Winter Solstice at the Prison

Standing in the cold, beneath a half moon, wind blowing from the north, waiting for a bus, Dick and I make small talk. I want to tell him I am in awe of what he does with the inmates in the writing workshop. He would not think it appropriate and would shrug it off. We are carrying empty plastic tubs. When we came in, they were full of books, pads, pens, and magazines.

Dick’s hair has grown out and started to curl. It’s the color of a baby’s, the lightest shade red hair can have, but Dick is no baby. He has been at this for a long time.

We met earlier tonight in the parking lot in front of the main guard house. He gave me the heavier of the two tubs, explaining that he had pulled muscle along his rib cage and could not breathe all that well. We make small talk as we pass through the metal detectors and then entered the sally port. We had badges from the Arizona Department of Corrections or Prisons. A bus wearing the a sign for Santa Rita sped it seemed out of nowhere, out of the darkness and all but screeched to a stop. It exhaled hot air as the doors opened and an inmate greeted us.

The race with invisible competitors began and I hung on to my tub, glad that I had seat.

Santa Rita’s doors are right next to the bus stop making it look more like a hospital than a prison. We entered and were let in to the visitors room through electric doors. The lighting was bad, but the tables were set up in orderly pattern, on the diagonal, with plastic chairs.

“You think we could get more light?” I asked, noticing that about half of the inmates would be sitting in the dark.

Dick tried the switch. All of the lights went out. He turned it back on. They stayed off. “Oh Shit,” he said, “now we’re really in the dark.”

I tried the switch. Same result. I asked to be let through the electric doors back to the guard house and was given permission to do so. “Do you know how to turn on the lights?” Shrug.

I went back and we searched but to no avail.

Then I noticed that one of the bulbs was flickering back on. Must be one of those fluorescent lights I muttered. As a few of them came back on we noticed that there were no inmates.

Back though the electric doors. “Of they’re under ICS. Someone found some clothes in a dumpster, so they have to do a count.”

“How long will that take?”

Shrug.

OK let’s wait, I say to no one in particular.

Dick and I sit and talk about this and that. He tells me he visited Emily Dickinson’s house while on tour with his new book. “She lived in a mansion. Twenty acres at least, and a huge house.”

We go on about Whitman and Simic and  Sam Hamill. I won’t tell you what he said about Sam.

An hour passes. I am relieved to think we might be leaving.

Then the first of the inmates shows up. Then a flood of orange jumpsuits and jackets comes through the door. “Good evening Mr. Shelton.” "Hey Mr. Shelton.”  “How you doin Mr. Shelton?” The air is immediately congenial, relaxed, almost playful.

The guys take seats around the table. Dick calls out names and distributes folders. The inmates talk about the assignments they have done. "Take one line: 'it is raining' and then we compose a vignette," one of them says to me, referring to a poem read the in the previous week's workshop. 

After that initial draft, they will economize, will cut some of the repeated phrases. 

He asks if some of them want to read. They do. They read well. John and Steve and Mr. Garcia.  After the reading there are comments. Dick puts me on the spot a few times. I zero in. They seem to think it’s OK, but I am not so sure. Doesn’t matter anyway. I’m just going to do the best I can.

“Let’s hear that again.” “Pass that up here and let me take a look at it.” "Take that back and re-work and bring it in again.”

Then a man reads about his crack cocaine addiction. The piece ends with some “Glory to God” comment, more fitted for a revival meeting than a writing workshop.

“The ending might be unnecessary,” Dick says.

“I knew you were going to say that,” the inmate laughs. “I knew it.”

“Well it is rather abstract and maybe unnecessary.”

“It is an important piece though, a breakthrough of sorts.” What I hear is that the content for the man is much more important the quality of the writing here. This piece requires a different kind of response.

Another man reads. This one is lovely, is read as a poem and takes the term from temperature, to emotional state, to spiritual hunger and soul’s despair.

“Let me see how that is written,” Dick says.

The man passes it to the front of the table. All eyes are listening. Dick reads them again. He points out that the lines of the poem are really sentences and that the piece might be better read as a prose piece. He mentions “The Bus to Vera Cruz” as an example of something he was working on, but that would not fit as a poem.

“I am convinced that any piece of writing can be successful if you can find the right form.”

