I ran a reading and writing group for 10 years at a women’s maximum-security prison. To me, the group was an escape from the confines of my grinding daily routine, and while our lives could not have been more different, I imagine that the women might have felt the same way. I have struggled for years about whether I should write about this group at all. I’m not entirely certain it’s my place to do so. While we were meeting in the group, it was a confidential safe space that was very intimate. To me, the act of writing often feels like such betrayal, but even more so in this case, not only because I cared deeply for these women and I do not want to misrepresent them, but also because I have concerns about confidentiality, power, and privilege.1 But for now, I lay these questions aside and I write.
I met with the women in the prison library. It was not as sterile and depressing a place as I had imagined. The walls were packed with books and more books. We had a couple of long tables that we would push together and chairs with wheels on them that we sat on. While the maximum-security building itself had a typically beige, industrial look to it, the library was cozier and felt comfortable. Even though it was against the rules, the correctional officer on duty usually let us close the security door, which allowed for greater intimacy.
If I wrote a story about myself, what kind of character might I be? Tall? Is tall a kind of character? Imagine the worst thing you have ever done and walk around for 20 years wearing a sign that says what you did. How would you feel if someone wrote that story? Maybe I’ll write that story about you. But please, don’t write that story about me.
For one meeting, we read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean Dominique Bauby. Bauby was a French writer for the fashion magazine Elle. He suffered a massive stroke that left him in a state known as “locked-in syndrome.” While locked-in, a person’s intellect and cognitive functioning remain fully intact, while their body experiences complete paralysis, except for the ability to blink. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is Bauby’s memoir of his life after the stroke, an account which he painstakingly blinked letter by letter to assistants, who in turn, typed it up.
Brandy said, “I loved it! It is the first book I ever finished!” I was very pleased by that. She said, “I could totally relate to Bauby’s situation. I feel just like he did, trapped. Sometimes, people around here treat us like we are pieces of furniture.” She observed that this was how Bauby was treated by those around him—discarded, like a non-entity. He wrote about being wheeled from one smoke-filled room to another, the silence that greeted him, and the lack of pity or compassion in the eyes of those he saw.
Bauby related his ability to escape the confines of his physical paralysis, which he describes as an oppressive diving bell, by allowing his mind to take flight, like a butterfly. In this way, he left his body behind and traveled through space and time, visiting long gone empires and lost loves. He could explore the past and imaginary places like Atlantis and live out his childhood dreams.
It seems to me that we are all, like Bauby, trapped in our Earthly bodies of flesh and bone, he more so than most, and the women in the book group, more so than me. Yet the experience of the butterfly is available, albeit at times camouflaged. It is one reason why we read.
One time, after Officer Crowell gave me a quarter for a locker to put my car keys in, because I forgot a quarter again, I was buzzed through the first security door, then buzzed through the second door, then buzzed through the last door. After I got to the classroom and waited for a minute, Brandy came in first and said, “Wow your car,” a white Fiat that looked like an egg, “is so small. I can’t believe you even fit in it.” She had been looking out her cell window in C-Mod when I drove up.
The next week, after I parked and got out of my car, I waved over to the side of the building that I thought C-Mod was housed in. That time when Brandy came into the classroom, she asked “Who were you waving at?” I said “You, of course!” Later I wondered if she liked it, or if she thought that I looked like an idiot waving at a prison.
After finishing Wild by Cheryl Strayed, her account of hiking the Pacific Coast Trail after her mother’s death and a heroin addiction, some of the women commented that they felt the ending was a let-down. “All she does is come to the end of the trail and go home. I thought something big would happen-she’d fall in love or make some important discovery.” That was typical of the sort of perceptions they shared.
Tracy had a very different perspective. “I thought it was very realistic, and just exactly how things really do happen,” she said. “You go on these long journeys, through all these trials and tribulations, you suffer and you struggle, and you think that in the end, something big is going to happen, but what really happens is nothing, nothing at all. There is all this build-up to something explosive, but then everything just dies down with a pfffttt.” She made a noise like the sound of air leaking out of a balloon.
