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Articles Tagged ‘Prisons and Prisoners’

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Watching X-Men in a room full of cons

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

Last night John and I had the end-of-semester holiday party with the prisoners in our writing workshop. We brought a movie (two movies actually, though we only had time for one and a half-hour of the other), and they gave us a holiday card with messages like, “Thank you for my little oasis of sanity.” The story of how we ended up with X-Men is worth telling, and the experience of watching that movie with this particular group of men was wrenching. [read on]

St. Sebastian, Holes, and Choreography

Sunday, October 29th, 2006

What a weekend! Sao Sebastiao, as I saw him in Guimaraes on my birthday, continues to smile in my bones. Swan Isle Press, in Chicago, sent me (at Christopher’s instigation, I’m sure) Christopher’s book about Salvador Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca—entitled wonderfully, Sebastian’s Arrows. Christopher writes tenderly that for Dali and Lorca, St. Sebastian was “a symbol of poetry,” of “the poet’s vulnerability,” “deliriously content with his punctured state.” The book arrived Thursday and took me more deeply into St. Sebastian’s territory: transcendent bliss, despite the “punctured state,” despite the “holes,” no: because of the holes. Once again my head spins from so much evenement, from the conjunction of ironies, miracles, and large and small joys. [read on]

Death Row in Texas

Wednesday, October 25th, 2006

Today John and I got a letter from one of the prisoners who was in our writing workshop for two years. That prisoner has served many years and is due to be released soon, but he was recently moved to the prison where death row is located, in Huntsville. From his cell, he can see the protesters who gather with signs every time there’s an execution. He says there’s a Subway Sandwich shop right behind where the protesters gather, and he notices both the protesters and the people buying sandwiches, going on with their lives. He’s on the “grounds keeping crew.” He says their job is to cut the grass, move furniture, plant flowers, and dig graves and bury prisoners who die in custody–both those who are executed and those who die of what the state calls “natural causes.” He writes, “We bury on average three or four a week. At the cemetery sometimes there are family members who show up. I used to think myself hard, not moved by other people’s feelings. Now I look at those family members and feel tight in the throat. Worse, sometimes we go out there and drop three or four coffins in the holes. No family to say goodbye, nothing.” Others in the workshop have talked or written about what it’s like when someone dies in prison. Within minutes the body disappears, and before a day has passed another prisoner is assigned to that bed. Death doesn’t scare us; invisibility does. Being ignored, forgotten, treated like a disposable thing, instantly replaceable: that chills us, makes us feel “tight in the throat.” We want our passing to be noticed. Yesterday I saw the film Paradise Now, a work of genius that takes us into the minds and spirits of two young men who decide to become suicide bombers. When one of the “martyrs” makes his final video, delivering his speech to the world and his farewell to his family, the camera doesn’t function properly, so he has to say his farewell speech all over again; the second time he delivers his speech, it comes off just short of absurd, and two of the “crew” stand by, calmly watching and munching on the lunch his mother prepared for him that morning.

Great night in prison!

Thursday, October 12th, 2006

The creative writing workshop in the prison tonight was exceptional. John, who co-facilitates the workshop with me, had left us last week with a reading by Mumia and the assignment to write about violence. For the first time in a year or so, John wasn’t able to come to the workshop because he’s in Cape Cod for a meeting (poor thing), so he missed his harvest tonight. We had a short story, a couple of essays, a piece that defies genre, a series of ten Haiku, a rant (from me), and two poems. I think I’m about to share some of that bounty in this blog. The guys in the workshop are preparing to launch a new literary magazine to showcase the work of people in Texas prisons. They’ll be the editors. It’s called The Midnight Special, for the Hudie Ledbetter song, for the way Odetta sings it, and for the legend: we’re in Sugar Land, Texas, right near the railroad line that runs alongside Highway 90. Every night we all can hear the echoing harmonium of the train whistle as we lie in our beds. Since the turn of the twentieth century, there have been prisons here, and the legend was that if the light from the Midnight Special should strike a man in the eyes as he lay in his cell, he’d be going home soon. [read on]

A swirl of life!

Sunday, October 1st, 2006

Lisa is having a baby as I write this. Manko has come home for an overnight, and that has gone well. On the world scene, it begins to appear that a significant mass of Americans now see what a disaster the invasion of Iraq has been and are perhaps wanting a change of government, though it is very difficult to see how to make the mess in Iraq better for the people whose lives have been ruined. Great emotion wells up in me for all of that. Speaking of great emotion, I showed Shakespeare Behind Bars at the prison on Thursday. Seeing it with John and that group of men was deeply moving, and last night I finished Alexandra Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat and sat weeping and wrung out for about an hour before I fell asleep and dreamed it. Last weekend I visited Guillermo in the prison he has recently moved to, and this afternoon, after I take Manko back to her dorm, I will visit Odus in a different prison. Plans for the summer, which are actually plans for my future life, are shaping up, and this morning as I walked on the trail, smelling the late summer grass and listening to the crickets and cicadas, watching dawn color the Texas clouds shades of pearl and rose, I felt as if the stillness in the very small me is surrounded by a swirl of emotions, changes, activities, and possibilities in the greater silence that holds everything. [read on]

Prisoners and the shape of freedom.

Wednesday, September 27th, 2006

For three years now, John and I have been facilitating a writing workshop at a men’s prison, a medical unit in Richmond, TX. Actually, I took a semester off to work on “deep practice” with a Zen teacher and discovered that my spiritual practice in working with prisoners was “deeper” (if such can be measured and compared) than my work at the Zen center; I returned to the workshop and left the Zen center. So the truth is that John has been doing this in Richmond for three years, and I’ve been doing this particular workshop for two and a half. I have been voluntarily walking into prisons for a long time. I started as a creative writing workshop leader in 1972. Working with prisoners is a calling for me. Last night, John and I “auditioned” six applicants for the two places in the writing workshop vacated when two prisoners were released last semester. [read on]

Porto!

Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

Rode a bus three hours north, through vineyards and pine forests to Porto. (Yes, Pam, I have a camera. I´m not taking hundreds of pictures, but I am taking a few.) I spent the day staggering around in Porto, which is vertical, so I´m either going up or down with every step. People walk faster here than in Lisbon or anywhere else I´ve been in this country. I had a bowl of the famous “Caldo Verde,” a creamy soup made with some kind of greens that are piquant, not bitter like most of our greens. It´s like eating mouthfuls of springtime. A street musician was playing wonderful music on his accordion. Businessmen in Porto wear their suit jackets over their shoulders without putting their arms in the sleeves (how do they hold them on?) and carry thin briefcases under one of their arms. Their shoes are highly polished and slightly pointy. Women come in every imaginable variety: rich and fashionable, poor and begging, tattooed, pierced, in black mourning, in short shorts and bra-tops, in khaki shorts and polo shirts, all jumbled together. My tiny fourth-floor walkup room in a Pensao (toilet in the hall, shower down on the third floor) has a single bed, a window onto a maze of tiled roofs, and a slanted floor, so when I am in there (so far only for about half an hour), I don´t know if I´m dizzy or if it´s the floor, or both. I´m dazzled, dazed, a bit sore of foot, surrounded by gorgeous tile decoration in the most unlikely places, laundry billowing above cobbled streets, the bustle and hurry of a CITY, and best of all I met a woman whose work may change my life. Seth said I would be blown away by Porto, and I am. [read on]