Shotland Sarah - Words without walls : writers on addiction, violence, and incarceration

Praise for Words without Walls

Words without Walls will motivate new readers to read and inspire new writers to write. The stories here are human and painful; the telling itself is direct, intimate, and sharp. I can almost imagine the conversations this book was created to enliven, and the new stories and poems that will be born.

JUDITH TANNENBAUM, author of Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin

Words without Walls is filled with the descendant voices of Garca Lorca and Jean Genet, of Voltaire and Akhmatova. These writers know that incarcerated voices, marginalized voices, and exiled voices are sacred guides to resisting everything that makes us less human than we are capable of being.

DARRELL BOURQUE, author of Megans Guitar and Other Poems from Acadie

If, as William Blake says, Prisons are built with bricks of law, then this searing, delving, heartbreaking, and healing collection, composed in diverse conditions and shared in a thousand lightless places, is potently unlawful. Featuring an array of Americas most admired writers along with new voices speaking out bravely, this book sings with a power no walls can quell: the power of witness. Words without Walls is a unique and necessary toolboth balm and weaponfor those of us teaching, reading, writing, and listening in the world beyond the academic pale.

PHILIP BRADY, editor at Etruscan Press

In the six years I ran a prison workshop, I would have welcomed a broad collection of work like this. These brilliantly selected pieces would have helped the inmates I worked with more easily see themselves as part of a community of people whose voicelessness can be the cruelest aspect of incarceration. Words without Walls offers a range of writers across genres, holding a lens to human consequence and the incredible capacity of people to endureand even rise again.

STEPHEN PETT

Words in spaces of forced confinement and places of recovery, which often squelch our humanity, become connective fibers, not only to the world removed but most importantly to the self who fights against intense hurdles to bring those words, their truth, to the surface. Words without Walls is an amazing collection, a powerful tool to inspire and empower all people to let their voices be heard.

KYES STEVENS, founder and director, Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project

PUBLISHED BY TRINITY UNIVERSITY PRESS

San Antonio, Texas 78212

Copyright 2015 by Sheryl St. Germain and Sarah Shotland

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover design by Anne Boston

Book design by BookMatters, Berkeley, California

Cover art: iStock.com/Viorika Prikhodko Photography, iStock.com/Purdue9394

Trinity University Press strives to produce its books using methods and materials in an environmentally sensitive manner. We favor working with manufacturers that practice sustainable management of all natural resources, produce paper using recycled stock, and manage forests with the best possible practices for people, biodiversity, and sustainability. The press is a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit program dedicated to supporting publishers in their efforts to reduce their impacts on endangered forests, climate change, and forest-dependent communities.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI 39.48-1992.

CIP data on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-1-59534-256-0 ebook

19 18 17 16 15 | 5 4 3 2 1

... for the first time, I had something to losemy chance to read, to write, a way to live with dignity and meaning.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

CONTENTS

Alternative spaces: a shorthand phrase for jails, prisons, rehab centers, shelters, community centers in urban areas, spaces where any of us might land to wait out a trial, serve a sentence, recover from an abusive situation, or work through withdrawal. In other words, places where we learn to restart our lives, places where the heart and mind often find themselves more open and vulnerable, and where writing can help give shape to the chaotic and unspeakable.

We are familiar with these spaces because we enter them each week to lead creative writing workshops for a program known as Words Without Walls, after which this anthology is named. Words Without Walls, housed at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, trains MFA students to go into jails, prisons, and rehabilitation facilities to teach creative writing. The program also sponsors a weekly community workshop for those released or out of rehab who wish to continue writing.

The poems, stories, essays, and scripts in this anthology, written by some of Americas finest creative writers, are pieces the teachers from Words Without Walls have used successfully over the years to inspire and model writing for their students. Here are brave poems that make the heart race, passionate stories, essays, and scripts that speak directly of some of the most difficult human experiencespieces that dare to say the thing that most scares us. These are not crossword poems or puzzle stories but rather essential pieces that inspire the reader to reach deep and explore his or her own dark places.

It has often been noted that the United States spends far more money on incarceration than it does on education. Budget cuts in education have caused creative programs of all kinds to fall by the wayside, and many people have never had the opportunity for exposure to or engagement in the contemporary arts. Those whose lives are affected by these factors number in the millions. And yet few publications such as this one are curated for them.

Our goal in creating this anthology has been to gather voices that speak intimately, with a sense of urgency and immediacy, to those who read and write outside the walls of the traditional classroom. We have compiled these poems, essays, stories, and scripts to connect with educators and students who come together in largely anonymous rooms to discuss and create writings that speak to vital yet often unvoiced aspects of our lives. The rooms are found in a variety of spacesthey are almost endlessbut include jails and prisons, rehabilitation centers, halfway houses, hospitals, transitional housing facilities, and shelters. This collection also has a place in the innovative college classroom, especially those whose undergraduate students might be considered at risk or whose graduate students might wish to teach creative writing in alternative spaces. Our hope is that Words without Walls will serve as a resource for writers who work and teach in these spaces and as a tool for the students they teach.

For the past six years we have worked in these spaces through a creative outreach program also called Words Without Walls. Housed in the MFA program at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Words Without Walls trains MFA students to teach creative writing to inmates in the Allegheny County Jail (ACJ), the State Correctional Institution in Pittsburgh, and Sojourner House, an in-patient rehabilitation center for mothers and their children. Weve also, throughout our careers, taught creative writing at a state womens prison, a veterans hospital, a transitional housing facility for homeless veterans, shelters for victims of domestic violence, drop-out recovery centers, and after-school programs for at-risk youth.