Dear Friend:

Not long ago a close friend and I were talking about The Stories We Tell, The Voices and Faces Project's global testimonial writing program for those who have lived through or witnessed gender-based violence and other human rights violations.

"It must be painful," he said, "to be in spaces where people are confronting that level of grief and suffering."

He's right, of course. Bearing witness as someone speaks to a trauma they have lived through, or are living with, is painful — and it should be. To imaginatively move closer to the suffering of another human being — which is what we ask of every participant in our writing workshops — takes compassion, and a rare kind of emotional courage.

Yet each time we bring our writing program to a community, I am struck by something my workshop co-creator, R. Clifton Spargo, and I didn't quite anticipate when we launched The Stories We Tell in 2011. The pain we bear witness to is almost always accompanied by an equally powerful emotion: Joy.

It's the joy that comes as our workshop participants see, perhaps for the first time, that they are not alone in their lived experiences.

It's the joy that emerges when they recognize that their own stories are part of an extraordinary, global history and present that includes artists and activists like Martin Luther King, Jr., Assata Shakur, Primo Levi, Sandra Cisneros, Joy Harjo, Sam Cooke, Nikki Giovanni, and far too many others to name.

It's the joy that comes as we explore, together, what it means to be shaped — but not defined — by what we have lived through.

And it's the joy that emerges as our writing workshop participants think in new ways about how their own heartbreaking, complicated, gorgeous, necessary stories can call the world to not only compassion, but social action.

We live in a world in desperate need of changing. For the survivors of injustice who take part in our testimonial writing program, that need is not an abstraction — it's a painful lived reality. They're fighting for change with the most powerful, time-tested tools available to them: their stories. Bearing witness as they do this has been one of the great gifts of my own life.

For me, this work is deeply personal. I am a survivor of violence who has learned to live with — and in — my own grief and sadness by listening to the beautiful writers and activists who are at the heart of our Voices and Faces Project work. They are the reason I fight for justice. And they remind me, every day, why it's so important to also fight for joy.