Words Without Walls writing program helps inmates, those in recovery
Eleven women sit around a basement table, heads bent, hair hanging, pens scratching, feet jiggling. Two are instructors, both in recovery from addiction. Nine are residents who are working on it.
They also are working on poems and essays.
We’re at Sojourner House, a drug rehabilitation residence for women in Friendship. It is one of two sites where Chatham University’s Words Without Walls creative writing instructors lead classes for 12-week semesters. The other is the Allegheny County Jail.
The opportunity to write has unleashed powerful works, says Sheryl St. Germain, co-founder and director of Words Without Walls and retired director of the creative writing/master of fine arts program at Chatham.
“We encourage them to write about the scary things,” she says.
The program began its run at Chatham in 2009, but its origins date to 2005, when Sandra Ford Gould, an artist and writer in Homewood, acted on the germ of an idea that a young man planted at a neighborhood meeting years before. He told the gathering that his felony conviction was keeping him from getting a job.
“‘Everywhere I apply, I have to check that box,’” she says, relating his words. “I thought, ‘A writer doesn’t have to check a box.’ That stayed in my head.”
Today, because she acted on her idea, dozens of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people are pursuing writing as a career, to be heard, to heal.
Ms. Gould says that for people who get in trouble grabbing outward and hurting themselves and others, writing makes them revisit their humanity: “They become introspective and thoughtful.”
One of the students in Ms. Gould’s last class at the jail, before she handed the program off to Chatham, was Eric Boyd.
She remembers the impact he had on other students. “Some of these guys were in for murder, drug dealing, but when Eric would
get up to read, they would scoot their chairs up as if it was storytime in kindergarten.”
Boyd had been released when he won a national PEN award for incarcerated writers, second place for a fiction piece called “Examination.” In it, his character, who has perfect vision, goes to the eye doctor at the jail to get glasses.
At a reading earlier this year at Alphabet City in the Central Northside, Boyd says that his character “wanted eyes to match up to the hazy uncertainty around me ... the superpower of not recognizing mold in the shower, frost in the toilet.”
He went on to study in the MFA program at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, N.Y., taking the Greyhound bus to Tuesday and Wednesday classes between his job as a dishwasher and line cook at a restaurant.
Sarah Shotland, a fiction writer and playwright, cofounded Words Without Walls when she was a student at Chatham. An assistant professor of creative writing now, she taught for three years at the State Correctional Institution in Pittsburgh and now teaches at the jail, which has men’s classes and women’s classes.
With hundreds of billions of dollars being spent nationally on corrections operations, she says, writing programs are sound investments. Numerous studies and surveys over many years have shown that arts education reduces recidivism by as much as 90%.
“In the beginning, I wanted to do this work because I believed that it could make a radical difference in the lives of those who participated in the classes,” Ms. Shotland says. “I continue to do the work because it has made a radical difference in my own life. It has made a lot of the invisible systems that shape our world bright, hyper-color visible to me. Once you witness what those systems are like, you have a responsibility to them.”
At the jail, she says, “Most people in my class have not even been convicted of a crime. They just can’t post cash bail.”
•••
This semester is approaching week 10. On a recent Friday, male students at the jail file into the classroom carrying purple folders stuffed with their writing and reading assignments. They sit in a circle with instructors Dmitra Gideon and Arielle Burgdorf, Chatham master’s students.
Seth Blackman opens a notebook, its pages filled with handwritten script — no white spaces except at the top, not even paragraph breaks.
He reads first, picking up where he left off the week before, stroking his goatee as he describes the shooting of the main character’s brother and the conversations it sparked among his friends.
That day’s class focus is on cliches and how to rethink what they mean.
“Cliches are imprecise, a sign that you really don’t know how to say what you want to say,” Ms. Gideon says.
“The cliche I had the hard- est time figuring out was, ‘You want your cake and to eat it, too,’” says student Captain Barnes. “That never made sense to me.”
“It means you want the best of both worlds,” Dorrean Watson tells him.
“I figured it out,” Barnes says, “like, last year.”
The circle erupts in laughter.
Instructors say incarcerated students often lack self confidence and feel vulnerable to be writing and reading aloud to others. But vulnerability also is a rich well to draw from. The students say as much.
“Poetry is like having a therapist on paper,” Danny Jackson says.
“This class has helped me more than any drug or alcohol class,” says Jason Rini. “It has helped me deal with my crimes, made me look at myself as a character and at my victim’s stories. The night before class, I know it’s coming tomorrow. It’s al- most like church.”
The class often breaks into discussions about life and family. It sparks personal sharing that the in- structors encourage their students to write about.
Jackson tells the class that, when he was a kid, he asked his mother if death was real. “She said, ‘Yes, we all die,’ he said, “and I asked my grandmother, and she said, ‘Yes, we all die,’ and it shocked me. I told my mom, ‘When I die, can you keep me at home?’”
“You should write that,” Ms. Gideon says. “That’s a really good story.”
••• Since 2009, more than 3,000 incarcerated students have taken Words Without Walls classes. Almost 70 MFA students have taught in the program. Classes end with the publication of a booklet of students’ work.
Each semester at Sojourner House, the instructors devise a theme for the residents to explore. This semester it is female archetypes — the queen, the witch, the fair maiden, the mother, among others.
The class is interpreting fairy tales, the roles women and girls play in them and the lessons they teach girls.
“We want our class to turn those archetypes around so that the female is a more active participant in her story,” Ms. St. Germain says.
Karen Collazo, who coteaches the class with Ms. St. Germain, says it wasn’t until she was in the master’s program at Chatham that she could write about her own trauma and addiction.
“A lot of the women at Sojourner House say that they used to write or to keep a journal,” she says. “A lot of them have tried to refocus their lives creatively.”
Since this semester started, student Jennifer Patterson says she has seen changes in residents who are writing each week. “Yes, people are thinking more and are inspired, getting in touch with their inner selves. We’re in pain, but this is an accomplishment we’re proud of.”
“Creative writing gets you to think, it’s relaxing and it helps your mind,” says Karlee Quinn, one of the students. “I feel like maybe one day, it could change someone’s life.”
During one class, Ms. Quinn waded into what she had written, shrugging apologetically, dancing her feet under the chair and hurrying to finish, saying, “I think it’s terrible. But I tried.”
No, no, the women protested, some emphatically. They urged her to work on it, to stick with it.
“I am 10 years sober, and I feel very connected to these women,” Ms. St. Germain says. “We feel that writing like this is healing. It’s not a promise you’re going to stay clean, but it’s a healthy thing for the journey.”