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)

Beauty and Celebration: The San Benito County Jail Book Project

“Though it was at my heart’s bidding that I chose the universe wherein I delight, I at least have the power of finding therein the many meanings I wish to find: there is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.”––The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet

The project took many hours. We spoke often of our subjects: addiction and sobriety in one group; struggle in another; love, in the third. Golf pencils in hand, writers approached their pages in monastic silence, writing quickly to stay ahead of inner censors. Let poor spelling not stop us, we cried. Let our pencils take us where they will.

Surprised and inspired by what paper and pencil had power to produce, some carried fresh sheets back to their cells in manila folders with author’s names delicately rendered in gothic lettering, while pencils, which were allowed but rationed, were tucked away in elastic waistband or bra awaiting additional discovery and expression.

Each week people returned to our classroom with new poems, small essays too, hand-written in partnership with cellmates. Artists created images to match the words: broken hearts; skeletal women; a fairy lifting off from a tender blade of grass. The work reached ever outward to explain something to someone but what and to whom? The condition of souls? Incarceration––its distinct qualities and sounds? The meaning of love, its illusions, traps, and ability to liberate and redeem? Who would listen?

My job was to facilitate discussion, lead us into writing, and gather the results. I’d arrive back at my office on a small community college campus in rural California with folders full of poems, stories, and drawings meant to accompany them. I then scanned the artwork, typed others' words into my computer, and began to design a sequence to best showcase the passion and intensity of our classroom experience.

The following week, I’d return to the jail with crisp, printed versions of what we’d produced. Is this what you wanted? I asked. Is this how the stanzas should flow?

Yes and no and maybe.

When possible, pieces were reworked. When not, they weren’t. Some writers we saw only once. They came to the room, wrote with us, and were released before a next class meeting, a few unedited lines the only physical sign of the time we shared.

As a final deadline drew near, the work came in a rush. Last minute flashes of inspiration led to book titles to which everyone suddenly and immediately agreed. That’s good! That’s good! we said. It took hours to type up new pieces, to print out and proofread, and printout once again. But what relief there was in meeting a deadline––the strange peace experienced when something is dropped off for a printing.

In the pods, perhaps they were sleeping or carrying on with ever more writing. As for me, I sat in my home watching a very pretty documentary, Dior and I, which tracked the creation of a designer’s first couture collection. That man, Raf Simons, had a tight deadline, a dedicated crew of artisan assistants, and millions of dollars with which to play.

Simons studied what inspired his predecessor and the subtle repetitions and trashed elegance of modern art, directing this aesthetic to the creation of new prints and surprisingly simple sketches, which he delivered to the ateliers responsible for turning sketches into realities.

In and out of workrooms flew the garments, hand sewn muslin prototypes draped over stuffed mannequins until just the right shapes were formed. A Dior trained international army of artisans approached their work as if the pieces they fashioned were sacred, and to me, encased in my own haze of creative release, it seemed possible they were.

Light-as-air skirts of impossible volumes required hundreds of small folds be carefully stitched into place. Late into the night, a dozen hands sewed beads on to bodices, so the next morning a long girl with a golden ponytail could stride across a showroom and Simons, the designer, could tell the artisans exactly where they’d gone wrong.

It was he that chose the backdrop for the unveiling of his collection––a once fine Parisian apartment in a wealthy district. It rooms were in disarray. But here would sit the wealthy and fashionable people for whose critical gaze Simons created his collection.

Would the already well-explored aesthetic of chipped paint and scratched floors be celebrated or dismissed when juxtaposed against Simons’ precise and polished pieces? He studied the apartment anxiously––its appealing shape and marble staircase. From here he somehow recalled Dior’s gardens and artist Jeff Koon’s giant sculptures rendered in living plants. Why not cover the walls in fresh blossoms? He wondered, and because he thought it, it was done!

After a frenzied 48 hours, dense walls of white orchids reached from floor to ceiling in one room, roses in another, delphiniums in a third––their fresh blossoms heavily scenting the air.

A younger me would have stood in judgment of the extravagance, pondering all the mouths that could have been fed with the cost of all the flowers alone. But that night I saw something different––connection! What teamwork!

How very human it is to want to create beauty, no matter the cost! We make excuses to do it, form communities, expend great resources, while also establishing entire hierarchical structures, ranking systems, etc... in order to judge our efforts and inspire the making of more and more beauty, so deeply do we long for it in new forms.

I couldn't help but look at Simons, all the busy laborers he employed––the seamstresses, publicity men, models lined against a wall waiting stoically––and think to myself, but it’s just like jail! I mean, the jail I teach in, the incarcerated writers I work with, my college, me, the woman who ran the copy machines that brought our books to life, so I could return to the classroom with separate editions for each pod and host a book release party on the last day of the term. That party was our runway.

It was a stupendous experience, our show. We shared it with the jail commander, the college’s vice president, the program director who brought college classes to jail, and all the contributing writers and artists who were still behind bars the day of our book party.

The three books contain fragmented stories, many poems, and a few illustrations rendered in the weak lead afforded by jail-approved golf pencils. The work is based on the lives of the incarcerated people of San Benito County in Hollister, California, a rotating team who found themselves together for at least one hour, and some for many more, in the fall of 2015.

We’ve distributed our titles to the discerning eyes of our colleagues, other writers, family members, friends, acquaintances, and now to you should you click on the links below. We hope you find beauty in our creation:

The Revolving Door, Writing from the Womenof E-Pod

The Struggle is Real, Writing from the Womenof F-Pod

Love of Various Examples, Writing from the Menof C-Pod