Silence. I think we are all aware that there this is some great advice. I am taken by the simple profundity of the line and its implications for any student of writing.

“Take this back and re-work it as a prose piece and then let’s look at it again.”

A man reads a piece he has written before. It is a scene of domestic tension, of trying to stay out of a spat with an irate wife. The men laugh at places that ring too true, maybe too familiar.

“It’s a nice scene. There is some tension there, some good dialogue. What do you think Erec?"

“I like it when Steve tells us his thoughts about wanting to avoid conflict, and how it seems inevitable given the portrayal of the woman.” Then changing track a little, I go to the content. “It’s a good idea sometimes to just head for the bomb shelter and close the hatch until the destruction is over.”

“You know,” says Dick, “Some men can avoid the conflicts by stepping aside, others by leaving, and still others attack.” He makes a gestures of surging forward with a sword. The guys nod in agreement.

“When I was doing the women’s workshop, the one I did for about seven years, I had one woman who was very flirtatious, very good looking and I was taken with her.”

“I bet Mrs. Shelton didn’t hear about this,” one of the guys snickered, conspiratorially. A few others nodded.

“Then, two other women took me aside one day and said ‘Dick, you know that she did not just kill one, but TWO of her husbands.’ “

The table laughed and deep laugh of delight. There was more at work, of course, than humor here.

“Shall we continue? Who else wants to read?”

Another man reads a poem that stops us all in our tracks. It is about love and self deception, about helplessness and sleep. “Beer bottles fall from our drunken hands and crash to the floor. We do not know if they fell or if we dropped them.” The lines drift out into the circle of men and then hang there in a raw truth and sharp beauty. I am stunned. All of us are stunned.

“I think it is brilliant,” Dick says. “What do you think, Erec?”

“I think it’s ready to publish.”

“Give that to me and I’ll get it re-typed.” The Holy Grail of the workshop, the destination, the ringing bell of accomplishment usher in the moment of royalty. This is magic I think to myself. Our surroundings are poor. Materials primitive. Yet, the atmosphere of learning, motivation, and collegiality is charged with intensity.

“Can you help with the tables?” Dick asks when it is time to go. I join in moving the tables. We set them back into the ordered pattern, under the dim lights. We are again back in prison, but not before shaking hands, wishing a happy holiday, and gathering up the sign up sheets.

The electric doors slide open to let us out into the cold night air. A wind is building out of the north. A cold front is coming in. I carry the warmth of the room, the excitement of the talk with me into the night. We stand under a light, hoping the driver will see us, will appear of darkness, surge to a stop, swing open the door with its blast of heat.

I want to tell him that I see. I am still trying to find the words.

Bus Ride in the Rain

Lightning strikes a couple of hundred yards away and the peal of thunder is immediate. Rain travels across the bleak yard in a grey curtain while wind rips and lifts water from the streams that have formed in the ditches. I better get inside I tell myself but continue to stand under the overhang as rain blows under. Yard after yard fills with the flood. The visitor bus driver sees me under the awning and veers off the main road and down the drive to Santa Rita. He speeds through the rising waters and sends a graceful wing of spray out from the keel of the wheels. He is loving it.

I am soaked to the skin immediately as I enter the downpour but walk with the tubs. I shiver but feel good to be cold. 

The driver is a young guy with holes on his ear where plugs used to be. No jewelry here. He has cranked up a heavy metal station on the radio, but that cannot compete with the peals of thunder all around us. He smiles. I see he is as wet as I am, his orange shirt  clinging to his muscled shoulders and back. 

“Just did shift change,” he says explaining why he is wet. His hand is on the lever and he waits until I sit down to swing the door shut. I sit on the plastic tandem seat beneath a blast of A/C. We head over the maximum security unit where we will pick some other straggling visitors. 

Two old women wait under the overhang. One removes her sandals to cross the flooded walkway. It is up to her ankles, but she does not complain. Instead, she moves like a schoolgirl, soaking in the lusciously warm runoff. The other keeps on her sandals and tiptoes. They climb in with help from the driver.

They chat with the driver like we are on holiday with him as the young tour guide.

