Helping Inmates Find Their Truth: Using Writing Prompts to Explore Personal Journeys

by Jo Knowles

It was an early summer day in 2004 when I drove along the winding road that leads to the Southeast State Correctional Facility in Windsor, Vermont. At the turnoff was an inconspicuous brown sign, which I almost missed. I drove up a short road to what looked like a working farm, silos and all, surrounded by a tall fence topped with razor wire.

My friend Chuck, who’d asked me to come to the prison to help one of the inmates write an article about the garden project he was sponsoring, met me in the parking lot.

“I never knew this was here,” I told him.

“Hardly anyone does,” he answered.

A guard took us up a paved pathway to a set of picnic tables, where we waited while he got R, the inmate I’d be working with. There were pretty flower beds along the path. A volleyball court. A basketball hoop. Several run-down outbuildings. A woodshed. It seemed more like a camp than a prison. Soon, a woman in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt came walking toward us. She looked like an average, middle-aged mom with a pretty, guarded smile. Chuck made the introductions, then left us alone so she could give me a tour of the newly-plotted vegetable garden. While we were talking, a cat wandered by and R explained it was one of the prison cats—a stray who’d somehow found her way through the gates.

After the tour, I asked her what she wanted to say about the garden project. She wasn’t sure. She knew she needed to describe how it came to be, and what the women did, but all that sounded kind of boring.

This is the challenge for any writing instructor. I always feel odd telling people I “teach” writing, because I don’t know for sure that’s really possible. What I do is help people find their stories, but they are the only ones who can tell them. The trick for the instructor is to help the person find the spark that will make the telling successful.

It was obvious to me that the garden project was wildly popular with the women, so I asked R what made it so special. She told me she thought mostly it was the solitude the garden offered, if you knew how to find it. “The other day I was walking along the rows where the green beans grow so tall they form a secluded passage,” she told me. “And there was this woman sitting alone on an overturned bucket, crying. I asked her why and she said, ‘Because I can.’”

I knew then that R had just found the story. It was already clear from the little bit she’d told me about “the farm” (as the inmates called it) that even this seemingly gentle, camp-like atmosphere was not a place you let your guard down. Here was a perfect way to illustrate that. “I think you should try to write about crying to the green beans,” I told her. “Start there and see what happens.”

I returned the following week and she handed over her essay. “You were right about the green beans,” she told me. It was her hook and she’d used it well. More than a fluff piece about inmates working in a garden, R had given it the bite of truth by showing the public the tears that were watering it. We did some fine-tuning together, and then she submitted it to the Vermont Women Newspaper. They published her piece as part of an exposé on the prison.

Did you know you can tell a bean plant anything and it will listen without judgment?—From “Our Healing Gardens,” Vermont Women Newspaper

With the project done, I thought I was, too. But R asked me if I would come back and help her work on other writing projects. R didn’t need a lot of direction. Sometimes I’d bring a short story or essay I thought she might be inspired by, but mainly she wanted to write about her every day life in prison: how she coped with missing her sons, how she yearned to write to the victims she’d embezzled money from. All that summer, we met in the storeroom in the kitchen during R’s breaks since we didn’t have a proper classroom to meet in. I would try to come up with questions that would help her dig deeper and push herself as a new writer. She did so fearlessly.

As R’s writing continued to improve, I shared her essays with my friend Chuck, who shared them with the editor and publisher of our local newspaper, The Vermont Standard. Both were so impressed, they agreed to publish R’s essays, giving her an editorial column which she named “The Glass House.”

One day, R asked if a friend could join us. I said yes. I decided to treat our meetings like my own writing group, modeling how to offer positive feedback, followed by some suggestions. Each week the women took turns publishing their essays in The Standard. They were learning from each other, challenging each other. I told them about the advice a writer friend, Jennifer Richard Jacobson, gave to me, which was to always ask yourself, “Is it true yet?” before handing something in—not the literal truth, I stressed, but the emotional truth. When D was ready to write about why she was in prison, she nodded when I asked her if she’d found the truth. She didn’t define her crime, but she didn’t need to. The emotional toll she’d caused and paid for was clear in her words. That was the story. It was the heart of who she’d been, who she was now, and who she hoped she could become.

I am left with the sound of something that was both me and not me ripping apart. I remember striking, in a desperate attempt at survival.—D

As the women became more comfortable sharing things with me, emotions ran high. I don’t think there was ever a meeting without tears. The women were writing from hard places. Angry, hurt places. Having no training in this area, I was often at a loss for how to respond. I asked Kevin Forest, The Standard’s editor, what I should do. He offered to join us. With Kevin there, the group took on a more “official” feeling. It seemed I was there to help the women get their words on paper, and Kevin was there to get their words beyond the prison gates and into the community.

