24 En glish Journal 102.4 (2013): 24–30

Deborah Appleman

The author discusses using creative writing as a way to unlock creative potential, to foster students’ love of language, and to offer a powerful outlet for self-expression in a class she teaches with 16 incarcerated men, ranging in age from 22 to 60.

Teaching in the Dark: The Promise and Pedagogy of Creative Writing in Prison

errell uses James Baldwin’s “My Dungeon Shook” to write a letter to his own nephews. LaVon writes an-grily, in blank verse, to his 17-year-

old self. Lue Lee falls in love with the sestina, using the following six end words to write an apology letter to his daughter for killing her mother: you, father, mother, remember, end, mind. Doppler furiously composes haiku after haiku to break his writer’s block. Chris begs me to be harder on his writing. “Make it bleed,” he cries. “How will I become a better writer if you are too soft on me?” Mayfield writes elegy for a galley mate who hanged himself in his cell. Zeke conducts informal writing work-shops instead of playing hoops in the prison yard. “To keep us fresh between classes,” he says.

This is my creative writing class: 16 men, ranging in age from 22 to 60, all sprung from the prison-movie grimness of their existence for two and a half hours every Wednesday night. I can’t tell you what they are in for, because I have chosen not to know. I am their teacher, and they deserve their teachers to regard them as students. Period. I refuse

to look up their names on the Department of Cor-rections public website. But they reveal their pasts and their crimes in classroom discussions, written assignments, and individual conversations, as the gauzy layers of wariness and mistrust are unraveled during our three months together. One killed a fel-low traveling carnival worker at the age of 15; an-other shot his father; a few committed gang-related murders. Several are in for life for crimes they com-mitted before they were 20.

Some have been institutionalized for more than 25 years, moving from group home to ju-venile detention centers to this place that they’ll leave “in a pine box.” These men know how to do their time, and an air of quiet resignation clouds around them, a sad gray aura. Others seem new to the place; they are impatient, skittish, and angry. Marcus’s anguished eyes nearly devour his face, and a woman’s name is tattooed across his neck in green three-inch letters. I hope she still loves him, I find my-self thinking.

In the time we are together, life happens, even inside these walls. Someone gets married, another

So these expressions of poetry and prose come as a great relief for me because these young ones seem to defy the order of the day. They are not mentored; they will mentor themselves. They are not given opportunity, they will make their own. They are given no future, they craft their own out of deeply felt words carefully set into sentences that made poems that re-define their souls to the world beyond the walls of their confinement. So while all else fails, literature steps forward to hail the new day with their voices claiming they live, that they want a life, that they want redemption and a chance to make something of themselves.

—Foreword by Jimmy Santiago Baca, From the Inside Out: Letters to Young Men and Other WritingsT

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25English Journal

Deborah Appleman

is transferred to a different correctional facility 400 miles away, one learns his father has terminal can-cer, one is reunited with a brother after 17 years. Some inmates work feverishly on their upcoming parole hearings and offer the same excuse when they turn in their late papers that generations of stu-dents have used: “I ran out of time.” I thought time was all they had. Yet in this way, and many others, I learned that my conception of them—as human beings, as inmates, as students—was far different from their lived, incarcerated reality. I learned that they were much more like all of my other students than I even imagined them to be.

What does it mean to teach language and lit-erature to these incarcerated students?

How far will our literacy pedagogies travel? Will they travel to this darkest of places? What are the inherent tensions in promoting freedom of self-expression to the incarcerated when even their bathroom and shower habits are regulated? Does creative writing have any potential to promote correctional goals of restorative justice? These are the questions I asked myself as I prepared to teach a college-level creative writing class at a high-

security men’s correctional facility. In this article I try to address those questions as well as share some of the work of my remarkable, incarcerated students.

