The Truth Exposed! Writing Behind Bars: Introducing the Women of San Benito County Jail

“Read this book! The strongest, bravest, and most brutally honest thoughts, feelings, and emotions ever put into writing by some of the most powerful, beautiful, and intelligent women locked behind walls.”

––From the cover of Ecstasy of the Streets: Agony of these Walls

An incarcerated person is someone whose shame has already been partially revealed. The public can look upon the inmate and draw all sorts of conclusions without knowing very much beyond the surface story of arrest.

The writers in Ecstasy of the Streets: Agony of these Walls have done their best to write their way through to a deeper understanding for themselves and their readers too. It isn’t always easy to say what one means, and the work in this semester’s collection walks the line between revelation and concealment as well as any I know.

The writer’s dilemma is that on some level we understand a reader wants authenticity (or at least its very good facsimile). We like to think we can recognize a piece of writing that represents a writer at her most authentic. It’s in the fresh way she uses language, the super specificity of her nouns, the way she exposes thoughts usually hidden from our curious and gleeful gaze. Whereas, the words a writer uses when masked, sound just like everything that’s already been written, and there’s no real risk to the writer in restating them once again.

Writers who are also incarcerated know their incarceration means they are among the most fetishized writers working. Who isn’t curious, at least a little, about women and men behind bars? Does one write toward these fetishistic conceptions or away from them? Does one try to appear authentic? Or does one simply try and tell the truth, a largely impossible challenge given how complicated truth can be and how vital hiding can seem to survival? This is the dilemma of any writer, somehow doubly amplified in jail. 

Rarely has one felt so vulnerable or had so many reasons to hide than as when one is in the state’s legal custody, though in any given lifetime only some of us end up experiencing the state's undeniable weight. Mostly you have to be poor.

Working with the writers in Hollister’s jail––located in one of the most impoverished counties in California––reveals a truth about the United States. Here addiction or mental illness combined with poverty leads to incarceration, and at the seed off all three there is often trauma.

Indeed, Center’s for DiseaseControl studies prove it. Childhood experiences of neglect, abuse, and violence often lead to adulthoods filled with poor health, addiction, and incarceration. In one sense then, we jail people for being traumatized as children.

By apparent, and tragic, and comic coincidence, what readers are most willing to engage in is a piece of writing infused with conflict, conflict promising to resolve its own tensions before the reader’s eyes with a balancing of surprise, truth, and inevitability. When writing from actual events the writer needs to appear unmasked and vulnerable. For this reason, and if the writer is willing, trauma can become a creative asset, for what is trauma if not conflict?

There is an implicit promise in the act of writing––what we bring to the page at last stands outside us. It may bring about connection with others, and holds the possibility of uplifting losses and pain. It’s as if what we put it on the page, may also put be put to rest.

On the other hand, it can also seem that shining light on our conflicts might destroy something essential in us, as if secrets were strengths, a feeling often underlined by fear that, anyway, our talents won’t match our truths.

Perhaps that is why there is so much tenderness in the jail classroom. The kindness students express toward each other sometimes leaves me in awe. They usually greet even the most marginalized among us with warmth and understanding.

By contrast, I often feel overwhelmed and frightened by people who lack resources necessary for survival or otherwise seem out of control in someway––the homeless, the addicted, the mentally ill.

The women of San Benito County Jail, however, make compassion look easy, and not only easy but also necessary. The well of tenderness they draw from seems somehow fundamental to survival itself––all of it––yours and mine included.

The work in Ecstasy of the Streets, Agony of these Walls contains their wise and caring words. Some of them returned to workshop, week after week. Others passed through before being released or sent to other facilities for longer stays, so the writing included in this book represents the work of people in transition in nearly every way. I hope within it, you find something to soothe whatever conflicts life has presented you.

To read the book, click here: Ecstasy of the Streets, Agony of these Walls (Writing from the Women of E & F Pod  Spring 2016)

Guided Tour: Along the Ruta Bolaño in Blanes, Girona, Spain (Journey in Six Parts)

“The visits to the chemist’s were constant and lengthy since in 1992 he was diagnosed with a serious liver illness. At the opening speech of the 1999 Fiesta Mayor, Bolaño made a special mention to the chemist’s assistants: To the chemist’s assistants of Oms Pharmacy, who always have a kind word for all.”

