Wounded Warriors Writers’ Program

One of the last places that Michael Jernigan, a former Marine corporal, might have expected to find himself last week was a theater program in this small wooded town. But then a lot of unexpected things have happened since his Humvee was bombed outside Mahmudiya, Iraq, in August 2004, and shrapnel shot through his eyes and into his brain.

Yet on this morning Mr. Jernigan, 26 and blind, is walking down the spacious hallway of a former public high school, a sensing stick to guide him in one hand and a tape recorder in the other. He has used the recorder to dictate a 15-minute story about his life in St. Petersburg, Fla., as a struggling college student turned recruit, and about what has happened since the explosion. Out of that material, he plans to create a two-and-a-half-minute monologue.

More on the Wounded Warriors Writers' Program from Donna Kornhaber and David Kornhaber in The New York Times.