Words without Walls

Writers on Addiction, Violence, and Incarceration

Sheryl St. Germain, Sarah Shotland, Sheryl St. Germain, Sarah Shotland

• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781595342553
• eBook ISBN: 9781595342560
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Writing programs in prisons and rehabilitation centers have proven time and again to be transformative and empowering for people in need. Halfway houses, hospitals, and shelters are all fertile ground for healing through the imagination and can often mean the difference for inmates and patients between just simply surviving and truly thriving. It is in these settings that teachers and their students need reading that nourishes the soul and challenges the spirit. Words without Walls is a collection of more than seventy-five poems, essays, stories, and scripts by contemporary writers that provide models for successful writing, offering voices and styles that will inspire students in alternative spaces on their own creative exploration. Created by the founders of the award-winning program of the same name based at Chatham University, the anthology strives to challenge readers to reach beyond their own circumstances and begin to write from the heart.Each selection expresses immediacy--writing that captures the imagination and conveys intimacy on the page--revealing the power of words to cut to the quick and unfold the truth. Many of the pieces are brief, allowing for reading and discussion in the classroom, and provide a wide range of content and genre, touching on themes common to communities in need: addiction and alcoholism, family, love and sex, pain and hope, prison, recovery, and violence.Included is work by writers dealing with shared issues, such as Dorothy Alison and Jesmyn Ward, who write about families for whom struggle is a way of life; or Natalie Kenvin and Toi Derricotte, whose pieces reveal violence against women. Also included are writings by those who have spent time in prison themselves, such as Jimmy Santiago Baca, Dwayne Betts, Ken Lamberton, and Etheridge Knight. Eric Boyd ennobles the day he was released from jail. Stephon Hayes reflects on what he sees from his prison window. Terra Lynn evokes the experience of being put in solitary confinement.Because in 2011 almost half of all prisoners in federal facilities were in for drug-related offenses, there are pieces by James Brown, Nick Flynn, and Ann Marlowe, who explore their own addiction and alcoholism, and by Natalie Diaz, Scott Russell Sanders, and Christine Stroud, who write of crippling drug abuse by family and friends.These powerful excerpts act as models for beginning writers and offer a vehicle to examine their own painful experiences. Words without Walls demonstrates the power of language to connect people; to reflect on the past and reimagine the future; to confront complicated truths; and to gain solace from pain and regret. For students in alternative spaces, these writings, together with their own expressions, reveal the same intense desire to write and share one’s writing, found in the Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya, who scratched her poems on bars of soap in a Gulag shower, or the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, who smuggled bits of poetry out of jail in the clothing of visiting friends.Wole Soyinka, in solitary confinement forty years ago, wrote that "creation is admission of great loneliness.” In these communal spaces, our loneliness is lessened, our vulnerability exposed, and our honesty tested, and through these revelatory writings students receive the necessary encouragement to share the whispering corners of their minds.

POETRY

23

JOHN AMEN

That birthday, I swallowed valiums with vodka,

drove dark back-roads, both headlights broken.

I made it to the driveway, crashing into an oak,

passing out behind the airbag. Jul called an ambulance,

and I came to in intensive care, sunlight flooding

through barred windows, tubes flowing like power lines.

I’d been here before, each survival bolstering some

myth of invincibility, but this time I knew I was treading

a bloody shark pool, the inglorious end converging like teeth.

I told the doctor I intended to get clean. He shrugged

when I declined his offer to check me into a treatment center,

railed that the odds were mounded against me. Death

sat on the edge of the gurney, smiling like a mentor.

Bed Sheets

JEN ASHBURN

When I remember that night, I can’t recall

if we had pork chops and broccoli for dinner,

or ham and beans, or fried bluegill

with stewed tomatoes. I don’t know

if we watched TV or sat on the back patio

listening to crickets. I can say it was summer;

the evening light soaked everything

in the color of plums—not the skin of plums, or the flesh,

but that deep orange-red that bleeds in between.

She was gentle at first, my mother. Then she said,

“This is how they restrain you in hospitals.”

She tucked the sheets hard under the mattress,

trapping my arms, legs, shoulders, my surprised ribs.

How old was I? Strong enough to untuck the sheets

and crawl out of bed, but I didn’t. Into the night

I listened for her return footsteps and startled

at every old-house creak. What I remember

from that night is this: my mother’s unsteady eyes

behind her thick-rimmed glasses, and squares of light

gliding across the bedroom wall. Light through the window.

Light from the station wagons and pickup trucks

that said, so patiently, there is a road. My mother

was breaking. Even the light on the wall knew.

Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony

JEN ASHBURN

My mother played the piano. The whole

of our years together she’d play the piano,

and I’d dance as if I were Dorothy Hamill

and Mary Lou Retton wrapped into one, except

my pre-teen limbs moved like tree trunks.

My mother would play the piano, twisting over 16th notes,

driving driving faster faster and I’d dance

just as fast and just as hard. Stop.

My mother would begin again,

begin with the deep bass notes. She clung

and lived in the dark old tones.

My mother lived in a garden

of darkness, and I’d spin

behind her back until exhausted,

until I collapsed and followed her

into the shadows of her song. She

did not see me follow. I listened

to her music—an echo from the depths

of an unknown forest that vibrated

from our living room walls.

My mother played...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Editors’ Introduction
• Nonfiction
• Poetry
• Fiction
• Drama
• Contents by Theme
• Bibliography and Recommended Sources
• Contributors’ Notes
• Acknowledgments and Credits
• About the Editors