by Cheri Register

As I get older, I grow wearier of the political fray that used to engage me so. The cynicism and polarization of American public life send me scrambling for refuge. I seek out places where people regard each other as worthy human beings and can talk about common pursuits without first having to choose sides and name their enemies. The Loft, of course, is reliably civil. Another place I go might seem an unlikely choice:  On a Saturday afternoon each month I drive to the Minnesota Women’s Correctional Facility, commonly known as Shakopee prison, to teach a two-hour class on writing prose. We began in October 2009 with ten writers and by our May meeting had “lost” four, who were released from incarceration to make new efforts to thrive on their own terms.

I first went to Shakopee in response to an invitation from librarian Andrea Smith. A book club she oversees there was reading my memoir, Packinghouse Daughter, and would value a chance to discuss it with me. She phrased the invitation in a way that allowed me to decline without explanation or embarrassment, but she also portrayed the club’s members as eager readers who had derived much benefit from previous author visits. I relish discussions with readers of my books, and I had already met with college classes, library and bookstore gatherings, labor history groups, and book clubs in city and suburbs. But I had never been inside a prison, so I lacked any basis to predict how this group of readers might respond to my book. Of course I had to go.

As it happened, Sally Williams, the former editor of the Star Tribune’s book review pages, was launching a column about book clubs on MinnPost.com, and she had chosen the Shakopee prison book club to serve as her first example. Her visit to observe the club in action coincided with mine. Although readers of MinnPost might have thought it a puzzling start, for Sally the choice was natural. For years, she had been donating the review copies sent to the Star Tribune to the prison library. As a result, the library is as well stocked and up-to-date as any community or small college library. Each “offender,” as the residents are called, is allowed one scheduled visit a week, during which she may check out five books. Books that aren’t available on-site can be requested from the Scott County Library, five at a time. The offender working that day as a library assistant told us she took her full quota every week and that reading had become vital to her well-being.  More such testimony was on display around the room, on bulletin boards covered with four-by-six-inch book reviews in many styles of handwriting.

Even before Sally posted her article, I knew I had to go back. What drew me back to teach was the intensity with which the women engaged with Packinghouse Daughter. They found ways to connect my childhood and adolescence in the 1950s and ’60s with their own, my family with theirs, my parents’ work with their parents’. They read as if their lives depended on the insights they drew from literature. I wondered if they might write with the same urgency. In all the teaching I do, I look for passion in student manuscripts, a conviction that something is truly at stake in the telling of a story, that the story itself begs telling. As a writer and teacher of memoir and essay, I wanted to help draw out the stories that must be burgeoning among women whose lives had pivoted on unwise choices, displaced loyalties, horrific moments, or patterns of misfortune.

My Shakopee students have not disappointed me! They bring to their writing a commitment to self-examination, a willingness to contend with whatever brought them into incarceration and with its ongoing challenges, and an eagerness to distill from the past the best, truest elements of their fundamental selves. While regret is a common theme, self-pity is rare. Anger and sorrow are expected, but humor is abundant, too. Fond childhood memories are treasured, even if the context in which they took place was troubled.

This group of women has established as easy and comfortable a trust as I have seen anywhere. They are generous in their encouragement of one another. KA says that she would like to curl up in bed and listen to J read her lush and loving childhood memories. J, a Catholic, and C, a Native American, quickly tune in to the spiritual themes in each other’s work. Everyone looks to BL to provide a light, comic touch to the end of her story, yet when she began exploring harsher subjects, she received nothing but encouragement. The day KE read about the continuing hold of a manipulative relationship she had left behind, the stillness thickened the air. Occasionally someone would sigh as if to punctuate an especially resonant sentence, and at the end the whole group broke into applause. The trust level is all the more heartening because the participants bring with them ancestral heritages drawn from four continents, a source of bitter divisions in so much of American life. Yet the more specific the detail they offer about the Hmong or Ojibwe or African American or Lithuanian aspects of their lives, the closer they come to shared, universal truths. I wish for diversity of this degree in Loft classes.