Language arts teachers from elementary school to college embrace creative writing as a useful way to unlock creative potential, to foster students’ love of language and to offer a powerful outlet for self-expression. Within the teaching pro-fession, the capacity of creative opportunity to lib-erate minds and hearts goes largely unchallenged. Rarely has this claim been tested, though, in the most restricted of educational settings: penitentia-ries. There is a dearth of research on the teaching of creative writing to adult male felons in prison settings. While there was some attention paid to teaching in prison in the 1970s and 1980s (Hedin; Hruska), there has been little recent activity in this field, despite the increase nationally in educational opportunities for inmates. Some emphasis has been paid on the teaching of writing in jail or deten-tion settings, especially with juveniles (Salzman; Winn). Given the current rate of incarceration of grown men in our incarceration nation (Alexander;

Appleman teaches a college-level writing class at a high-security men’s correctional facility.

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26 March 2013

Teaching in the Dark: The Promise and Pedagogy of Creative Writing in Prison

Meiners), more attention must be paid to maintain-ing the humanity and dignity of those who find themselves incarcerated, especially those serving long or life sentences. And in this age of incarcera-tion, what can traditionally prepared language arts teachers do to try to offer the power of language to these underserved former students? We can go to them and teach them.

Teaching a Creative Writing Course in Prison

A couple of springs ago, I taught a creative writ-ing course in a high-security correctional facility outside St. Paul, Minnesota. The facility houses approximately 1,500 inmates. Although college courses are offered in the facility on a somewhat

regular basis, many of the in-mates are “non-Specter eli-gible,” a status named after former senator Arlen Specter (PA), who sponsored a bill to forbid offenders who have been convicted of felonies from taking classes offered through federal or state fund-ing. (This bill stands in stark contradiction to the signifi-cant evidence that the most powerful tool against recidi-vism is education.) By donat-ing my teaching services, the

non-Specter eligible men were able to enroll in the course. That also meant that 13 out of my 16 stu-dents were doing serious time for serious crime. The students ranged in age from 22 to 60. Of the 16, 11 had been convicted of first- or second-degree murder, with the other offenses ranging from felony assault to criminal sexual assault. The length of time for which they had been incarcerated ranged from 5 months to 25 years.

The creative writing class met weekly in two-and-a-half-hour sessions for twelve weeks. I de-signed a course that, on paper, seemed no different from any regular college creative writing course. I relied on the wisdom of Annie Dillard, Natalie Goldberg, Tobias Wolff, Donald Murray, Peter Elbow, Donald Graves, Mike Rose, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and other writing wizards. I integrated my

knowledge of writing process and writing peda-gogies into the course. There were weekly assign-ments that spanned a variety of genres—poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Class time included some direct instruction, guided assignments, work-shop time, and peer editing. We read models of other creative work from a variety of genres and cri-tiqued them.

I attempted to create a learning environment that was as much like an ordinary class as possible in terms of pedagogical approaches, assignments, and class structure, although the presence of incar-ceration and surveillance was ubiquitous (Meiners). Despite the degrees of creative freedom offered by the assignments and assurances of confidentiality I offered, the incarcerated writers were reluctant to write specifically about their crimes or about the conditions of their incarceration, subjects that are often staples in prison literature. In fact, our most heated class discussion occurred after the class watched Eve Ensler’s documentary about teaching creative writing in a women’s correctional facility, What I Want My Words to Do to You. Her first as-signment for her incarcerated students is to have them write about their crimes “in excruciating de-tail.” Half of our class was outraged. They felt the assignment was an invasion of privacy. “This is the only place I can escape from my crime,” cried one. “That’s why I write!” “You’re deluded,” countered another, “living in a kind of fantasyland. Writers are supposed to write about what they know, and this is what we know, man. Crime . . . and prison.” In the end, some students chose to write about their crimes “to work through them,” and others medi-tated on prison life even within the short confines of a haiku:

Prison is a sad placeLonely cells in long rowsDon’t go to prison(Terrell Shaw)

or

A mind is a terribleThing to waste, butNot worse than an entire life(Lavon Johnson)

Others were much more likely to engage in creative work about family, life before incarceration, and expressions of regret and restoration. Toward

I attempted to create a

learning environment

that was as much like

an ordinary class as

possible in terms of

pedagogical approaches,

assignments, and class

structure, although the

presence of incarceration

and surveillance was

ubiquitous (Meiners).

