Revising Confinement: Transformations in a Prison Writing Workshop

Written with the Women of the Writing Workshop at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women

This paper reflects on the evolution of a writing workshop initiated in 2006 at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women (MCIW). The workshop, enrolling more than 20 women and coordinated by a group of local activists and faculty from Baltimore area colleges, approaches writing — and talk about writing — as a means of reflection, expression and individual and collective transformation. Now in its third season, the workshop has matured from an introductory course designed to develop writers’ confidence and fluency through relatively short writing exercises, to sustained engagement on the part of each writer with the crafting and revising of a single, longer piece — a “New Yorker” style profile of an individual, to a new focus on telling participants’ life stories. The current season, which includes encouraging submission of student work for publication, has raised expectations for both the “inside” and the “outside” participants and has catalyzed the development of additional workshops and a college degree program at the prison.

The MCIW writing workshop model focuses on building trust and community as a prerequisite for transformative creative work. Drawing on the wisdom developed by university-based writing scholars (see Tobi Jacobi’s “Reflections on Prison Literacies”; the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program; the community arts movement. especially the mural arts movement and established correctional arts programs such as Victoria Sammartino’s Voices UnBroken), this flexible workshop model can be adapted to a variety of settings within and outside institutional walls, but is particularly suited to situations initially characterized by mistrust and inequality. In this essay, we describe the workshop practices and activities, amplify the voices of participants by sharing writing created in response to those activities, and reflect on the value of this workshop process as an approach to community arts.

Preparation — A Collaborative Faculty Development Model

In the summer of 2006, Judge Brenda Murray, the chief administrative judge for the Securities and Exchange Commission and co-chair of the Women in Prison Project sponsored by the National Association of Women Judges, sent out an e-mail to Baltimore and Washington, DC area faculty, inviting professors to participate in a book club for women incarcerated at MCIW. Judge Murray had been volunteering at MCIW for quite some time, had cultivated relationships with the warden, and had paved the way so that the initial request to faculty was minimal: simply suggest a book and agree to lead a discussion of that book at one of the monthly evening meetings. About a dozen professors responded, in the process becoming educated about criminal justice issues and becoming ambassadors for the women participating in the Book Club. Many of the faculty who agreed to facilitate book discussions are writing teachers, and soon the participants suggested adding a writing workshop on alternate weeks.

Five faculty members joined with Judge Murray to plan the writing workshop, and we soon found ourselves inventing and enacting the format of the writing workshop itself: sharing tentative ideas, responding in supportive but critical ways to each other and trusting each other with professional intimacies — the inner workings of our typically private classrooms. For each of our first six sessions, we planned together, facilitated the workshop together as a group, and collaboratively debriefed from each session. This seemingly labor-intensive model powerfully meshed community and academic perspectives, emboldening instructors who otherwise might have been daunted by the perceived barriers to participation and efficiently preparing all six of us to lead future classes independently. During our second and third seasons, three additional faculty members joined the group, quickly metamorphosing from apprentices to co-leaders. Our practices of collaborative planning and reflection have become less formal over time, but no less generative; in fact, the writing workshop facilitators have since become the incubator or “think tank” for both the college degree program now operating at MCIW and the nonprofit organization created to support it. As a bonus, the intensely engaging and deeply collaborative work with the workshop writers has informed our activism and influenced our teaching in more traditional classrooms as well.

The First Season — Exploring the Rhetoric of Confinement

The practices of observation, revision and deep listening are central to this writing workshop, and the first meeting played a critical role in setting a respectful tone and establishing trust. As would be true at all future sessions, the workshop opened with a prompt to writing — in this case, a black-and-white photograph of a woman carrying an umbrella. Each participant, including each of us facilitating the workshop, wrote an “interior monologue,” imagining what the woman in the image was thinking. Adapting a practice from Friends’ Meetings, after each participant read aloud, other members of the workshop (who had been noting down phrases that resonated for them) “echoed” back the words that they found interesting and powerful. When participants “echo,” they do not praise or explain; instead, by simply repeating the words that they find memorable, they amplify a writer’s voice and affirm her choices. This ritual of writing in response to a prompt and then going around the circle to read aloud created an equal voice for all, at once eliminating the need for leaders to moderate turn taking, minimizing the role of authority, and orienting each writer toward the others in the group.