I wondered if Tracy was thinking about how it might be when she got out. How terribly disappointing it would be if you were locked up for 10 or 20 or 30 years, thinking all the time that you could live through anything, all of the indignities and horrors that incarceration brought to your daily life, just to get to that eventual freedom at the end, only to find out that it was a huge let down on the other side.
First you make up the people. Those are the characters.
Then you put them somewhere. That’s the setting.
Then you make them do some things. That’s the plot.
They meet, they fall in love, they die.
You put things in there that mean other things. Those are the symbols.
You also need a theme, like mortality or greed or truth.
But what if none of it means anything?
The Fault in our Stars by John Green is the story of two teenagers dying of cancer who fall in love. It contemplates the question of all questions: do we have free will or is everything predetermined? In other words, it asks, is where I find myself at right now my own fault, or the fault of something greater, the stars, which have put me here.
Shonda raved about the book. “I loved it! It’s such a great romance!” She always loved a love story, even the ones that ended badly.
In the group, we observed that young adult books, like The Fault in our Stars, often raise existential questions quite overtly, perhaps because adolescents are such great philosophical thinkers. They ask themselves endless questions like: What is the point of my life on the planet earth? What is the point of my life? What is the point? What is? What?Maybe this is because they are the only human beings with the time to spend on such questions, other than philosophy professors. I know I am much too busy thinking about how I need to buy a new refrigerator to spend much time on the bigger picture. Or maybe it is because older adults have already pondered these questions and determined that the answers really don’t matter all that much as we are trapped here anyway, so you might as well get a new refrigerator.
Once I was going to bring in bookmarks for everyone, all different ones: butterflies, scenes of Tuscany, Sojourner Truth, 3-D polar bears. One had roses on it. My husband said, “I wouldn’t do that, they might think you were transmitting contraband by splicing the bookmarks open and sealing the goods back up inside them.” I thought to myself, well, wouldn’t the words in the books themselves be more dangerous?
I never dreamt of the women in the group at night or dreamt of being on the inside with them or about the book group in general or about the prison, but I did daydream about them on the outside. Daydreaming of them on the outside was the only way I could meet them out here. I wondered if they, too, dreamt of meeting me outside the walls.
You come to a fork in the road. One path leads to the ocean. One path leads to the mountains. One path leads to the woods. The final path leads to the unknown. Which way do you choose, and what does your choice say about you? This is a writing prompt that I once gave to the women in the book group. I gave them five minutes to write, then we shared our writing. Tracy chose the mountain. Shelley chose the forest. Juliette chose the ocean.
Stacy raised her hand. Her piece was my favorite. When I first met her, she seemed deeply depressed. But then something happened to her a couple years into her sentence. Perhaps it was just a sustained term of sobriety, as she was an addict when she arrived at prison. Something inside her shifted and she blossomed like no one else I’ve ever known. She was a masterful artist. She once brought a portfolio of her work to our group, and I was totally blown away. And that was with no formal arts training whatsoever. So much beauty, derived from so much pain.
Stacy didn’t write about going to the woods, or to the ocean, or to the mountains. “I’m still at the crossroads,” she said. “All that time I was writing about standing there, trying to decide what to do. I don’t know what that says about me!”
She described her intense fear of making the wrong choice and taking a lot of time to think all the options through. She contemplated staying at the fork forever because then everything was still imaginable, no dead ends or disappointments, just wide-open possibilities.
Later, after 10 years in prison, Stacy got released. I did see her again eventually. But for now, I’m just going to leave her where she placed herself in our writing session, at the fork. Why did Stacy choose the crossroads? It strikes me that nobody chose to write about walking backwards away from the fork, back towards where they came from. Is that ever a possibility, or does that road behind you slowly evaporate with each step you take forward? Maybe, in the end, it is all just forks.
Once when my brother said, “Yeah, well, maybe some people just deserve to fry!” I jumped down his throat and said that some of my dear friends had taken another person’s life, and that they didn’t deserve to fry. He asked, “well, what if they killed your kid?” And I said, “well, would frying them somehow bring him back?”
At some point in time, after having read a book of Russian fairy tales, Shonda asked if the group could read a book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Many of the fairy tales are very dark and include lost children, wolves, spurned lovers, nasty revenge plots, corpses caught up in thickening bramble bushes, and other disturbing happenings.
