Why I Teach in Prisons

Lit Salon on the word work of setting ourselves free

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 …