“Yeah, when it rains out here, the rivers run deep and fast.  All that water has to go somewhere.” He speaks with the calm authority of the local, the native, the one with the inside scoop. We could be in Greece or Nepal but for the razor wire and memory of division between the free and the imprisoned.  For just a minute our roles evaporate and we are just people on a bus traveling through the rain.

Pen to Paper

                When I point my old Subaru south, the familiar butterflies in my gut take wing. As I drive toward the tracks, the coal-fired power plant, and the state prison, where I will meet the writing workshops, I get nervous.  I do not get nervous because I will soon be sitting in a room with twenty inmates in a medium-high security unit of the Arizona State Prison Complex, nor because of the sometimes rigid and byzantine bureaucracy that seems to be forever changing the rules. No, the nervousness comes from a fear that I will not do a good job running the workshops.

I am concerned that I have not sufficiently prepared, that I have forgotten copies of inmate work, that I am not up to the job of providing what these men need to improve their writing. I feel some of the same butterflies on the first day of college writing classes for similar reasons. All teaching situations require customized planning, whether teaching upper division non-fiction prose classes, first year developmental writing, or prison creative writing workshops.

The butterflies settle as I pass through the six electric gates, three ID checkpoints, and long walk across the open yard to the Programs Building. As the men enter the room and help to set up the desks and chairs, I find myself on more familiar ground, talking about language and ideas, the same topics I address in college writing classes. It is this point of contact, this negotiation, and how it differs between the prison and the university that I would like to explore. It’s a good subject, and one that, as a teacher I find challenging to think about.   

When I first consider the differences in how I approach college classes compared to the prison workshops, I see more continuity than disconnect.  In some ways, in other words, writing is writing, whether it be a freshman comp class at the university or a creative writing class in the prison. I am not surprised to eavesdrop on the men in the workshop at the door to our classroom arguing over the uses and abuses of profanity or whether explicit violence is necessary to develop a particular story. Inmates are often less jaded and more passionate about style and content than my undergraduate students, though both share the interest. All that said, the contexts and purposes of prison writing workshops and college writing courses are drastically distinct and require that I tailor methods and materials to fit the job.

The biggest difference between my university teaching and the prison workshops is what one could call the “social and political constructs” within which the writing happens. Angela Davis coined the term “prison industrial complex” as way to get a handle on the epidemic increase in incarceration along with the growth of private, for profit prisons.

Our prison population is the highest in the world, and part of what leads to incarceration is illiteracy. Learning to read and write makes it less likely that one will end up in prison, or, in the case, of already being there, makes it less likely that an inmate will return. The reasons for decreased recidivism and literacy are not fully understood, but the relationship has been documented, and parsing the particulars is beyond the scope of this essay.

As a teacher, I need to understand the context of the workshops.  Inmates don’t get credit, grades, or degrees for their writing. Inmates come to the workshops for a wide variety of reasons, sometimes just to get some paper and a pen. More often than not, they bring some kind of question, something about how to express feelings they cannot contain, or about how to compose a letter to a judge. Sometimes they come for the wrong reasons and find better ones as time and writing progresses.

The prison population, like any other, is diverse and complex. J., for example, graduated from an Ivy League school before becoming a heroin addict, and C. dropped out of school in the eighth grade. Yet they see themselves represented stereotypically in television, film, and advertising as low-lifes, cruel, mentally deranged, stupid, comically inept. As a result, inmates have desensitized to criticism, or gotten so thick skinned that they accept it with much of a struggle. Paradoxically, they tell me the workshops are a place where they can feel, be more human for a while.

Inmates write about a world I barely know – one of addiction, homelessness, violence, prostitution, as well as love, hope, and spiritual life. They patiently explain terms like “tweaker,” and strategies to stretch food stamps like buying a cheap item with the stamp and then taking the cash for what they really want. They have few illusions about clichés like a fair, blind justice system and are jaded about equal enforcement of laws. Unlike students at the university, I do not have to persuade inmates that poverty, race, and class all figure in to opportunities offered.  

The physical space of the workshops is decidedly low-tech: no ELMO, LCDs, connectivity, or even overhead projectors. The workshops operate in the age of pencil and paper. Regimentation, martial authority, and predatory relationships pervade the yard. All of this adds up to a “no bullshit” atmosphere. My persona has to be one that radiates confidence and commitment to what we are doing. I have to believe in it. I have to have reasons that the inmates understand and respect for what we do.

