Jonathan Wei, the founder and director of The Telling Project, is a playwright, writer and producer. Jonathan’s dramatic work has been staged at the Guthrie Theater, Library of Congress, Maryland Center for the Performing Arts, Lisner Auditorium in Washington, DC and Portland Center Stage in Portland, OR among others. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Village Voice, Iowa Review, and the North American Review and Glimmer Train, and his work featured by the New York Times, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Inside Higher Ed, the Associated Press, and NPR. He has received support from the Bob Woodruff Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, the Smithsonian Institute, the Library of Congress, Metabolic Studios, Minnesota Humanities Center, Humanities Iowa, Oregon Humanities Center and others. Jonathan lives with his family in Austin, TX.

The Purpose The Telling Project is a performing arts non-profit that employs theater to deepen our understanding of the military and veterans’ experience. Greater understanding fosters receptivity, easing veterans’ transitions back to civil society, and allowing communities to benefit from the skills and experience they bring with them. Through this understanding, a community deepens its connection to its veterans, itself, and its place in the nation and the world.

The Work The most direct path to understanding veterans’ experience is person-to-person contact.  With the dramatic decline in the numbers serving in the military – less than one percent of the population over the last eleven years of war – this contact will not happen through day-to-day life. It must be created and supported.  Through performance, The Telling Project puts veterans and military family members in front of their communities to share their stories.  We give veterans and military family members the opportunity to speak, and their communities the opportunity to listen.

Show Notes:  http://VeteranPodcast.com/011