Michael Sullivan celebrated a birthday recently. “I gave myself a couple things,” he says to me as we sit in his comfortably cluttered office in the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences. “I decided to get a cell phone, and my inner child wanted a kayak…so I got both.” He laughs. The choice of gifts seems fitting, expressive of important facets of Sullivan’s personality: the cell-phone standing for his commitment to communication and making connections, the kayak a symbol of his ongoing active involvement in the world around him.

Mr. Sullivan is the director of the Writer’s Workshop, a program which is itself strongly dedicated to a meaningful involvement in the world. The workshop has its roots in the experiences of Vietnam Veterans, like authors Tim O’Brien and Bruce Weigl, who wanted to create a place for other writers to express their own experiences with war and its subsequent trauma.

The Joiner Center was itself only five years old when it initiated the Writer’s Workshop. That was fifteen years ago. Michael Sullivan has been with the workshop since its beginning, and though he has seen its focus grow to include the experiences of those who have suffered through war and oppression, not just in Vietnam but worldwide, that fundamental commitment to helping writers voice their concerns for social issues has remained a constant. “…Witness and social justice, peace issues and issues of war and its consequences…a number of people over the years have said that this is one of the few, if not the only, place that they can come and write about these issues,” says Sullivan.

The Writer’s Workshop is an intensive program that runs the last two weeks of June. Beyond classes, which meet for two and half hours three times a week, it includes individual consultations with the faculty, as well as student and faculty readings. The program is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. It is a nationally acclaimed program that has attracted topnotch authors to its faculty positions. Grace Paley has taught for the workshop. So has Martin Espada, who has publicly called the Writer’s Workshop the best writing conference in America. Though the themes of social injustice and war are central to the workshop’s approach, it also welcomes those with other interests.

Says Sullivan, “If someone says, ‘I’m not writing about war’, I say, ‘you don’t have to be. You just need to be writing’. But some people say it’s the only place they can come to and have the theme that they’re writing about be respected as a legitimate literary thing.”

My conversation with Sullivan circles back several times to the importance of the social function of writing. I am curious to know whether this is something that was inherent in the beginnings of the workshop.

Evan: Was that part of the original conception of the workshop, to be something more socially oriented?

Sullivan: Whether it was a conscious thing in the beginning, I don’t really know…but it is very much now…The other thing is the community. I think that there is a sense of community that exists in the workshop, both among the participants and with the faculty. The sense of community is very real and palpable…it does have that sense of involvement and connectedness…And I think that’s a very real need. I know in my case, I can probably trace it back to my education with the Jesuits…one of the Jesuit ideals is…”to be people for others”. I think that can have a lot of manifestations, but I remember thinking, “this makes sense. This is important.” I think people feel that at different times in their lives and to different degrees, and one way to express that is through writing, in a community of writers.

Evan: It seems like this writer’s workshop, in addition to helping people hone their writing skills, also helps them see the connection from writing to society.

Sullivan: Yes. A lot of people say that to me, and it seems pretty obvious to me…but I guess there is that whole aesthetic out there that says that art is in isolation from everything else. And, you know, that has its place. But that place is, well, it’s in isolation from everything else. You know, I talk about music and people ask me “what do you like?” I like Beethoven. “Why?” Because it goes somewhere, it gets something done. Mahler gets something done…and I think that the writing in the workshop goes somewhere and gets something done.

[The workshop supports] that kind of poetry or literature of engagement, involvement, and commitment to seeing things as they are, to changing things, to witnessing things, to expressing what is important in the human condition.

This is like an oasis for some people, you know. They go 52 weeks of the year; they get two weeks of water. The need to write, to create, is never going to go away…We all have a need to express ourselves.

…Some of it really gets into the pain, but I believe you’ve got to get beyond that. I think this is what the Vietnamese writers do very, very well. The whole spiritual trip to renewal and to a sense of rebirth and freshness…

Certainly, [the writers on the faculty] are important as witnesses to…humanity’s involvement in history…and the larger meanings of those involvements. Just the very act of writing about them in a sense is a renewal and a testament to the tensile quality of the spirit.

Evan: Are most of the people who attend the workshop professional writers, or aspiring writers, or are they people who are doing it for reasons of personal interest?

Sullivan: They span the gamut. We go from the college undergraduate-we’ve also had high school students here-to those who are retired. It varies. One woman was on a mission this year; she wants to write a book that will give memory techniques to people who have suffered head injuries. Others have just gotten a crush on poetry or literature. Others are writing out their experiences from the sixties. We have a lot of involvement from people who have been to the workshop before who come back and conduct workshops for us. Some of them have degrees in creative writing; some of them have MFAs…

I think the workshop does a number of different things. I don’t try to analyze it. It gives people a place to come to; it gives them a springboard to go on.

Evan: What process do you go through in finding faculty for the workshop?

Sullivan: Well, it needs to be congruent with the mission of the Joiner Center. So with that in mind, the pool is not as large as other conferences and workshops. At first it was pretty narrow, Vietnam veteran writers and Vietnam veterans, and we decided that it was just too narrow. We began to expand, using people from the Creative Writing department here-Martha Collins and Lloyd Schwartz…We’ve had two winners of the Pulitzer Prize, two winners of the National Book Award …Their commitment to the workshop…I think it’s special, I really do…With [people like] Tim O’Brien, Grace Paley, Yusef Kumunyakaa, you can sense their involvement, their commitment to the people, to this place, to the issues, to the writing, to literature…to the human spirit.

Evan: Do you think that the fact that the workshop takes place at UMass Boston has something do with the focus of the program?

Sullivan: UMass has a civic involvement, it’s knitted to the fabric of the community in different ways…I think the fact of it’s being at UMass Boston is significant, and is important…this a unique place, it reaches out and engages the community. And it should. I like to think we do.

While Sullivan recognizes the past successes of the Writer’s Workshop, he makes it clear that there is always room for growth.

Sullivan: We have the need for renewal, for new ideas. I try to keep the wax out of my ears for that, and listen to people and meet with people…My job in this is to make it happen but then to get out of the way of it’s happening; to set up, send it off, and then get out of the way and let good things happen. The workshop is like that: the enthusiasm, the commitment of the faculty, the interest of the participants, the concern, the community are such that if you let it happen and you stay out of the way, it can be successful…You have to keep pushing the borders back. You have to keep opening it up. When it wants to close, you have to open it up again.

I tell people, “The workshop is a work in progress. You have to be willing to go with it a little bit.” It’s almost like a pregnancy in a sense; it goes through its stages. And then it’s over…then you start thinking of the next one.