Writing in the workshops is intrinsically motivated. That is, I don’t tell them what to write about. They choose the subjects, though I do give “assignments” for those who are stuck. For example, I might ask them to describe an idea or concept as a character, to personify an abstraction like despair. But I tell them that they have to do the assignment, or something else that they want to work on. Most just work on what they want to write about. The work is usually what we composition people call “expressive” or creative – prose, poetry, and fiction, or some blend of them.

The inmates bring a rich well of experience to the workshops, but not always the technical skills to present that experience in a way that most readers will find interesting or comprehensible. In order to polish the writing, inmates must work on language, rhetorical strategies, syntax, form. We talk about matching the subject to the form best at conveying it. It is heady, hard work. The “lessons” of “showing, not just telling,” using figurative language, selecting telling detail, and many others, are all woven into the context of drafting, revising, editing.

Another aspect that contributes to motivation lies in the end goal of the workshop: publication. The Poetry Project is supported by a grant from the Lannan Foundation that pays for a yearly magazine. For years it was the Walking Rain Review under Richard Shelton, but now it is Rain Shadow, part tribute, part description of the meteorology around the prison.

            But they can try to publish anywhere, and they bring in drafts to workshop for science fiction magazines, travel magazines, literary magazines, and contests like the Pen America Prison Writing Contest.

            In other words, the workshops are a means to an end of reaching an audience, and not an abstract audience, but one that might pay for the right to publish.

Given that the workshops have limited seats and participants that self-select, most of the inmates want to learn, desperately in cases. They do not carry an inheritance of entitlement, like many of the undergraduates at the UA, however. Many come from families that did not expect high levels of literary attainment. They were not told to go to college, become doctors, lead. Many of the inmates have been homeless, or addicted, or grown up in abject poverty, or dropped out of school. In terms of writing, many have trouble with spelling and punctuation and are not afraid to ask basic questions about nouns, verbs, sentences, or whether or not it is better to begin with a detail or a broad overview. Sometimes the profundity of the questions, such as what is a sentence or what makes a paragraph leave me scratching my head because I don’t know for sure. I can’t define the difference between poetry and prose other than by vague generalizations. they make me think.

Given that the context, population, physical resources, and motivations of the prison workshops differ so dramatically from the college writing class, what can a teacher/writer do? How do I negotiate this difference?

The first move I make is to meet them where they are, wherever that is. Then it is time to listen to what it is they need and what the best ways are to offer that. Some inmates need critique, sometimes sharp critique. Others may need encouragement, recognition for exploring difficult subjects or experiences. Sometimes the best thing I can do is listen. Some of them just want to have their say, to speak their truth, share a hard-won realization. These intangibles may be the reward of the workshops. Inmates get no direct social promotion for the workshops, but they can glean some better understanding of themselves by working on creative pieces.

            When I reload the Subaru and head back toward the city, I remember that when I began to write, I spoke with a voice I did not yet know; I found a persona separate from the one I knew in day-to-day life. The words that came to me carried a different weight, tone, and understanding. Those words strung together to shape ideas, to shape an identity, spoke taboos, affirmed beliefs. The  words took on a life of their own when put to paper. It is the words I trust when I go to the prison or to the classroom. With some respect, skill, and something to say, they maybe build a self, maybe rock the world.

Raven 2

I pass the sign warning that anyone beyond this point should be prepared to be searched, or, in Spanish, “revisado.” I like that idea better. I should be prepared to be revised. First drafts only up to this point. From here on, you need to focus and figure out what the hell it is you want to say, to do, and to act for a reason. Nobody except students writes for no reason other than his or her own.

The tubs are heavy with writing pads, pens, some magazines, a few books of poetry, copies of inmate drafts that we will discuss. I set the clear tubs down on the steel table so the guard can go through and check for contraband. All of it is contraband, really, but usually the guard just sifts through the pads, shuffles a few pages of the books to make sure they are not hollowed out. He has no interest and likely thinks this stuff is worthless, harmless, and a bit eccentric, if not insane. Why would anyone, including inmates want to sit down and write only to have others critique it? The best outcome is that the work might show up in an obscure journal somewhere, just another crazy poem or story that weirdos would read.

