Jill McDonough, who has been teaching in Massachusetts’ prisons through Boston University’s Prison Education Program, has a fantastic blog. She’s currently writing about each class session, sharing the poem up for discussion and her students’ responses. She also has a great blog roll that includes some fantastic prison-related photography.
“Your vocation is that place where your deep gladness meets the world’s great hunger.” Frederick Buechner
Beginning to set up readings for By Heart. Of course, Spoon — 32 years down on a life without possibility of parole sentence — can’t join me to read in person, but Michel Wenzer is making a film of Spoon reading from one of his chapters that I’ll show. The schedule so far:
Thursday April 8, 2010 7 PM Diesel, a Bookstore 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, CA
Sunday April 11, 2010 4 PM Booksmith 1644 Haight Street, San Francisco, CA
Wednesday April 14, 2010 7:30 PM Tattered Cover Book Store 1628 16th Street, Denver, CO
Wednesday August 4, 2010 6 PM Sacramento Poetry Center @ Central Library 828 I Street, Sacramento, CA
That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row is Jarvis Jay Masters’ second book, and it comes with endorsements by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Van Jones, author David Sheff, and many others. Although Masters writes of the crimes he’s committed, as well as those he’s innocent of though convicted – and although he writes some about his life on San Quentin’s Death Row – That Bird focuses primarily on Masters’ childhood and coming of age.
Much of what Masters reports is heart breaking: being left to watch over young siblings with no food to feed them, beatings and cruelty of foster care families, being set up to fight for bets by older male relatives, choices he makes against his own best interest. But Masters also describes the love he shared with his sisters, his wonderful first foster parents, the neighbor who silently left food for the children each morning, his caring though drugged mother. When life gave him a chance, Masters was the little boy he was born to be: loving, sweet, curious, responsible.
The story Masters shapes for the first two-thirds of the book lets the reader in very close as the child tries to make sense of his experience, as he learns to protect himself from hurt, and eventually, as he comes to feel most comfortable in institutions. Masters’ telling is honest, well written, deeply (humanly) interesting.
The last third or so of the book is also interesting, honest, and well written, but to me feels tacked on – more like a handful of essays than the continuation of an unfolding story. Perhaps the publisher felt the book needed to include stories from prison itself.
Both Masters and his publisher (HarperOne) seem to want the book to speak out most strongly about the foster care system. An important goal that Masters achieves. But I think the book does even more than this. That Bird shows one life – its huge difficulties and its few gifts – and how a being is shaped by both.
R. Dwayne Betts – “a good student from a lower-middle-class family” – carjacked a man, went to prison, and has written a book about the experience. Betts was sixteen when he committed the crime, but tried and convicted as an adult; he served eight years in Virginia prisons. He’s been out for four years now and in that time has earned a BA, founded a book club for young men (YoungMenRead), been an intern at The Atlantic, married and become a father. Betts is now a graduate student at Warren Wilson College. His book of poetry – Shahid Reads His Own Palm – won the Beatrice Hawley Award and will be out from Alice James Books in May 2010.
A Question of Freedom is getting lots of attention (from NPR to HipHopWired), and I’m very glad. Those of us on the outside – the ones making decisions about who we lock up – need every report on prison we can get from those who’ve been there. Betts’ report is that of a very young man – a teen-ager still (“Sixteen years hadn’t even done a good job on my voice,” is the book’s first sentence) – and therefore shines important light on this aspect of contemporary US incarceration practice.
What I appreciate most in A Question of Freedom are the ways Betts attempts to:
1. understand why he was drawn to the uncharacteristic moment that brought him to prison;
2. express the responsibility he feels, especially to his mom;
3. speak out about all the young black men in prison with him, while at the same time working hard for a complex – rather than a simplistic – analysis of this fact;
4. present the varieties of senselessness he encountered in prison;
5. describe the various ways he educated himself (with some, but not much, help from prison programs or staff);
6. claim how literature – reading and writing – shaped the man he became as he walked out of prison.
Betts is no longer a teen-ager, but he is still a very young man. A Question of Freedom is being marketed as the first work of an emerging author, and that description makes sense. The book has the virtue of rawness – conveying as it does the confusion and circuitous thinking experienced by a child locked up with adults – and some beautiful writing. Betts’ telling also bears the (probably inevitable) limitations of a young mind that has not yet developed enough scope or distance to create a coherent whole. No matter the “more” I wish from the book, A Question of Freedom is important and I’m very glad to see it building a large readership.
Creating Behind the Razor Wire is an excellent resource for those wanting to know more about prison arts and for practitioners hungry for connection to colleagues. The book’s author, Krista Brune, received a fellowship that allowed her to research dozens of programs across the United States, and this book documents her research. There are essays by people in prison, teaching artists, program administrators, and college students. There’s an advice section from three of us old-timers (Buzz Alexander of Prison Creative Arts Project, Grady Hillman and me), and an extensive program directory and resource list.
The book’s available for purchase and some of its information is available online.
