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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 crafttheir own out of deeply felt words carefully set into sentences that made poems that redefine 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 Writings
Terrell uses James Baldwin's "My Dungeon Shook" to write a letter to his own nephews. LaVon writes angrily, in blank verse, to his 17-yearold 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 softon me?" Mayfield writes elegy for a galley mate who hanged himself in his cell. Zeke conducts informal writing workshops 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 Corrections 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 fellow traveling carnival worker...