Recycled Media

Cutting up uniforms can seem almost sacrilegious. For soldiers who take pride in their appearance and care for their equipment, a uniform is a key device for communication. The quality of your uniform can say a lot about your pride and experience. It can say whether you’ve deployed, show your years in service, and your duties determine your uniform of the day.

There’s endless human story and experience from all of the wars that we’ve been fighting for all of the generations of people who have lived in this country and all of their children and their spouses, and friends, family, colleagues, coworkers, and otherwise. It’s the kind of thing that if I can distill it down without hyperbole or cliche, I’d say there’s not one tiny little town in this country that’s not touched by it. You can’t go anywhere and not find a military connection. So if there’s anything conclusive in traveling around the country making paper, I’d say very much that we are all veterans.” - Drew Cameron, creator of Combat Paper

“Workshops that I’ve facilitated helped me understand a lot about not only my own experience in the Army in the Iraq War, but also about compassion, listening, and how to identify and foster shared experiences with others regardless of political views, rank or the many forces that work to fracture our communities.” - Kevin Basl, co-creator of Eighty One Echo

“I wanted to share the writing that I was doing because it was related to just dealing with trauma, my own trauma from childhood sexual abuse and a lot of my writing had been, was, and still is about healing from that and moving forward,” Lovella Calica explained why she started Warrior Writers on the Eighty One Echo podcast.

“Our first workshops were outside of Green Door Studio, which is where the project began was in Upstate New York, up in Saint Lawrence University. Essentially uninterrupted since that time, on Veterans Day, Armistice since 2007, we’ve been traveling around, trying to make workshops more and more of interest to people in various ways and capacities in which our hosts are able to find them.” - Drew Cameron, creator of Combat Paper