Lessons from a prison book club
Memoirs and nonfiction popular among inmates, as well as novels with a ‘bit of romance’
Ann Walmsley is in a book club that may be very much like yours or mine. The group (all women) meets in a member’s living room to discuss a book over a glass of wine and some nice cheese. But for 18 months a few years ago, Walmsley was in a book club that was very different. There were no soft furnishings, no wine, no women, save the volunteers leading the discussion, and no certainty that the next meeting would even go ahead if, say, a lockdown prevented the members from attending.
In The Prison Book Club, journalist Walmsley shares the story of the time she spent as a volunteer at two prison book clubs for inmates, at the Collins Bay and Beaver Creek institutions in Ontario.
It is an inspiring story of allowing people to exceed your expectations; about a prison for the body encouraging a freeing of the mind.
Over a recent pre-publication drink in Toronto, Walmsley was asked what kind of books made good picks for the group.
“We were looking for armchair traveller books,” she said, to get the men away from their prison environment. Memoir and nonfiction were popular. Also popular, perhaps more surprisingly, were books with “a bit of romance. They liked The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (by Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer) . . . they were all a bit wrapped up in the love story of Juliet.”
Seeing things through another person’s eyes is a central theme of The Prison Book Club.
The meetings are run by an organization called Book Clubs for Inmates, whose slogan is Literacy, Self-Awareness & Empathy.
Asked about witnessing reader empathy in action, Walmsley’s face lit up: “Oh I saw it so many times!” She grabbed her book for reference and gave a long list of examples of characters real and imagined who had provoked thoughtful and emotional responses from the group: Paula Spencer in The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, Aminata Diallo in The Book Of Negroes, Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Infidel, and more. In each example, the incarcerated men were identifying with the plights of women.
Several years before she was first introduced to the Collins Bay book club, Walmsley was violently mugged outside her home, an experience that left her with acute anxiety around strangers, particularly men. And yet she volunteered to enter a room with no security cameras or guards present, and to engage in literary discussion with men serving time for crimes including bank robbery, extortion and manslaughter.
The inmates in Walmsley’s memoir aren’t the only ones for whom the book club delivers lessons to help them move on in life. While the men in the group were learning to empathize with plights of female protagonists, Walmsley was coming to an understanding of her own.
“I guess, in time, I realized that I was a prisoner of fear, and what happened was that with each book (the group) read I was gradually being liberated from that prison of fear. Going in to see the men taught me that they are not just people who committed a terrible crime one day, but in fact they are fully human with so much to teach me.” Becky Toyne is a books columnist and editor in Toronto.