This week, look at a day in your life through the eyes of an ancestor. How would your grandmother react to the e-mails you get at work? How would your great-great-grandfather navigate modern public transportation? Write a diary entry in the voice of someone from an earlier generation. Consider the cultural norms of the time period your ancestor grew up in as well as his or her personality. Focus on the surprising similarities in your daily lives for a challenge.

At their annual benefit and awards dinner held last night in New York City, the Center for Fiction announced Tiphanie Yanique as the winner of the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. Yanique, who won for her debut novel, Land of Love and Drowning (Riverhead Books, 2014), will receive $10,000. The annual prize is given for a debut novel published in the previous year.

Yanique was chosen from a shortlist of seven debut novelists. The shortlisted finalists, who each received $1,000, were Rene Denfeld for The Enchanted (Harper), Smith Henderson for Fourth of July Creek (Ecco), Josh Weil for The Great Glass Sea (Grove Press), Vanessa Manko for The Invention of Exile (The Penguin Press), Ted Thompson for The Land of Steady Habits (Little, Brown), and Matthew Thomas for We Are Not Ourselves (Simon & Schuster). In July the Center for Fiction announced the longlist for the prize, which included twenty-six novelists. David Gilbert, Tayari Jones, and Margaret Wrinkle judged.

Yanique is the author of a short story collection, How to Escape From a Leper Colony (Graywolf Press, 2010), and a picture book, I Am the Virgin Islands (Little Bell Caribbean, 2012). Land of Love and Drowning tells the story of two sisters and their half-brother orphaned after their parents die in a shipwreck. The novel takes place during the early 1900s in the Virgin Islands. In a video from our Poets & Writers Live event in New York City last June, Yanique—along with four other authors— discusses her work, her process, and what inspires her to write.

Established in 2006, the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize honors reporter and writer Ray Flaherty, the father of late writer Nancy Dunnan. Dunnan, who sponsored the award, passed away in August. Previous winners of the prize include Junot Díaz, Ben Fountain, Hannah Tinti, and Margaret Wrinkle.

Photo Credit: Debbie Grossman

It has never been easier to learn how to cook with culinary shows on television, tutorials on the internet, and an abundance of cookbooks and food blogs specializing in all sorts of cuisines. This week, write a scene in which one of your characters has sparked an interest in cooking. Does cooking come naturally to her, or is it difficult for her to master? Does she set lofty goals, like winning a competition?

This week, write a whimsical, nonsensical poem about a creature you’ve dreamt up. Try to let go of the meanings associated with the words you use every day when describing this creature. Instead, use words as springboards for weird associations, as colors in a vast mural. Let your mind run wild and hang on for the ride. For inspiration, read Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” 

Brian Castner is the author of The Long Walk (Doubleday, 2012), an Amazon Best Book of 2012 and Chautauqua Literary & Scientific Circle selection for 2013. His writing has appeared in Wired, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Outside, and on National Public Radio. Castner is the co-founder of Buffalo, Books & Beer, a new literary series in his hometown of Buffalo, New York.

We’re all still learning how to come home from a war. Veterans struggle to readjust, civilians and family wonder how to welcome back their changed loved ones. We shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves; Odysseus had trouble, too.

This truism of history still applies: Every veteran saw their own war, had their own individual experience, were exposed to their own proportion of terror and transcendence, and deal with their own mix of pride and regret. It follows, then, that no single national program or strategy will best welcome home all these men and women.

For some veterans, though, writing helps. Trauma therapy for some, but for most, just a human need to share an experience with others. The same could be said for the country at large, of course; narrative helps all of us make sense of our lives.

Inclusivity. This is what spurs Words After War, a literary nonprofit based in New York City, to organize workshops and events around the country. Rather than focusing on writing for a small circle of military peers, Words After War instead creates opportunities for veterans and civilians to speak to each other. It’s an effort to bridge the civilian-military divide, one story at a time.

This past semester, with support from Poets & Writers, I led a Words After War workshop on the campus of Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. On Tuesday evenings, war was a lens through which to read and write and think about the same topics that have always preoccupied writers. Many traditional workshops use this lens model, we simply considered violence and its aftermath instead of environmentalism or realism or faith or any other typical construct. 

There is no good writing without good reading, so we started each session with Whitman or Hemingway or Vonnegut or Klay (who visited our class just weeks before he won the National Book Award). We studied classics, but also new work from Siobhan Fallon, Brian Turner, and Hassan Blasim, and two post-Vietnam books, Qais Akbar Omar’s A Fort of Nine Towers and Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story. What better way to start than to put great sentences—moving sentences, jarring sentences, and imperfect sentences—in everyone’s ears? An ice-breaker, for the workshopping that followed.

I’d like to think that the strength of our program is to be found in the stories we wrote and the precision and quality of the feedback we provided each other. To judge our success in bridging the civilian-military divide, we could parse the demographics of our group (five veterans/six civilians, four women/seven men, three graduates of creative writing programs, three retirees, a lawyer, a photographer, a poet, an anthropology professor, a magazine editor, an author of four books, one that had not written in decades), but I’d rather examine the work we produced.

Some stories you would expect from a veteran writing group—a nighttime raid in Afghanistan, a day on the gunnery range in basic training—but most may surprise. A dying grandmother who keeps a secret to the end of her life. A son with nightmares while his father fights in Iraq. Travels in Korea. A meditation in a snow-filled graveyard. We workshopped prose poems and flash fiction, chapters from novels, and a Civil War biography told through letters. Some stories had a military connection, but plenty did not; grief and love are grief and love, after all.  

In short, a veteran writing workshop looks a lot like any other serious literary class. Because at the end of the day, we’re all just trying to produce good writing; Hemmingway’s one true sentence.

Photo (top): Don Bond, Brian Castner at a teaching workshop. Photo (center): Brittany Gray. Photo (bottom): Marilyn Rochester. Photo Credit: Words After War

Support for Readings & Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, A.K. Starr Charitable Trust and Friends of Poets & Writers.