When I met with the women to discuss the Grimm’s, most of them were enchanted with the stories. Part of the appeal seemed to be the delight any of us might hold in reading tales of other stupid, naughty, irresponsible, and disobedient people who reap what they sow-a fictional guiltless schadenfreude. We can gleefully think, “Ha! That fool got what he deserved!” without beating ourselves up about wishing ill on another real human being.
Shelly spoke at length about the darkness in the stories and how that darkness represented feelings that we all have inside of us. She said that the stories were playing out all our subconscious wishes for revenge and that was what made them delightful, as they were safely contained on the page. I was excited by this notion, and we picked apart several of the specific tales. It certainly felt like she was onto something-fairy tales as Rorschach to our darkest inner thoughts.
You don’t have to think about what you wear as a visitor, not for fashion anyway. But no underwire bra or jewelry, as that will set off the security system, and no flip-flops or mini-skirts or hoodies or ripped clothing, because those things are not appropriate and may pose a security risk. When you got inside, all the women were wearing the same thing, blue scrubs. Except the unsentenced women. They wore beige, the color of purgatory. Everyone’s hair always looked better than yours. They had more time to style it.
At one session, Ary asked if we could read the book First, They Killed My Father by Loung Ung. It is Ung’s memoir of her experiences as a childhood survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.
Ary, who was a twenty-something Cambodian American, spoke at length about her own family’s experiences in escaping the Khmer Rouge. She told us that both of her parents were refugees who fled Cambodia in the 1970’s. She said her grandfather’s brother was killed by Khmer Rouge soldiers right in front of the family. She remembered her grandfather telling her about drinking snake blood to make himself strong enough to survive. She told us that neither of her parents would talk about their experience. Ary said that she was happy that we read the book, as otherwise, she would have no idea what they went through.
We contemplated the incredible resilience of human beings, especially children, and how they can live through the most dehumanizing and seemingly never-ending traumatic events and still, at times, prosper. Rachel said that it was amazing that the author survived by eating only grass.
Ary described her mother’s physical condition—she was in the hospital and would have to start kidney dialysis soon. Ary’s prison sentence was due to end the next winter, but she was going to try to go up for parole sooner because of her mother’s illness. She seemed hopeful about getting out then-she said her mother was the only one who had been there for her and that she was the only support her mother had, so she wanted to get out and take care of her.
Part of me wondered for a bit if I should have gone to see her mom for her, but I didn’t know how good her English was and if she only spoke Cambodian. And of course, I was not her daughter, I was nobody to her. But still.
Our Crimes: Infanticide Filicide Patricide Homicide Felony assault Armed robbery Child abuse Breaking and entering Domestic assault Simple assault Possession of a firearm Possession of a controlled substance Delivering a controlled substance Child neglect Driving under the influence Shoplifting Obtaining money under false pretensesWriting bad checks Prostitution Being in the company of felons Being a shitty parent Being an addict Being crazyBeing irresponsible Being foolish Being a person of color Being a woman Being poor Being beaten Being gay Being uneducated Being on probation Being angry Being unemployed Being willful Being ignorant Being silent Being a burden on the taxpayers Being in the wrong place Being the wrong person Being unloved Being shy Being homelessBeing the product of bad parenting Being headstrong Being abused Being part of the cycle Being hurt Being hatedBeing feared Being hungry Being human Being Being Being.
Unlike Gillian Flynn’s other thriller, Gone Girl, The Grownup is a very short slip of a book. It is my favorite type of book, in that, to me, it is all about storytelling. The book is essentially a horror novella, which takes the reader down a bloody and frightening garden path and ends ambiguously.
The book concludes with the unreliable narrator locking herself in a room that adjoins another one with an entry door. She pulls a piece of furniture in front of the adjoining door, to prevent anyone from getting in. Or perhaps, to prevent herself from getting out. She says that there is nothing to worry about and then the story fades to black.
The women loved it but felt shafted by the ending.
“I wanted to know what happened!” said Juliette. “I liked it so much, but I need to know how it ends!”
