A. Hansen Miller

“I’ve always been a bit of an escapist,” reflects Gotham teacher A. Hansen Miller (who goes by Andrew). “I’m really interested in exploring what’s beyond the world around me, whether that’s physically traveling or in my imagination.”

Though Andrew is a seasoned creative nonfiction teacher and writer, his love for writing began with conjuring fictional stories and worlds to escape his suburban hometown. He explains that he was “very lucky to have a family that liked to travel a lot,” instilling in him a curiosity about and passion for the world integral to his life and writing.

Andrew’s desire for exploration is largely what motivated him to become an officer in the US Army. “I knew enough about the world that I wanted to see more of it.” Traveling all around the world from Afghanistan to South Korea to Europe stretched his worldview far beyond the “white picket fence suburb” of Chicago he grew up in.

“I met people that just blew up my world and I found different ways to connect with and learn from all of them…It made me realize that so many more things are possible with life than I had experienced growing up.”

Andrew’s fervent desire to learn from the diversity of the world and its people permeates his work. Yet after leaving the military, he lost interest in fiction—and writing in general. Thanks to the Syracuse Veterans Writing Group, Andrew’s passion for writing was rekindled with a new orientation: nonfiction and memoir writing.

“I really didn’t enjoy the fact that the dominant narrative was controlled by these commercial sources,” Andrew says. “That’s why I went into creative nonfiction. To find a better narrative, to figure out what I really thought about it, and to give that more of a voice.”

Among veteran peers, Andrew says that “writing was the way to process what we were going through and find ways to think about it that were more evolved.” He considers his writing “more of a form of activism,” which he approaches from two angles: to make sense of his experiences and what they meant and, more importantly, “to find a better narrative that [he] could share with people.”

Now, he is pursuing several passions and projects. “I’ve always got a few poems in the oven,” Andrew says. He is also tinkering with parts of his memoir, which focuses on his experiences at the Columbia University Graduate Writing Program. His fellow soldiers and student veterans faced unique challenges with reintegration. “Like salmon swimming up the stream to try and spawn, I watched people try every different way to make their way back into the civilian world. It was a fascinating experience to see how hard it was to unlearn some of these really important survival mechanisms the military taught us.”

Teaching at Gotham has been among the most fulfilling of his pursuits. The passion of Andrew’s students constantly surprises and moves him. “Some of them are working so hard and have visions of what they want to write about, and they don’t even wait to be told what to do or how to do it. They just start trying.”

With a smile, he adds “I have learned more from my students than I learned in two years of grad school.”