“The Best Writing Workshop I Ever Taught Was in Federal Prison," Novelist Mesha Maren Writes
The first writing workshop I ever taught was at a federal prison. I was given brief and vague instructions about bringing the arts into prisons. I was nervous. I had no MFA, no published book, no teaching experience. I left the parking lot, full of the deep heat of late summer, and entered the chill of the cinderblock building. The metal detector went off three times before I managed to get all the offending bobby pins out of my hair. A guard escorted me down the hall through the clanging security doors and past video monitors until we reached a small classroom stuffed full of 20 men.
“Let’s start by introducing ourselves,” I said when the guard left the room. “Tell me why you signed up for this creative writing class.”
A man raised his hand. “Can we serve the coffee now?”
“What’s that?”
He pointed to a percolator set up on the back table.
“Yeah, that’s why I signed up for this class,” another man added. “I heard we were gonna get coffee.”
No one seemed eager to introduce themselves or talk about writing, but another inmate filled the silence.
“I wish y’all would shut up. This class is for serious writers, right?” He looked to me.
I did not know how I should respond.
“See, I’ve already published eight books, got a ninth on the way.”
“Yeah, I thought this was for serious writers, too,” another voice said.
I looked over at a man with a gray beard.
“I’ve been writing for longer than you’ve probably been alive,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s have some coffee.”
When we had all filled our styrofoam cups, I passed out paper and pencils.
“I want you all to write down your earliest memory,” I said.
Hands shot up.
“Do we have to?” Mr. Just for the Coffee asked.
“Well,” I said. “I guess not, but try to write something.”
The room went silent and I was left with 15 minutes to wonder how in the world I was going to salvage this class. How could I teach to a room half full of students who claimed to be there only for the refreshments and half full of writers who claimed to have more experience than me?
“Anyone want to share?” I asked after the timer went off.
Mr. Nine Books raised his hand, followed by Mr. Longer than You’ve Been Alive, and then slowly, but surely, a scattering of other hands. The room filled with their memories: the buzz of a suburban lawnmower, trash fires along the Ohio River, a glint of broken glass, the great big backseat of a grandmother’s Lincoln Town Car, upholstery sticky with sweat, tiny perfect patent leather shoes and a mother’s waitressing apron, heavy with the smell of fried food.
The ones who had been most vocal about not liking to write were some of the ones who had produced the best prose.
“You better quit with that writing about fried chicken,” a man with a braid down his back said to Mr. Just for the Coffee. “It was like for a few minutes there, I wasn’t even in prison, like you carried me there.”
Mr. Nine Books laughed. “Yeah, me, too,” he said.
And that was it, I realized, that was the common ground here: a desire to leave behind, even momentarily, the drudgery of prison life. There in that room, in their writing, something other than the penal system was given precedence. That was more of a reason to write than what anyone I’d ever known in academic settings ever had. They had already shown each other one of the most important aspects of writing without my ever having to use words like verisimilitude.
“You really took me back with those Mary Jane patent leather shoes,” Mr. Longer than You’ve Been Alive said to a white-haired man on his left. “It was like I was watching an old black-and-white movie.”
“Yeah, I guess I dated myself a little, huh?” Mr. White Hair chuckled. “I was born in 1929, so, you know.”
The other thing that had come to the surface during their memory sharing was the intense diversity in the room. It was not just racial diversity, though there was that, but they also ranged in ages from 18 to 87, and as the weeks went on, I learned how incredibly different their backgrounds were too. Mr. White Hair had owned an island in the Caribbean. Mr. Just for the Coffee grew up on his grandparents’ farm with no indoor plumbing. Mr. Longer than You’ve Been Alive had been a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The man with ice-blue eyes hadn’t known how to read or write before he came to prison 15 years ago, and the man with the Fu Manchu mustache had two PhDs.
As the class progressed, their backgrounds and areas of expertise came to the surface. One week we were workshopping a story where a character went squirrel hunting, and Mr. Just for the Coffee raised his hand.
“I gotta ask you something,” he said to Mr. Nine Books, who had written the story. “Why do you got this guy skinning each and every squirrel as soon as he shoots it?”
“You’ve got to dress them, right? Prepare them?” Mr. Nine Books said.
“Yeah, but ain’t nobody in their right mind gonna do it one by one out in the cold. You get your sack full and then bring ’em all back and dress ’em.”
“Oh, I see.”
“You ever been squirrel hunting?”
“No.”
“That’s all right; I’m just saying, you want anybody who’s actually been squirrel hunting in real life to read this story and believe you, you gotta change that right there.”
With the wide range of experiences that we had available to tap into, it seemed that somebody knew detailed information about just about everything. They took to reading each other’s work outside of class, and I would hear them discussing it in the hallways. The highest bar was a standard of “Carry me there.” They were all hungry to leave the prison reality, and if a piece didn’t totally take them out of their present situation, they weren’t shy about voicing it.
By the end of the semester, I hardly recognized the classroom I had walked into on that first day. We were having craft discussions well above the introductory level, and every single person was engaged. I found that I felt sorry, in retrospect, for myself and the other students in all the academic workshops I had attended in the past; those stale, white-washed discussions of careful craft analysis. I thought it was the workshops’ fault, but I realized now that a workshop is exactly as alive as the people you fill it with. In the prison workshop, we had rollicking discussions about the cultural significance of coon dogs versus pit bulls and the various possible meanings of the word joint. We pushed each other to dig deeper, illuminate further, make a scene come alive for someone who had never experienced a place like that but who was hungry to be transported.
“If there’s one good thing you get out of prison,” I said on the last day of class, “it’s the chance to have readers like this. There is nowhere else in the world I can think of where you get access to such a wide range of readers for your work.”
As I walked back out to the parking lot, the happiness I had felt in class evaporated. I got to leave, go through the metal detector and out into the world. They did not. I hoped that they could continue to carry each other up and away through their writing, but the truth was that every aspect of their lives was controlled by the whims of the Bureau of Prisons, the state legislature, the federal government. One warden might think that arts education was important and the next might see it as a frivolity. For a brief time, I could help provide a space for them to talk to each other about their writing, but in the end, there was really so little that I could do.
Mesha Maren is the author of the novel Sugar Run (Algonquin Books). She is an assistant professor of the practice of creative writing at Duke University and serves as a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellow at the federal prison camp in Alderson, West Virginia.
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