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 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 co…