Tomorrow, I start my class at Moose Lake prison, a 10-week advanced fiction course with an emphasis on scenes as the building block of story (I’ve procured seven craft books devoted exclusively to scene writing in fiction, and I’ve been poring over them hungrily).
I need to be to the prison by 5:30, but there’s construction on I-35, so I’ll leave around 3 o’clock to be on the safe side. I need to be on the safe side because the prison is strict about time—if I am late, I might not be admitted at all, and then I would have driven more than two hours for nothing, leaving my ten students very disappointed.
So, I’ll leave between 2:30 and 3 and drive the two hours north to Moose Lake, where I’ll stop at a gas station just off the exit to pee just to be on the safe side because it can be a hassle to go to the bathroom in prison facilities. Then I’ll head to the parking lot of the correctional facility, a brick building originally constructed in 1936 as a state hospital before its eventual conversion—and expansion—into a prison. It still has paned windows and a turret.
I’ll walk in the front doors and go through the security procedures for being admitted to the secure area, which involves having my clear plastic bag of materials (books and readings for my students) searched by a guard, and going through the metal detector myself before being buzzed through the sally port. The metal detector at Moose Lake is said to be the most sensitive in the state, and last time I taught at this facility, I never got through it even though I was careful not to wear an underwire bra and took off all my jewelry. This means I had to be wanded by a guard, which is an extra hassle for everyone especially on busy days. I don’t know why I always set off the metal detector at Moose Lake, because it didn’t happen at Stillwater, the other facility where I teach in person.
Once I am cleared to go—as I said—through the sally port, I’ll be escorted by a guard to the room where my class will take place, after which my students will file in as soon as they are given their passes. I’ll teach until 8 pm, at which time—or, hopefully, soon thereafter, though sometimes it takes a while—a guard will meet me at the classroom and escort me back to the sally port, and I’ll leave for the long drive home, where I’ll arrive around 10:30. So, an 8 hour day for my 2+ hour class.
Why do I do this?
Because it is the reason I am here.
Isn’t it strange, being human?
Being aware of the finite nature of our lives, having what Wendell Berry calls “forethought of grief,” which robs us, mostly, of the peace of wild things?
Isn’t it marvelous, too, being human?
Having a heart whose beats we can feel and recognize as life force and even count, as each beat takes us closer to the 2.5 billion we’re allotted? Having a hand that we recognize as a hand, our hand, both of us and somehow separate from us? Just as we oddly feel a separation, both real and imagined, between our minds and our bodies?
And isn’t it something, how we recognize, somewhere in these spaces between head, heart, and hand, the capacity for the profound human goodness that could compel one to donate an organ to save the life of a stranger?
But also the inevitable capacity for hate, with its darkly destructive powers?
And everything in between, including the kind of frantic, out-of-body confusion that appears in roadside squirrels around this time of year, when they dart away, then toward, then away, and then under the wheels of cars.
One moment, they’re just after the next nut.
The next, they completely lose their way.
For those of us born human, car wheels are everywhere.
We are, all of us, continually losing and finding our way.
For those of us born human, the main task seems to include discerning, eventually, the reason we are here, a reason beyond the next nut.
I have come to believe, over the course of the years, that perhaps the luckiest break we can hope for in our lives is to achieve that task—that is, to know with certainty, before our time is up, what it is we are really meant to give. To know, without doubt, why we are here.
I am here to write and teach.
I am here to share the extraordinary power of language with as many people in as many places in as many ways as I can, while I still can. When I say—as I do in the tagline for Writing in the Dark—that “writing saved my life, so I teach writing as if it might save yours”—I mean it literally.
We wake up every morning and go to sleep every night telling ourselves a story made of words, made of stone, feather, muscle, arrow. Skin, teeth, penny, spoon. Artery, death, portal, love.
And every morning we have another chance to awaken ourselves to the unending power of the words available to us, and to recognize the limitless effects these words can create depending upon how we arrange them, shape them, polish them, how we whittle and warm them, hide them in our fists, in our pockets, under our tongues, how we trade them, stomp on them, shred them, decorate them with glitter and glue and little plastic jewels that leave sad messes in their wake.
To awaken to how we might melt words them down in order to forge their liquidity into a master key with which we can finally open the prison door within us, and set ourselves free.
This is the power of writing.
I see it. I do it. I share it.
This is the power of teaching.
I know the vastness of the reclamation and exaltation words contain, and I know how to pass on the secret codes that slide them open.
This is my purpose in life. It is my reason for being.
My publications—my books, essays, stories, and poems—are part of that, because I am a writer, and writers write. But my publications are not, on their own, the calling I heed to. That calling is far more personal and primal, more inherent to the words themselves, their sounds and shapes and weight and levity, their music and madness. The calling comes from deep in the old forest where language happens inside us and between us and leads us back to the fullness of ourselves and each other while there’s still time.
And that is why I teach writing in the prisons.
All the prisons.
Including the invisible ones we build ourselves.
Prisons fashioned from warped, discarded words and crooked stories, from barbed wire of misperceptions and the stiff leather of our blinders, from the collapsed caves of false beliefs and the cracked concrete of lost wonder, lost awe, and lost joy at the simple but miraculous possibility, beauty, and power of one word after another.
Lost wonder, awe, and joy at the potent brew of possibility, beauty, and power that already exists, with or without us, that just is, because words just are, our uniquely human creation that makes us who we are and helps us become who we’re still meant to be, if we can only learn to hear them again.
The words are already ours, all of them, telling all the stories we’ve ever imagined and the many more we’ve not yet dared to know.
Yes, this is why I teach in prisons.
Love,
Jeannine
Wow. In fact, another one: Wow. Respect, Jeannine. Lots of it. This is magnificent in word and ideology.
I feel a sense of kindred spirit-ness; teaching/words/sociology as spiritual, by which I mean a connection to something larger but very much of this world, of the collective, and the "I's" place in the "we." And oh, man, all of the prisons. I'm slow reading this book, IMAGINATIONS: A MANIFESTO, and starting last week, each small, in class exercise I'm having my students do, now ends with an "imagination" prompt, asking them to think/write their way into a different kind future, and then to think about the ways they can start acting like they live in that future today.
Rebecca Solnit said, "what we dream of is already present in the world," and I see that in the you and the we that is in this post.
Jeannine, here's what reaches the depths of my soul about your writing: that you speak of what is sacred, of meaning and purpose, of paradox and change. You write about what it means to be human--unabashedly, intentionally--and you remind me so often when I open my inbox that every speck of my existence serves some purpose. I have always believed that, anyway, yet I have learned recently of those who do not think much about what this human life is all about--where it's leading, what it all means.
For some reason, since I was about five years old (one of my early autobiographical memories), I have pondered this very question: Why am I here? What good can I do with my life?
So, what I am saying today is that it is a relief--it's honestly like this giant exhale for me when I read your posts--to see there is another human whose voice is being heard and read and widely shared who sees things as I do, who shares my need to give what only I can give to those who need it most. Thank you for that.