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27English Journal

Deborah Appleman

that end, in the complementary genres of Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet and James Baldwin’s “Letter to My Nephew,” the students compiled an anthol-ogy of letters to young men. (Thanks to the Stu-dent Press Initiative at Teachers College, Columbia University, we were able to produce an anthology of the men’s writing [Appleman]). The following two pieces, a letter and Lue Lee’s sestina to his daughter, are examples of those letters:

Cyann: A Sestina

Lue Lee

I can’t tell you how much I love you,You are constantly on my mind, You look just like your mother,I wish that I can do more to be a real father,Cyann, You I will always remember,Don’t worry little girl, this is not the end.

Don’t look at it like it’s the final end,Each and everyday I would always think about you,You are the last thing your mother remembers,Be strong; don’t let people play tricks with your

mind,Wherever you go, always remember that I’m your

father,Always remember that you came from your beloved

mother.

Later on in life, you will become a great mother,Don’t worry, I’m still here, it’s not the end,Always remember that you do have a real father,No one can really tell you what to do, only you,Your beautiful smile, will always be on my mind,It’s hard to go back, but just try to remember.

Your mom is gone; she will always be remembered,Always keep in mind, the name of your mother,Mommy and Daddy are not there, it’s not the end,I hope that you will always have us in mind,I’m here to answer what questions you have in you,I always and will always be your father.

Nobody can love you like your mother and father,I know that what happened, is hard to remember,I lived my life already and I’m here for you,Don’t forget to go and visit your mother,Forever always remember to keep us in mind,This is not our family’s final chapter; this is not

the end.

You always be on your mother’s mind,When you grow up, don’t forget to visit your father,Your mother and I, our love for you will never end,

You will always be the one we both love and remember,

Life is hard without mom, one day you will be a mother,

Both our lives didn’t end; we are kept alive because of you.

Your life is not at an end, keep that in mind,For you, you now have taken the place of your

mother,Your Father, I will be the last memory of our family

to remember.

❖ ❖ ❖

Ross Shepherd

A Letter to My Son

Dear Brandon,

My son. It has been twenty years now; so much time squandered, given away in a fit of rage. I am sorry for that. I am sorry for all of the time that we never had together as father and son. I am sorry for all of the things that you never experi-enced because of the mistakes that I had made and because of the price that I am paying for my hei-nous actions.

I am here in prison, now; regretting what we never had together. I missed your birth and the bond that your mother and I would have made with you in the first, early days of your life. I missed being able to see your little fingers wrapped around my thumb as I made a solemn promise to always put you before me in all things and to pro-tect you from all of the bad things in life. I missed seeing your proud joy as you took your first steps, and the sparkle in your eyes as you tasted ice cream for the first time. I’m sorry. I gave all of that away.

My heart breaks at the thought of not witness-ing you walking into school for the first time. I know that I would have been more nervous than you. I didn’t get to hear you retell every minute of that day as I recall my own experiences from so long ago. I gave all of that away.

I missed taking you fishing with me for the first time and being so anxious to make sure that you would have a great time so that we could have something that we loved doing as father and son. I missed seeing the great, big smile on your face as you reeled in your very first sunfish on your Snoopy fishing pole. I missed out on seeing you jump in surprise at the cacophonous roar of a nearby light-ning strike, and watching you sleep blissfully to the music of the rain. I missed your frightful tears after you were stung by a wasp. I gave that away.

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28 March 2013

Teaching in the Dark: The Promise and Pedagogy of Creative Writing in Prison

I didn’t get to see you dressed up as a Cub Scout or witness your recital of the Cub Scout Motto and the Law of the Pack in order to get your first of many patches. I never got to bring you to church to learn about God. We never sang hymns together. We never sang anything together. I

never bought you a Holy Bible. I never got to dedicate His Word to you. I missed meeting all of the friends that you would make, and all of the activities that you would have participated in. I bet you would have been great at anything that you wanted to do. I gave it selfishly away.

I missed out on finding out about your first girlfriend through the grapevine because you knew that your uncles and I would have teased you until your face turned red. I missed being so proud of you at that moment,

seeing for the first time the growing man you would one day become. I never got the chance to drive you and your sweetheart to a movie and then wait for hours in the parking lot for you to be done with your very first date. I didn’t get to teach you how it is no big deal when she breaks up with you either. I gave that all away.