The others agreed, and I did too, but I suggested that Flynn had very purposefully left us in the lurch to make a point about life, perception, memory, and storytelling.
“What point?” they asked.
“Well, what’s the truth about what really happened?”
“That’s the thing,” said Brandy. “You just never know.”
At some point, before I was getting ready to start a new season with the women, I came across a lovely blank journal. One cover of the journal bore the inscription “Day Dreams” and depicted a glowing sunlit meadow with various beautiful flora and fauna, including magical rainbow berries, and if you flipped the journal over, the other cover was inscribed with “Night Dreams,” and showed a darkening nightscape full of stars and mystery.
I knew that I wanted to use the journal for something special. Then I came across a novel called The Hotel Angeline that contains 36 chapters, each written by a different author.
I decided to propose that the group use the journal to initiate a collaborative writing project. Each week, the writer who had the journal would read out loud to the group what she had written and then hand it off to the next writer. We did just that. Each section that we wrote had a dreamlike quality and presented a duality of perception and consciousness in which it was difficult to ascertain what was real versus what was imagined. Each section utilized a human blink to travel between star-infused universes.
“You captured exactly what it feels like to be in here,” Ary said to Brandy, “trapped, frozen.”
“I think we may all have written pieces that reflect our perception of our daily experiences,” one of us said. I agreed.
“Sometimes all of this seems like a dream. Or rather, everything that used to be was the dream before this and will be the dream after this, and this is the terrible reality,” someone said.
As part of our discussion, Brandy and Stacy both described their dreams and how they had changed over the years of their incarceration.
“My crime had a victim, and he used to terrorize me in my dreams.” Brandy paused. “It was so awful, I would relive that night over and over again, like there was no escape from it.”
Stacy described a similar sensation. “My crime had a victim too, and in my dreams, I used to never be able to get away from him. He was always there, but not anymore. Now he just randomly pops up in the strangest places, like if I’m getting into a car, he may be there. Or if I look in a window, I may see him, but it doesn’t feel menacing anymore, he’s just there, like anything else.”
“Same for me,” Brandy says. “I don’t feel afraid of him anymore, and he’s there less and less now.”
“Maybe,” someone said, “they are trying to tell you that it’s ok to let them go. Maybe it’s time to release them. Or maybe they are trying to release you.”
One time, Stacy shared a piece that she wrote called “Girl on a Train/Wreck.” It was basically the story of her life, in metaphorical terms, up until the time she came to prison. She was an addict. She did a lot of awful things. Her life was in constant upheaval. She lied, cheated, manipulated, stole, hurt people, and did whatever she had to do to get drugs, up until she did the last most terrible thing that landed her behind bars, for which she felt deeply remorseful.
She wrote about how for her, prison changed everything. For the first time in her life, she felt free. She was not the first of the women to say that she was in prison because that was exactly where she needed to be.
We talked about what we were doing in the group and what a struggle it was for any of us to ever truly understand anything from another’s point of view. We observed that while it was a sheer impossibility, how through reading and writing, we tried to do it anyway. We decided that the effort to understand, to get inside of someone else’s heart and mind, however briefly, was really the thing that mattered, even when we failed. We decided that, in fact, the failures to connect were often the most revealing and important glimpses that we could get, because those were the times when the effort became obvious, as often when the effort succeeded, it laid there invisible, unnoticed.
Stacy and Brandy told me about something they had seen, or read, or heard about, or gotten from somewhere that described what we were talking about, this experience of muddling through everything alone, the impossibility and the pain of it, and the way in which the ache was eased by togetherness. We decided that we wanted a word or phrase to describe this experience of being alone in this, together. I promised them that I would try to seek out such a word.
Later that night, when I told him about the word we are trying to identify, my young son offered up “human.”
Esme DeVault is a poet, attorney, and non-fiction writer living in Barrington Rhode Island with her husband and college-age son. Her poetry has appeared in Motherscope, Spadina Literary Review, Streetlight Magazine, Solum Literary Journal, Kissing Dynamite, and numerous other publications. She is a former English teacher and academic reference librarian and ran a book and writing group at the women’s maximum-security prison in Rhode Island for 10 years.
- I use pseudonyms for the women. ↩︎