It wasn’t long before D said she had a friend who liked to write, too. From there, the group seemed to grow every few weeks. Our meetings were modeled much the way I model my writing class. We started with a free-writing exercise; I’d provide a writing prompt— I’m afraid… I’m not afraid… I miss… I don’t miss… Before I came here —and the women would write to it for about 5-7 minutes. Then, we’d go around the table and share what we wrote. Kevin and I decided to participate because it showed that we were willing to put ourselves out there, too. I think it helped the women see us as real people, with our own problems and worries, but also as struggling writers who didn’t always find the perfect words on the first try. There was trust in that room. It may have slipped away as soon as the women stepped back out into the yard, but for one hour a week, we gave them a row of green beans.

The longer the women participated, the better they became at picking up a writing prompt and quickly forming a personal story with a strong hook to draw the reader in.

I’m afraid of my daughter not being proud to have me as her mother and wishing I was something better. —H

I am not afraid of the statistics. I’m not afraid to continue on this path. I am not afraid to greet life with this face, ten years older, or of starting late in the game.—J

I miss bouncing my daughter to sleep, breathing in the precious baby scent of her.—H

I don’t miss the worry in my grandfather’s face each time I left the house; or his voice cracking the first time I called from jail.—L

Before I came here, I knew I’d be here someday. I didn’t know how, or why, but I knew that here was my destination before hitting the road to someplace else.—D

At the end of each meeting we’d give the women a “writing assignment” for the following week. Often, they wrote such powerful responses to the free-writing prompts, their assignments were to expand on or polish those. They’d share their assignments with the group for feedback, and eventually these pieces ended up as Glass House essays. Whether it was writing about the loss of the beloved prison cat, the injustice of price-gauged toiletry supplies, or missing a child, the women were learning how to craft their essays in a way that didn’t blame, but offered a window into their fragile world, where something as arbitrary as hair conditioner suddenly became as precious as gold.

Kevin and I worked with many women over the nearly five years of the project. We got to know the patterns pretty well. A woman would join the group full of anger. Her essays would be self-centered, focusing on the crimes against her, rather than the ones she’d committed herself. After several weeks though, the writing would take on a more introspective tone. Many of the women were “frequent flyers” who’d been in and out of prison several times. Some were third generation flyers, who didn’t know any other way of life. Some were there because it was, in one woman’s words, “the only place I feel safe.” But always, the more they wrote, the more they found the core of who they were and how they got there, and gradually we could see a glimmer of hope rising out of their despair.

This prison was constructed to keep the world safe from us yet the shimmering entanglement of wire that holds me hostage began whispering comforting words of safety.—C

When Kevin handed out the newspapers each week, the women would flip immediately to the Glass House section to see whose article was published. We’d watch that week’s author to see the unmistakable beam of pride cross her face before she carefully folded the paper back up. Sometimes the women would bring in cards from local “fans” in the community—people who’d read their articles and been moved enough to send the author a note. For many, it was the first time they felt they had a voice. The women realized someone was listening. Maybe even cared. Words—their words—were that powerful. They all knew this as evidenced each week when one or all of us would inevitably cry while we listened to them read their raw response to a writing prompt, but now they were touching strangers, too. Their words on paper were permanent. They couldn’t be erased or hidden away on a quiet back road where no one knew they existed. Coming to realize this empowered the women in subtle yet profound ways. Without fail, the next submission would be even more thoughtful, more “true.” The articles allowed the women to say, “We are here. And we’re part of this community, too. We may have failed our community, but our community also failed us.”

The community paid attention. Through the Glass House project, people learned what was going on at the prison—how the women were treated, how policies affected them and their families, how little support the women had both in and outside of prison, and how that led to the seemingly revolving door the women found themselves trapped in. But most importantly, the community learned that the women really weren’t so different from them. They were mothers. Daughters. Thoughtful, sensitive people who’d made mistakes many of us had made, too.

When Kevin and I learned that the women’s prison was being moved last winter, we had mixed emotions. We’d been volunteering at the prison for nearly five years. There were some nights when I drove home from the meetings in tears. There were some nights I drove home in total frustration. Most of the women we met with were addicts, in prison for drug-related crimes. What they needed was rehab, but what they were getting was more of what they’d heard all their lives in one way or another: “You’re no good. You’ll never change. You’re not worth it.” There were times when we’d arrive to find out that a member was in “the hole” for getting high or stealing or fighting, and we’d feel the sliver of doubt creep in our own hearts. But for every disappointment, there were so many more moments of hope. It’s been a year now since the last time Kevin and I walked up the hill to meet with the women. There’s so much I miss about those meetings. The writing prompts, the tears, the laughs. But mostly the women themselves. I often wonder where they are, and if they are still holding tight to the good truths they discovered about who they are and who they have the potential to be. Our friend C, an inmate who was released just before the prison closed, sums it up just right:

As my time here winds down, I am a fallen leaf in a flowing river. I endure without complaint, my spirit no longer stifled but shaped by the turbulence that flows around me. Time has helped turn my disappointments into character, my delusions into blessings.—C

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