Or at least that’s what I think when I look at his face. I see a faint disgust mixed with bewilderment. Normally, he replaces the lids, and I walk through the metal detector to pick up the tubs on the other side. From here I have only to pass through the sally port and then I am in. I go through this every Saturday, and watch but keep my thoughts to myself. I am lucky and familiar enough that all of this protocol is routine. I see myself on the other side already, under the roof, next to the shoe-shine station, waiting for my ride.

There I will catch a bus and head on over to the Rincon Unit, a two minute ride from the main gate. I will hear the electronic locks snap open, like a bullet being chambered. I will show my badge through the half-inch thick, mirrored security glass and the invisible guard on the other side will open the sliding electric door, clearing my path to the yard and the Education Building.

Musing on my near future, I wait, ready to move the tubs, to feel my fingernails bend under the weight of them. When the guard signals me to lift the lids and stand back, I do, before unloading my pockets of glasses, pen, clip-on badge that allows me clearance, car keys, and any loose change. I am ready to go through the metal detector when he asks me for the memo. I am snapped out of reverie.

“What memo?” I ask.

“Your personal property memo that lists everything you are taking in to the units.”

I don’t have this.

“I have never been asked for a memo before. This is for the creative writing workshops. We’ve been running them for a long time.”

“You can’t take anything in that is not accounted for, and you need to bring it all back out with you.”

“They need paper and pens to write during the week so we can workshop on Saturdays. I have to leave them pads and folders.”

“Nothing is allowed in that doesn’t come back out.”

I think this is some kind of glitch, so ask to see a supervisor. The guard says she will contact the sergeant, before re-entering the control room. She points to a bench that looks like some detention site. This is where the drug sniffing dogs usually wait between checking visitors for drugs.

I wait forty five minutes. The sergeant, a blonde, heavy set woman, emerges from a gray office complex, and walks, with a slight swagger, toward me. I can see a trace of irritation in her face. I explain that the materials are for the writing workshop and that I take them in every week and leave them with the inmates.

“I’m sorry. But you cannot leave anything with the inmates.” She looks at me, but doesn’t look at me, and is reciting policy. It’s her job.

“You can’t go in with anything not on your list. You won’t be able to go in today.”

I can tell she is hoping that I will give up, go back to the car with my tubs, and go home. I decide to bargain, and ask if I can take in a file with copies of a poem by Sandra Alcosser, a poet who is coming in as a guest speaker in a couple of weeks.

“We need to read samples of her work,” I say matter-of-factly. Both of them look at me and each other. I keep going and offer to take the tubs back to the car as a concession, going in with only my fig leaf of a file folder.

They consent. “But only this once,” as a way of winning this battle, of teaching me to submit.

So I take my contraband back to the car, lock it up, and return for my revision. I pass through the metal detector and the electric doors of the sally port and enter the yard. I will have to figure this one out.

I count thirty-two ravens in a cottonwood tree over the DA, the Dining Area, as I walk from the gate that opens onto the yard to the Education Building in the Rincon Unit. Ravens whistle above me as they negotiate strong, gusts of wind. Dust blows across the yard and into my face. The ravens seem to like the razor wire and the dead trees, the military lettering of the buildings – HU5 – the strafed austerity of the recreation area. I like them. They mock us humans and our folly even as they benefit from our trash and discards. They are not proud and take none of this seriously.

OK, I say to myself, so that’s the way it is. Fly high enough not to get caught and keep your eyes on the cottonwood. If you’re lucky, no one will shoot you down.

New Year's Day at the Wilmot Prison

Prison Writing Workshop

Eleven ravens roost

in a winter cottonwood

wind slices through

my jacket as the lock

snaps shut

fingers strain at the weight

of papers and books

and pens and notepads

and other dangerous characters

as a man lights his cigarette

on an electrical coil

wired to a steel post

a bare grey stump

bleaches in the sun

mute now

no breeze can stir the leaves

it used to offer as shade

and here in this

clear unforgiving

light

no one

can hide or run

but a man can refuse

square one of

a new year

a blank page waits

for the story

that will mark the passing

of steps in hopeless time

snow shimmers on the mountain

far beyond the confining wire

one by one the ravens

lift into the wind and are carried

on the words

thrown down like dice

in this the last and

only chance to

harvest new truths

born of an

impossible heart.