Place, Murder and Memoir

Inside Out - Teaching In Prison

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“What happened to you?” R asks, as soon as he sits down next to me. R has arrived a bit late, and we have already pulled our desks into a small circle.

“I’m okay,” I tell him.

R frowns. My right cheek is covered with a good size purple bruise and slight burn. I’d tried to cover it up with concealer, but evidently hadn’t done a good job.

The Department of Corrections training stresses that you are never reveal anything about your personal life to the men inside. This can be been tricky. Obviously, I don’t hand out my address or phone number or share anything intimate with the guys in my class. But they do know my real name, so that kind of information would be easy to find. Over the course of months in the classroom, we inevitably learn things about each other.

So I told R the truth, because I worried that he thought I’d been punched.

“I’m being treated for skin cancer,” I said. “It’s not a big deal.”

“How can you get cancer on your skin? P asks.

“From the sun,” I say.

“Can Blacks get it?” S asks.

And we are down the first rabbit hole of the evening, without having even done the class warmup/check in.

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I bring the discussion on skin cancer to a close and ask the men to come up with one or two words to describe how they are feeling. P, who has arrived with Lola, the dog he is training, is hyper. His knee is bouncing up and down and his hand is tapping on the desk. P is white, wire-y and muscular.

“I’m trying to figure out a word to describe how I’m feeling,” he says.

“Anxious?” S offers.

“Yeah, that’s it. Anxious.”

P, it turns out, had his parole hearing yesterday. It’s done remotely, through video. P says this was his seventh parole hearing. He’s feeling hopeful. He thought it went well. The hearing went on for more than an hour.

The men discussed the relationship between the length of the hearing and the probability of release. Anything 20 minutes or shorter and you’re staying incarcerated. “It’s a formality but they never had any intention of letting you go,” said P. But S said a really long hearing can be a bad sign too, explaining “if they have no reason to keep you but don’t want to release you, they just keep you talking until you say something that gives them a reason to deny.”

P claims that the reason he has been denied parole so many times is that the district attorney who prosecuted him is still in office. “He says I’m a psychopath,” P said.

And now we’ve gone down rabbit hole number two for another five minutes and still haven’t started class work.

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The evening’s writing lesson was on the role of '“place” in memoir. Place, I explained, shapes our experiences and memories. Place also prompts sensory memories, a scent or a sound that resonates and evokes an entire scene.

The concept of place works on multiple levels. There’s the actual space we are in - the room, the building, the town or city, the state or country. There is the place you are in the specific situation you’re writing about - if it’s a family scene, you have a place in that family. You have a place among your friends.

What I really wanted to get to in this class, though, was our minds as a place. I asked the men to consider times in their lives when they were in a different head space. “Maybe you were thinking in a completely different way. Maybe you held a different set of beliefs. Sometimes, it’s hard to recognize yourself from those times,” I said.

“When I get angry,” R said, “It’s like I’m not even there anymore. Something takes me over and I check out. Like that?”

“Like that,” I answer.

For a while I’ve wanted to ask R about the elaborate tattoos on his forearms - almost blue black against his dark skin. He has ink on his neck too. But I’ve thought better of it. Boundaries.

The men read a few pages from Stephen King’s “On Writing” - another high recommend, and you don’t need to enjoy horror to appreciate his writing advice. The excerpt we read concerned King’s addiction, first to alcohol and ultimately to cocaine and other drugs. “By then I wasn’t in shouting distance of my right mind,” King writes, and goes on to describe his expertise in denial and rationalization.

The writing prompt was to write about a time your head was in a different place. It could be about addiction, or about things you once believed were true and now don’t, or a whole world view you used to have.

Usually, the men react enthusiastically to writing prompts, but this one landed with a thud. No one wanted to do it. Basically, it would lead to them writing about their crimes, a mindset they did not wish to return to.

“I mean, I believed either I had to kill myself or kill this girl, so I killed her,” P said. “I thought she was my girlfriend, but she wasn’t. But I don’t feel like writing about it.”

Oh shit. P killed a girl? P killed a girl. This has happened before when teaching in prison. A class member reveals his crime. And I can never look at him the same way. Ever.

Of course I know that most of these men are incarcerated for murder. But to be able to teach them, I need to check that part of my mind at the classroom door. I don’t romanticize these guys or think they are all wrongly imprisoned. I just relate to them as human beings.

But P killed a girl. P, who is a talented writer, a group leader, who is so loving with the dog he’s training. P killed a girl. He talked about it calmly, in the context of a prompt. Was the DA right - is he a sociopath? Who are these men?

I have to keep teaching the class and process my own reactions later. Why am I surprised?

“Guys,” I say, “Let’s scrap this prompt. It’s a bad idea. In fact, it’s a perfect illustration of being in a different head, which I must have been when I thought of it. What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking. Let’s brainstorm about a different idea.”

We talked for awhile and decided to go with something considerably less fraught. “Write about your favorite place.”

Have I mentioned how hot the classroom is? There is one fan, but it just seems to blow around more hot air. It’s huge and metal and noisy. I decided to answer the prompt too.

After 25 minutes, I announced “Time’s up.” S asked for two more minutes. And then it was time to share the work.

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R wrote that his favorite place was the planetarium that he had visited on school trips as a child. “You leave this world,” he wrote. “You see all the stars in the night sky. The brightest is the North Star, and if you ever get lost you just look up, and that’s North. I will probably never go into space, but I will get back to that planetarium because that’s as close as I can get.”

S wrote about being in his girlfriend’s home. This place comes up a lot in S’s writing. There was always food, and people were kind to him. And the place was nice. “I just always felt good there.”

P wrote about a childhood trip with his family to a National Park. As always his writing was descriptive, with ice cold water slipping over smooth rocks, woods filled with cedars and pines, the wonder of a waterfall.

P killed a girl.

I’d also written about my favorite place - a cabin in the woods, and how safe I felt there. I described bringing a blanket to a clearing outside at night, lying down and looking up at the stars, and how close they seemed.

What struck me was how interrelated all of our memories were - we all wrote of beauty and safety, and R and I both wrote of stars, though the only ones he’d ever seen were on a ceiling. “To see them for real…Man….” he said, and trailed off.

Lightening was beginning to light up the sky as I was escorted through the courtyard. Given that the courtyard is ringed with huge metal poles, metal gates and metal barbed wire, I was anxious to get out of there.

Still, I chatted with the corrections officer walking with me.

“How was your day?” I asked.

“The usual. I’ve got five more years,” he answered.

That’s five more years until he’s eligible for his pension and he can retire.

In prison, everyone is marking time. The incarcerated men. The corrections officers.

Today, P will hear about whether he was granted parole or not. I know he’s been incarcerated since he was a teenager. He’s been in at least 25 years, maybe 30. P killed a girl. Maybe he’ll be released. Maybe not.