I never got to make sure that you did well in school, or to teach you about how important it is to be educated. I never stood over your shoulder as you struggled over algebra. I never got to feel happy for you when the lights went on and you finally began to understand it. I never told you how proud I was of you. Not even as you gradu-ated from high school. I couldn’t. I gave it all away.

I missed seeing you in the sharp Army uniform and the bitter argument that we would have had because I was disappointed that you didn’t go to college. I didn’t get to see you deployed to Afghanistan to fight the enemies of our way of life. I never waited up at night for a phone call that you had promised me so that I would know that you were okay. I never saw the change in you. I never saw in you what I see in myself when I look in the mirror. I never got to give you a hero’s welcome home when your tour of duty was finished. I gave it all away.

Son, I am sorry for the things we missed. I am sorry for coming to prison and giving away all of the moments that a father and son should have

together. Right now, I am suffering my punish-ment for the crime that I committed. I never knew until it was too late just how much was being given away. I am sorry that you never had the chance to be born. I am sorry that I never got to meet your mother. We never fell in love. I came to prison never having known love. We never had you; never got to see the person you would become. I gave it all away . . .

. . . Before we ever had a chance.

Creative Writing and Restorative Justice

These pieces afforded the writers, both serving life sentences, an opportunity to express regret and to take responsibility for their actions. At the same time, it afforded them a chance to express them-selves creatively and to discover they had some writing ability.

In addition to the humanizing effects of the creative process, the anthology itself has notable significance for the authors. First, many of them chose to write to young people, including their sib-lings, not yet incarcerated. They view this writing as a kind of outreach or distant mentoring. Second, they (and I) view both the publication of their work and the presentation of their reading as a kind of liberation (Freire). Through their words, they be-come present in the free world, or as one incarcer-ated writer put it, “I write because I cannot fly” (Chevigny). Finally, the anthology itself is part of a restorative justice effort. All proceeds from the book are donated to the correctional facility’s Re-storative Justice Committee and used to fund ini-tiatives such as apology letter workshops, victim/perpetrator meetings, youth offender mentoring, and other restorative justice efforts. This effort is an affirmative response to one of the questions I posed at the beginning of this article. Does creative writing have any potential to promote correctional goals of restorative justice? Yes, creative writing can be part of a larger restorative justice project.

In a recent issue of Rethinking Schools dedicated to the school-to-prison pipeline Linda Christensen reminds us “the school to prison pipeline begins when we fail to create a curriculum and a pedagogy that connects with students, that takes them seri-ously as intellectuals, that lets students know that we care about them, that gives them the chance to channel their pain and defiance in productive

These pieces afforded the

writers, both serving life

sentences, an opportunity

to express regret and

to take responsibility

for their actions. At the

same time, it afforded

them a chance to express

themselves creatively

and to discover they had

some writing ability.

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29English Journal

Deborah Appleman

Perhaps the largest lesson I learned from “teaching in the dark” is that we must respect the humanity of all of our students, even when so-ciety fails to do so. Put another way, perhaps if these incarcerated students had found themselves in classroom spaces where they were valued, their life trajectories might have been dif-ferent. I also learned that students everywhere walk with poetry and prose inside of them that is ready to break out at the slightest invitation. It is our responsibility to issue that invitation in our classrooms.

Yes, the transformative power of our pedagogy and the power of language can travel even to the dark-est of places. The proof is in their po-

etry. I close with a few lines from Ezekiel Caliguiri, an incarcerated student from my class, who just placed first in the memoir cat-egory of the 2012 PEN prison-writing contest. Like his patron saint Jimmy Baca, he is equally adept with poetry. Through the opportunity to write his way out of darkness, he has found his voice. And so may they all.

From “These Songs Remind Me”

We are the childrenthat used to be the future.the dried brooks in a crook’s eyes,absorbed by that oblivious spongeinside the ordinary inertia of being human.Dreams that live and diein a wet abysswith broken fingersat the endof clenched fists.