The writers’ creative responses to this prompt led us in a later session to first present as a prompt a black-and-white image of an Edward Hopper painting, and then to repeat the exercise with a color version of the same image. In response to the black-and-write image, Alice wrote:

The vase stands decorated, tall and beautiful, with no one to enjoy its life. Many people know of flowers, but not that this actual one even exists.

And in response to the full-color image:

Light, camera, action for the entire world to see. May the sun reign on my vase and petals for the entire world to see. As I stand on my pedestal, draped in silk, wrapped in expensive porcelain, I hear the world scream for me: “Long Live the Queen!”

This was but one of many ways that the workshop, like the workshops described by Tobi Jacobi, encouraged both seeing and re-seeing — or “revising” — an initial vision, supporting incarcerated women as they struggle to overcome stereotypes and narrow expectations, to see and re-see themselves, their choices, their futures. During the following weeks, assignments to write a letter that would not be sent, to recall a favorite song, and to craft a “This I Believe” essay built on this momentum.

This theme of transformation permeated the entire workshop and was dramatically heightened by the lecture that Harvard professor and literary critic Helen Vendler gave to more than 80 women of MCIW at Judge Murray’s invitation. Vendler, who had never before entered a prison, essentially delivered the same talk on Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry that she gave in Washington that same week in the form of the prestigious Mellon Lecture. The prison context, however, gave unexpected significance to the tightly controlled, highly repetitive poetic forms that Bishop employed, and Vendler and the women shared an electric moment as they discussed the poet’s power to wrest meaning and nuance from seemingly meager fare.

Over the next weeks, our workshop focused on poetry, and several writers chose to experiment with the villanelle. Karen’s poem, “O Tenacious Weed,” spoke to all of us as an especially powerful expression of the theme of transformation:

O tenacious weed
You must serve a purpose
Determined as you are
To eke out life
On ground where
Self respecting flowers
Refuse to squander their pedigree

O tenacious weed
You must serve a purpose
Your head high
And roots deep
Not simply leeching
What you won’t be denied
But thriving

O tenacious weed
You must serve a purpose
Shouting to an audience
That fails to see beauty
In your lush green splendor
Blooming for a moment
Against looks of disdain

O tenacious weed
You must serve a purpose
So gifted at blending
That among haughty flora
A cursory glance
Would number you with them
The skilled mimic

O tenacious weed
You must serve a purpose
Destroying well laid plans
Of perfection and balance
Frustrating the gardener
Who arduously struggles
To yank your roots

I understand you
O tenacious weed.
I too am thorny
Taking life from inhospitable soil
Virtually impossible to exterminate
My existence an insult
As I hold my face to the sun.

As college professors, we have been trained to tend flowers accustomed to nurture. Applying Karen’s metaphor, facilitators in a prison workshop must also encourage weeds to re-see and re-name themselves. Revision of language cultivates new skills and perspectives, supporting revision of lives.

Other writers spoke of the ways that writing helped them to re-see prison itself and to re-invigorate past and future selves. Victoria, reflecting in part on her poem “Beautiful Women Everywhere,” described the writing workshop as a process of “using cells that I thought were long dead, reaching deep within myself to explore my inner self, and noticing things around me. Even in a place such as this to find something good to write about.” For Victoria, writing deepens her space, transforming everyday prison life into what another Writing Workshop member calls a “shallow but deep place”:

Looking out the window
Two women laughing
Women walking, fast — slow
Two women hugging
Women carrying commissary bags
Two women embracing
Women going to work
Two women kissing
Women embracing each other
Two women holding hands
Women coming from lunch
Two women arguing
Women dressed all the same
Young — old — proud — strong
Beautiful women everywhere.

Other women create space differently. In response to an invitation to develop an extended metaphor, Elise writes:

Life is like itself. E=mc2. The sound and the fury. Minute un-seeable particles in constant motion, holding together suspension bridges, volcanoes, cans of soda and popcorn. That what life is … like the lunge of a lion for a young gazelle who hasn’t a chance of getting away.

Elise is a time-and-space traveler, using writing to transport herself to worlds she visits imaginatively. The writing workshop, with its emphasis on peer review and revision, not only makes the prison walls more permeable for Elise, herself, but also makes her conjured spaces communal. By eliciting memories and dreams and then considering these in class and group critiques, the workshop transforms private reflections into shared (if virtual) spaces populated with imagined others and past and future selves. Private memories become part of the collective imagination, and the entire workshop is buoyed by absent allies, the gumption of a feisty grandmother, the thrill of riding a home-made scooter. Language here is not just therapeutic self-expression, it is public communication, and in a place where trust and intimacy can be dangerous, language builds a creative community that expands relationships. We all become writer and audience for each other. Even — or especially — between sessions, Writing Workshop members inhabit larger spaces. And so do those of us on the outside: the spaces we daily take for granted assume depth, color and shimmer.