––Point 16 Ruta Bolaño

Part Six: The Living and Dead

My last night in Blanes, I finally stumbled across the folkdance performances. I’d been looking for the young dancers’ stage all week, but no one seemed to know where to find it. Even their guardians, who I saw in the bar couldn’t explain how to find the place.

And then suddenly, there it was in a hidden courtyard behind city hall, the very location where I believe Bolaño once opened a festival and thanked the pharmacy clerks, who filled his prescriptions and treated him well.

With intense uncomplicated pleasure, I enjoyed the performances. The Georgian youngsters flitted across the stage in staccato rhythms of precision and grace while their more elderly Turkish cousins seemed immune to such energetic displays. Instead, the Turks demonstrated the pleasures of a simple step repeated often, a step that could accommodate dancers of any age, infirmity, or ability.

Between numbers, I let my eyes wander across the courtyard and up one of the surrounding buildings where I spied a woman wearing a bra and underwear mopping her terrace and smoking a cigarette. In some ways, she appeared as the dancers’ opposite because they crossed the stage in intricately embroidered costumes with jewels sewn across sashes, while in other ways her simple movements mirrored almost exactly what was happening below. The gestures of the stage were like those of the farm––the planting of seed, the cutting of hay––a lot of it looked something like mopping.

Plus, beyond City Hall, the sun was setting, which lit up the square in the kind of golden light that makes landscape paintings seem like dreamscapes. From a certain angle, one could look upon all of it––the precious light, the woman on the terrace, the international gathering of dancers––and believe the world a happy and untroubled place.

Of course, this was weeks before refugees of nearby war and poverty took to the seas in increasingly alarming numbers. Many hoped to find themselves safely landed in Mediterranean towns just like this one.

Knowing what was to come and what had already happened, were some of the performances ridiculous? Sort of.

More than that, they were great. The troupe of Austrian men, in lederhosen, percussively slapping each other’s asses while their director played the accordion; the Armenian girls, in flowing chiffon skirts, lip-syncing romantic tunes in an over-the-top manner owing more to modern televised singing contests than folk dancing traditions of any nation; the young Macedonians lining up in a slow rendering of peasant courtship. All of it mesmerized, including the final performance of the night. A local troupe, who spun over the floor with olive oil bottles and bread loaves held high overhead, created a human pyramid in celebration of the Catalan nation.

Then again, one didn’t have to look too far to see examples of what might give rise to a Bolaño-like dark humor. A sharp-chinned man took the stage and was announced as the program’s international director. He had a villain’s oily hair and stood chest out, holding a clipboard in one hand the other balled into a fist; it looked like he wanted to threaten someone or at least demand higher fees from the parents.

During performances, he stood just off-stage, where half the audience saw him berate the show’s announcer, a woman with a newscaster’s honey-blonde hair and non-committal professional smile.

To me it seemed she was doing an excellent job, climbing the stairs between number in dangerously high heels to compliment even the blandest performers, announce the next group, and urge more applause from the crowd. None of it seemed to please the director.

While various children fluttered and spun on stage, he stood, inches from her face screaming long sentences at her forehead. But she was unflappable. Yes, she looked at him with dagger eyes, but otherwise offered no defense. It was as if she had an inner clock, telling her in exactly how many seconds she would be free of him, the stage dismantled, the chairs stacked, and performers and audience all returning to their homelands.

I couldn’t imagine Bolaño working the dancers into his fiction, but the off-stage humiliation––that seemed about right. However, despite the heavy presence of cynicism in his work, I find an almost intangible sense of human connection––its importance and beauty.

Along the Ruta and in my brief conversations with townspeople, I gathered that Blanes had, indeed, loved Bolaño. The town extended to him a welcome and helped him create a sense of home, one in which he felt comfortable enough to write some of the most powerful literature of our time.

