Jun 29, 2026
Writing, trauma and trust
Grad students shaping scalability of the Mighty Pen Project therapeutic experience
While veterans and their dependents gather each week to learn the craft of writing and share deeply personal experiences through the Mighty Pen Project, a second group is doing its own studying to understand how the unique academic program can inform a new type of therapeutic activity.
In the latest phase of a VCU grant, graduate students in the Department of Rehabilitation Counseling are analyzing the conversations and interactions held as part of the Mighty Pen Project, founded by Richmond author David L. Robbins to help these individuals use written storytelling to work through sometimes painful legacies of military life. Through “Life Between the Lines: A Writing Workshop for the Family Members of Veterans and Active Military Personnel,” the students are working to deconstruct the program and determine how to scale the approach beyond its current classroom walls.
A central tenet to the work is that teaching people how to write and follow the rules of grammar can be replicated. Their work is focused on conducting research, gathering data and documenting practices to answer a critical question: If the Mighty Pen Project’s approach helps people heal, can it be replicated often enough and well enough to help many more?
Bridging writing and counseling
For Melissa Zhu, the project brings together two seemingly separate career paths. Before arriving at VCU for graduate studies, Zhu worked as a National Geographic content strategist and writer after studying psychology and English as an undergraduate. While she loved storytelling, she eventually realized she wanted work that focused more directly on helping people.
“Interviewing people for stories and counseling have a lot in common,” Zhu said. “You’re trying to understand someone’s experience, what shaped them and how they see the world.”
When Jared Schultz, Ph.D., chair of Rehabilitation Counseling, approached her about joining the Mighty Pen grant initiative, the fit felt immediate.
“Art has this immense capability to help people process things, understand themselves and heal,” Zhu said. “So when Dr. Schultz started talking about what it would look like to manualize this process – not just for veterans but potentially for people dealing with all kinds of trauma – that really resonated with me.”
Learning the ‘secret sauce’
With $100,000 from the Virginia Department of Veterans Services, the project is designed to study whether the therapeutic benefits emerging from Mighty Pen workshops can be replicated, taught and eventually scaled.
The four-student team first observed workshops led by Robbins to facilitate portions of the discussions. Today, they help guide conversations around participant submissions, while closely studying the classroom dynamics that make the workshops effective.
“There’s a huge emphasis on trust,” Zhu said. “The instructors focus on the craft of writing and storytelling, while the therapeutic work – like emotional processing, empathy and validation – often happens organically between classmates.”
Participants submit stories ahead of time, and discussions are intentionally sequenced to begin with the heaviest emotional pieces before moving toward more reflective and hopeful stories by the session’s end.
“It mirrors what counselors call the ‘buttoning up’ process,” Zhu said. “You don’t want people leaving emotionally raw without helping them return to a place where they feel grounded and supported.”
A Military Spouse’s Perspective
For graduate student Catalina Riveros, the project’s mission is deeply personal. Although she served briefly in the Army herself, Riveros spent much of her adult life as the spouse of a career soldier deployed multiple times during their marriage.
“We talk a lot about veterans, but we sometimes forget about the spouses and families who are also carrying trauma,” Riveros said. “Military spouses are often the first line of support when soldiers return home, but there are very few programs designed specifically for them.”
She immediately volunteered when Schultz introduced the project during orientation. “This is exactly the population I want to work with,” she said, with a goal of extending support specifically to Latino military families.
As a native Spanish speaker, Riveros initially felt intimidated joining a writing-centered project conducted entirely in English. “In the military, you write reports. You write facts,” she said. “You don’t write about profound truths.”
But working alongside Robbins and the project team has changed how she thinks about storytelling.
“Now I’m learning how writing can help someone truly feel and see another person’s experience,” she said. “It’s not just about what happened. It’s about helping someone understand you.”
Beyond traditional therapy
Both students say the experience is reshaping how they think about counseling itself.
Zhu has become increasingly interested in narrative therapy, which focuses on how people construct and reinterpret the stories they tell about their lives. She also sees broader possibilities for creative and nontraditional therapeutic approaches.
“There are cultures where people don’t necessarily want to sit down and ‘go to therapy,’” Zhu said. “But learning a skill – writing, art, music – can feel much more culturally acceptable while still providing real therapeutic benefits.”
Riveros believes that could be especially meaningful for Latino military families and other communities where mental health treatment may still carry stigma. “People might feel more comfortable learning writing techniques or telling stories,” she said.
Building toward scale
As the workshops continue, the graduate students are helping VCU researchers better understand how the model evolves past writing instruction and into a therapeutic environment grounded in trust, structure and shared experiences.
“There’s a lot of warmth and emotional openness,” Zhu said of the current workshop cohort, which includes many military spouses. “The support participants give each other has honestly been one of the most moving parts of the experience.”
And for the larger Mighty Pen initiative, their involvement is helping to determine whether this personal process can be taught, replicated and expanded to help far more veterans and military families.
Both students believe it can.
“I absolutely think this can grow,” Riveros said. “Once you understand the techniques and the structure, you can teach other people to do this.”