The Second and Third Season — The Profile and Life Stories

Inspired by several presentations at the Arts in Criminal Justice Conference in Philadelphia in October 2007 that emphasized the value for participants of sustained effort, high levels of craft, and public presentation of finished work, we designed the second season of this writing workshop as a multisession series that would build on the skills developed in the introductory work to emphasize more ambitious, thematically focused writing and revision. The profile is a particularly flexible form, honoring insight but also permitting humor and irony. Participants chose to write about teachers, friends, prison staff, grandparents, parents, children. Each week, as writers explored such techniques as scene creation, extended metaphor, physical description, speculation and association, they also mined memory, identified nuance, adopted multiple points of view and admitted (and forgave!) flaws in those they’ve cherished. The work of the eye, the mind, the hand and the heart fused, transforming each writer’s understanding of herself in relationship to significant others.

Most recently, drawing on the writing workshop model that Wally Lamb developed at Bedford Hills resulting in the spectacular collection “Couldn’t Keep It to Myself,” the workshop has turned to the writing of life stories. We began this season by inviting participants, as a “warm up,” to write a six-word memoir, a mini-genre recently suggested by the creators of Smith Magazine, popularized by NPR and The New Yorker, and adapted by countless writing teachers. Within a matter of minutes, women in workshop wrote:

This Wisdom Will Not Be Wasted

Love Too Soon Yet Not Enough

Barefoot Lady Who Loved Many Shoes

I could be home living life.

Children and all first. Me second.

Life is downhill skiing without poles.

Work on life has only begun.

Can you sit while “standing by”?

Circles of Women: Voices. Power. Listening.

Loves rolling down grassy hills.

I shall finish the game.

Over the course of the next several months, the insights expressed in these mini-memoirs propelled extended writing, as writers began to integrate newly learned technique with the courage to explore material hidden in the past. Reading “Couldn’t Keep It to Myself” encouraged many of the women to aim for creating a similar collection. The Sun Magazine’s “Readers Write” topics, from “The Dining Room” to “Choosing Sides,” allowed writers to address difficult material “on a slant” and in manageable pieces; The Sun also provided a welcome venue for submission of publishable work. Life stories began to emerge in scenes, snatches of dialogue and character sketches. Over and over again, workshop participants affirmed for each other that every writer had something important to say. Serving as witnesses, they honored the enormous risks each writer took. Over and over again, attention to craft enabled the women to navigate cascades of emotion and memory. In writing the stories they “did not want to tell,” they found they were writing stories that had the power to liberate and heal.

The Transformation: Subtle but Unmistakable Shifts in Power

As we had hoped, the effects of the writing workshop, and its companion, the Book Club, have begun to reverberate in other aspects of prison life and governance. In addition to inspiring Warden Brenda Shell to wholeheartedly support efforts to create a college degree program at MCIW, the workshops have empowered the participants to trust themselves and each other. This trust manifests itself in a variety of ways, both within and beyond the workshops. Consider these developments:

• Conversations in the workshops take the form of discussions among equals; women comfortably challenge facilitators’ and each other’s points of view.
• Participants frequently refer to conversations about books or writing that have taken place outside the classroom, extending the workshop community to the larger community.
• The sense of cliquishness — common in a prison environment that may be dominated by gangs aligned on racial lines — has abated. Elise, isolated at the start of Book Club and often the subject of snide remarks, has become a valued member of the group. Friendships have ceased to function as protective armor and participants routinely volunteer to give messages and materials not just to friends, but to anyone who has missed a session.
• Some of the barriers between inmates and correctional officers have been lowered. During a session when we were unable to use the usual room, two female guards were assigned to join us, and one found herself contributing to the conversation. The incarcerated women were momentarily silenced, but then the discussion resumed, with the officer and the inmates exchanging ideas and stories. This experience enabled us to recommend that officers have the opportunity to take college-level classes given at the prison, a proposal that secured enormous support for the college program from Department of Corrections administrators. (A future goal, enthusiastically welcomed by Warden Shell, is to organize writing workshops specifically for officers as part of their professional development.)
• The women have become better decision-makers, able to communicate their needs about scheduling sessions and choosing materials.
• The writers have also helped the facilitators better understand the role writing plays in their lives, letting us know that public readings are not their main goal and can be, in some cases, paralyzing. Although the idea of eventual publication appeals, for now, at least, the writers want to find their own voices and claim their own narratives.
• Perhaps most tellingly, several of the workshop participants have formed Women Helping Others (WHO), a group focused on preparing those nearing release for successful re-entry. The Warden has supported the group’s efforts, recognizing these women as leaders and allies in the institution.