This is the social tsunami

individualsin strangled, strychnineparadigmsplaying their instrumentsand singing songsabout the way we were,and always will be.

ways” (27). Christensen’s commentary admonishes us to rethink our curriculum and pedagogy for all students. To be sure, our responsibility as En glish educators is to create responsive and responsible classrooms and curricula that will engage the high school students these men once were. Our job is to keep them from being pushed out of our schools into the streets and eventually to prison. But while it might be too late for them to participate in a life of infinite possibility, it isn’t too late to engage them in the power of creative writing.

I find myself walking a perilously shaky line with incarcerated students. I try to treat them with the respect and regard that all students in a class-room deserve, and yet I can’t forget that they are here in this awful place because they have been found guilty of doing awful things. They are not the good guys, I remind myself. But they seem good to me.

In the end, what seems most important is that it is education that humanizes us and that these men become more human when they are learning, read-ing, and writing. If we choose to preserve the lives of human beings who commit serious crimes, we must have some interest in helping them preserve their humanity. And, if recent statistics can be believed, the more education they receive in prison, the less likely they are to reoffend. So for a couple of hours a week anyway, these men are more than inmates: they are students, poets, interpreters, critics, and writers.

The incarcerated men in Appleman’s class are students, poets, interpreters, critics, and writers.

They are not the good

guys, I remind myself.

But they seem good

to me.

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Teaching in the Dark: The Promise and Pedagogy of Creative Writing in Prison

Hedin, Raymond. “Teaching Literature in Prisons.” College En glish 43.3 (1979): 280–85. Print.

Hruska, Thomas J. “Teaching Literature in Prison—Or Confessions of a Neo-Pragmatist.” Annual Meeting of the Midwest Regional Conference on En glish in the Two-Year College. Minneapolis, Minnesota. 19 Feb. 1981. Paper.

Meiners, Erica. Right to Be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.

Pew Center on the States. “One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008.” Public Safety Performance Project. Washington: Pew Center, 2008. Print.

Salzman, Mark. True Notebooks. New York: Vintage, 2004. Print.

What I Want My Words to Do to You. Dir. Madeleine Gavin. 2003. DVD. PBS Home Video, 2004.

Winn, Maisha. Girl Time: Literacy, Justice, and the School­to­Prison Pipeline. New York: Teachers College, 2011. Print.

Works Cited

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2010. Print.

Appleman, Deborah, ed. From the Inside Out: Letters to Young Men and Other Writings, Poetry and Prose from Prison. New York: Student Press Initiative, Teachers Col-lege, 2009. Print.

Baca, Jimmy Santiago. Foreword. From the Inside Out: Letters to Young Men and Other Writings. Ed. Deborah Apple-man. New York: Teachers College, 2010. 13–16. Print.

Chevigny, Bell Gale. Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing (PEN American Center Prize Anthologies). New York: Arcade, 2011. Print.

Christensen, Linda. “The Classroom-to-Prison Pipeline.” Rethinking Schools 26.2 (2011): 24–27. Print.

Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury, 1970. Print.

Deborah Appleman is the Hollis L. Caswell professor and chair of educational studies at Carleton College. Professor Apple-man’s recent research has focused on teaching college-level language and literature courses for incarcerated men. She is the author of Reading Better Reading Smarter, (with Michael Graves) Adolescent Literacy and the Teaching of Reading, Reading for Themselves: How to Transform Adolescents into Lifelong Readers through Out-of-Class Book Clubs, Teaching Literature to Adolescents, Critical Encounters in High School En glish: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents, Second Edition (winner of the Richard A. Meade Award), and co-editor of Braided Lives: An Anthology of Multicultural American Writing. Email her at dapplema@carleton.edu.

30 March 2013

Call for the Secondary Section High School Teacher of Excellence Award

The Secondary Section of NCTE wishes to recognize and celebrate high school classroom teachers. Each NCTE affiliate is at liberty to select a person for this honor in the manner of its choice. An affiliate’s govern-ing board might acknowledge someone who has previously won an award within the affiliate, thus moving that person’s recognition to a national level, or the affiliate might advertise for applications for nominations before choosing a winner.

Documentation should be sent to the Secondary Section Steering Committee administrator/designee by May 1 of each year. Materials should be sent to the address on the current nomination form. For more infor-mation, go to http://www.ncte.org/second/awards/hste.

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