping, continuing education workshops, and community outreach, we provide our veteran community with opportunities to discover a new mission outside of the military. We believe that friendship, connectedness, and community are essential to overall health and wellness.
In addition to encouraging healthy living, interpersonal relationships, and physical activity, we help cultivate a sense of self-empowerment and self-worth. This can be achieved when our members realize that they are an important part of the community and others trust and depend on their contributions.
Our long-term vision is to dramatically decrease veteran suicides.