Essential to each of these transformations has been trust. In a prison environment where individual degradation is institutionalized — where meals are “feeds” and people are “population” — trust is a foundation for hope, growth and self-respect, a rare flower that can flourish with constancy and nourishment.

The Future — Growing our Community

As we look ahead, we can see that both the Book Club and the Writing Workshop have become “institutionalized” at MCIW: They are not only self-sustaining elements of community life, they have spawned productive offshoots that engage and empower much larger groups of incarcerated women. A full-day career and work-readiness conference was held inside MCIW in October 2008 that not only taught skills, but also brought speakers and prospective employers inside the walls and expanded the network of support for re-entry. Most significant, thanks to the advocacy of the writing workshop leaders and the extraordinary efforts of Judge Brenda Murray, Warden Brenda Shell, state corrections and education officials, university faculty, and the administration of Anne Arundel Community College, a college degree program has been established at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women.

At the same time, the women incarcerated at MCIW have spearheaded and organized a series of life-changing programs from within the walls:

• To combat widespread obesity, WHO created the Biggest Loser program, modeled on the popular reality TV show. WHO recruited participants, and prison officials responded to the women’s initiative with increased exercise opportunities and dietary changes, including salad and fruit at every meal and such options as baked chicken instead of fried. The commissary added cereals and other healthy snacks, and most important, the women teamed up to encourage and mentor their peers. Within four weeks, participants recorded a total loss of more than 400 pounds — and an enormous gain in control over their lives and community.

• WHO members persuaded Warden Shell to permit a make-up sale. Imagine the pleasure of new lip gloss, lotions and hair ornaments to people confined in a grey and denim world. Consider, too, the satisfaction of exercising long-dormant organizational and planning skills to bring some happiness to others while earning money for your organization. The make-up sale generated $28,000 in revenue, resulting in a sizable sum to fund future WHO events.

These and other transformations point not to the power of our particular program, but to the larger power of education and the arts to change lives. As the women in our workshops at MCIW continue to read the stories of others and write the narratives of their own lives, the rhetoric of confinement that we see at work in their words will increasingly become a formidable tool to help them control, survive and transform their prison experience.

As for the faculty leaders of the writing workshop, we see equally powerful changes in our own professional lives. The workshop participants inspired us to take risks, as well, and collaborating with diverse stakeholders to realize the dream of a college degree program at MCIW has challenged and stretched us individually and as a group. Our teaching in traditional settings has also changed, as we recognize more clearly than ever the essential roles that trust and community play in creating learning environments where students engage fully. We ask ourselves, How can we construct activities and assignments to foster community among disparate, competitive participants? How can we help students, themselves, develop the trust that makes authentic risk-taking possible? How can we evaluate meaningfully without judging harshly? These questions lie at the heart of education. The responses we bring to our universities will be richer for having been cultivated with the writing workshop participants in the unadorned classrooms of the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women.

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art. The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.

Barbara Roswell teaches writing at Goucher College in Baltimore, where she directs the First Year Colloquium Program and co-directs the Read A Story-Write A Story afterschool program, pairing over 50 Goucher students with learning partners at the Dallas Nicholas Elementary School every week. Roswell serves o– the steering committee of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, connecting institutions of higher learning with correctional systems to deepen the conversation about and transform approaches to issues of crime and justice. From 1999 to 2007, Roswell edited Reflections, a peer-reviewed journal of writing, service learning and community literacy. She is author, with Gail Goldberg, of “Reading, Writing and Gender.”

Pamela Sheff, a faculty member at the Center for Leadership Education at Johns Hopkins University and a founding member and treasurer of the Prison Education Partnership, has helped to lead both the Book and Writing clubs at the MCIW at Jessup. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Harvard University, has taught writing and communication at Goucher College and is an award-winning writer and marketing communications consultant. She has developed and taught business communications courses for private companies and, prior to becoming a consultant, worked as a documentary producer and editorial director for WMAR-TV.

Original CAN/API publication: December 2008