That home didn’t depend on his talent nor literary fame; few, it seemed to me, knew him as a writer. He lived in Blanes and made friends because of a shared appreciation of drinking, and movies, and reading, and gaming, and families, simple things that anyone could enjoy.

The same uncomplicated bonds of kinship that imbue all of Bolaño’s stories (in spite of their depictions of violence, failure, loneliness, and injustice) highlight a belief in friendship’s importance and our common human purpose.

We can detect (a Bolaño verb if there ever was one) that he hadn’t given up on humanity. Everything truly awful about us––the way we ignore each other’s suffering or even go out of our way to cause it––is contained inside an equal possibility that we might just as easily extend mercy. In this way, Bolaño’s shout-out to the pharmacy clerks, who treated him kindly as he faced illness and death, is in alignment with his greatest literary works.

I on the other hand, will only ever know him through his writing, which provides an incomplete, likely false, picture of the man himself. Did I need to travel 6,000 miles to learn this? Apparently I did.

Once again, I know it to be true––the writer is not the person. The person who writes lands on the page part ghost, part channel, part remnant of overactive ego and will. From such fragments the reader begins a collaboration, which results in a living text made anew every time we open the book and read.

Guided Tour: Along the Ruta Bolaño in Blanes, Girona, Spain (Journey in Six Parts)

“The hypotheses that guided this study were no doubt shaped to some degree by a desire to formulate and organize the messages emitted, as it seemed to me, by inconspicuous recesses of Bolaño’s work in which I had lingered as a translator.”

––Chris Andrews, Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction an Expanding Universe

Part Five: A Spanish language writer living in Catalan

Everywhere I went, I hoped to meet people who had known Bolaño, and everywhere I went I met people who only knew of him in a vague way as something foreigners liked.

I believe the Catalan flags displayed in every neighborhood, rich or poor, and all across the church plaza, provided a clue. Bolaño, of course, wrote in Spanish. The Third Reich, which, like other of his stories is set in a fictional Blanes-like town. Nevertheless, for the most part, his stories are depicted as taking place in Spanish, Spain, but Blanes is not Spain, not in a social and cultural sense.

In The Third Reich, Bolaño describes one marginal character as being Catalan as if that were a distinguishing feature in the region. But in Blanes, it’s no such thing. At a local bookstore (Point 06 along the Ruta) the woman who once ordered the author’s reading material (I know because the plaque outside the store said it was so) hunted under a stack of Catalan language books on a variety of subjects, so I could look upon the cover of one of my favorite Bolaño texts in his native Spanish, in his own hometown. Like the others, she too kindly indulged me in my quest, gently shaking my hand with what I felt was prescience––in future years more like me would arrive.

A few days earlier, I had attended an event at the local Catalan worker’s club, a space for political agitation, cheap beer, and occasional dances. I sought out swing-night in hopes of also hearing some Latin American tango, salsa, cumbia or bachata. But only North American big-band music was played.

In Catalan, people suffered under the Castilians in ways not dissimilar from Latin Americans. Yet no one here seemed much interested in the cultural products of the former colonial outposts.

While we danced, giant puppets, representing what I think were important Catalan historical figures, stood propped in the corners. The walls were decorated with pro-Catalan secession posters, which I couldn’t always understand, knowing no Catalan, which isn’t really that much like Spanish, and, anyway, my Spanish isn’t even any good.

I was invited to come back the next day and join the English language conversation group. Its members were interested in what brought me to their town, which was Bolaño, a man whose work they’d never engaged. 

Here is a photo of the English language conversation group, sitting outside the Catalan Workers Center, which is nowhere along the Ruta Bolaño, perhaps, because in Bolaño’s fictional universe, Catalan does not seem to exist anymore than his importance as a Spanish language literary figure exists for Catalans.

Guided Tour: Along the Ruta Bolaño in Blanes, Girona, Spain (Journey in Six Parts)

“I came to this town years ago, at a dull and dingy time in my life”

––Roberto Bolaño, The Skating Rink

Part Four: Residents and Tourists

Behind the line of seaside hotels is the working class Blanes neighborhood Bolaño first called home. One afternoon, I walked its streets examining its anti-facist graffiti and less than picturesque buildings.


It was there I took a photo of a dog on a grassless playing field. The sky above was cloudy and overcast in a manner that recalled the author. Though in reality the dog was in the company of a woman who smiled and threw a ball to it, in my favorite photo she remains out of frame. There is only a black dog, walking over a bare field under an oppressive sky, and I am reminded of Goya, who reminds me of Bolaño all over again.

Later I learned that Bolaño arrived in Blanes with an inventory of costume jewelry purchased in Barcelona, only a half-hour away by train. During the day, he and his mother sold it from a storefront a few blocks from the beach, which was also their home (02 along the Ruta). Even knowing Bolaño died having married, raised children, and formed close friendships all over town, I’d so often imagined him as an anguished literary figure, living at the edge of social convention, I now found it hard to picture him running a small business and living with his mom.

At point three, not far from the store, the oddest sentences are posted, which capture something about Bolaño’s relationships with Bolaño's other citizens. The Ruta’s text reads, “[Here] was one of the bars frequented by Bolaño during the first years of his stay in Blanes. In these premises, whose clientele were quite marginal, Bolaño met his first friends.”

Today, the site where the “marginal” once gathered is home to yet another ice cream shop and a fish-fry place that serves beer and bland snacks to tourists. It was while sitting there sipping from a copa, that I finished The Third Reich. Upon reaching the last page, I saw a quartet of swallows flitting high overhead, and once again I became sentimental, taking them for a sign, but a sign of what I didn’t know.


Nowadays all the costume jewelry in Blanes seems to be sold from tented stalls across from the sea. There African women braid children’s hair, and local men sell homemade sock puppets, leather wallets, and t-shirts silkscreened with marijuana leaves and the names of old bands. I bought some jewelry––trinkets for family and friends––from two smiling sisters, who allowed me to take their picture under a hot summer sun.

Guided Tour: Along the Ruta Bolaño in Blanes, Girona, Spain (Journey in Six Parts)

“The door was behind me; when I heard it swing shut, I didn’t know whether to burst out laughing or crying.”

––Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star

Part Three: Writing Alone and Together

I took pictures of doorways. Perhaps they are difficult to find interesting without realizing Bolaño once walked through them to family apartments and writing studios. On the other side, he met blank pages and unfinished manuscripts, things that would later become 2666, or Last Evenings on Earth, or Distant Star, or some other incredible something that occupies once empty space because Bolaño walked across a threshold and took time to create it.

Thanks to information provided along the Ruta, I now believe Bolaño preferred to write alone and in quiet (05, 13, and 17). But along the Ruta are glimpses into his friendships with Blanes’ citizens–– drinkers at a local bar, a video store owner, a bookseller, and the players of strategic war games of which he was said to be a top competitor. Each of his connections documented along the trail (03, 04, 09, and 11).

I prefer to do my writing in cafes surrounded by people, people going about their day. It keeps me feeling less lonely during writing’s most difficult tasks––facing the blank screen, managing the confusion, even terror of infinite possibility, and the brutal necessity of accepting an image or scene that was not was wanted, only what arrived.

Here is a photo of the fly that joined me at one my favorite writing spots in Blanes (the Café Terrassans. No word if Bolaño frequented it, but it would be hard to imagine him not knowing it was there, sitting, as it does, at one end a busy pedestrian thoroughfare not far from the sea).

And here is what I hope is a respectful photo of the waiters who served me copas, pulpo, and Spanish tortilla while I wrote.

The Bolaño doorways are plain, but the town itself is charming in just the way one might expect.

It has an ancient Roman fountain from which drinking water still flows. There are gilded saints in its churches and grottos where sailors’ families pray for their safe return. Picturesque arches lead to neighborhoods with narrow sidewalks and hidden plazas. Some of the buildings are tiled in spectacular ways. There are farmer’s markets with displays of local honey and saffron, and sidewalk cafes, and, of course, the beautiful sea, which one can look upon from restaurant tables while drinking sangria and eating grilled sardines, and every evening families walk along the promenade and climb the rocky peninsula where a red and yellow Catalan flag snaps freely in the breeze.