It’s always risky to write thumbnail portraits of people you see only briefly and periodically. The words chosen too easily devolve into labels that pin their subjects in place. Nevertheless, I want to name, for each participant, one thing I admire and have come to anticipate in her writing. Of those who have left, I appreciate BE’s eagerness to revive the light she discovered within herself when the poet and Loft teaching artist John Minczeski visited her fifth-grade class. I imagine MT with her head down, her nose grazing the page as her pen rushes furiously across it, so focused she can’t be distracted. L’s self-ironic humor will make anything she writes accessible to readers. C’s work is firmly grounded in nature and heritage and draws lovely metaphors from soil and stars. KA amazes us with poetic imagery and deft, meaning-packed phrases, after prefacing each reading with apologies for its raw state. We count on N to pose provocative questions in keen, rhythmic language that echoes throughout the day and keeps us unraveling those tortuous whys. ML’s gentle candor turns her heart-wrenching accounts of a difficult adolescence into guiding beacons for young women in similar situations. BL’s tender affection for the details of daily life—the blue flip-flops known as “Hmong Nikes,” the thump-thumping bass of a passing car—has shown us the truth that familiarity can be comforting even when it is unpleasant. J’s soothing childhood memories don’t strand us in a lost paradise, because she always finds some core element that serves as a touchstone in her current life. KE’s writing ranges from childhood memoir rich in sensory detail to tenacious examinations of her recent life history for turns taken, choices made, chances missed.

Yes, people who hear that I am volunteering as a teacher at Shakopee do want to know what these women did to get there. I, too, was curious, especially after meeting the members of the book club, some of whom could easily pass for my daughters’ twenty-something friends. I knew that their crimes and sentences, along with mug shots, were shockingly easy to retrieve online, but I decided to wait until I had gotten to know my students face-to-face, as the people they are now. In the meantime, I learned the same counterintuitive lesson that I had learned years ago conducting interviews for a book on chronic illness. In that case, I discovered that how people manage a life beset by illness has little to do with the severity of their pain or how dire a prognosis they’ve been given. It depends far more on the strength of an underlying conviction that life is worth living, no matter how imperfect or encumbered it may be. Murder? Theft? Sex crimes? Drug crimes? The nature and severity of the crime have no bearing that I can see on either will or skill to write. Only one of my ten students is writing directly about her crime, as part of a book-length memoir she believes will be useful to readers whose lives share certain features with hers. I leave it to her to say more about that, in her eloquent way.

The greatest challenge I face as a teacher is helping students acquire or compensate for the tools they are lacking. Some students’ knowledge of grammar is limited by insufficient education, or by the fact that English is a second language, and not the one they are most inclined to use. (The class includes college graduates, as well.) Given the limits of our time together, I have to trust that my editorial “fixes” on the pieces they turn in will encourage them to work at improving their grammar and syntax on their own time. The vital stories they have to tell deserve the sharpest tools.

Familiar habits of speech, including street slang, can constrain or enrich the prose, depending on how they are used. I have declared my own proud attachment to dialect forms, having encountered a copy editor who wanted to “correct” the speech of my packinghouse worker dad and his fellows in the oral history material I quoted in Packinghouse Daughter. “He don’t” and “pret’near” communicate just fine where I come from. Yet I have also taken to heart the essayist and Loft creative nonfiction mentor Phillip Lopate’s advice: “Write from your highest intelligence.” I walk a fine line in encouraging my Shakopee students to use spoken dialect forms for characterization and dialogue, but to incline toward standard English in narrative, unless they knowingly choose to create a narrative persona who is distinguished by her speech. N, for example, is at her sharpest and most genuine in a dialect-inflected prose, and I want her to see its use as an affirmative decision she makes, not the only recourse she has. If she claims it—and trusts it—as her voice, her command of vernacular speech can serve her well.

I have come to expect shorter pieces of writing than Loft students would produce in a month, or even a week. For most of my Shakopee students, the discipline of sustained writing is a new challenge. Revision is another. I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that offenders live, for most purposes, in a pre-typewriter world. Story development and revision are more laborious in prison, because time in the computer lab is rationed. Zapping out extraneous words and reordering paragraphs with cut-and-paste are rare options. The pieces I pack home with me after class are handwritten, and my scrawls in the margins look invasive. Revised work must be written out afresh. Nevertheless, my class is compiling their favorite works—revised—into a book, using the prison newsletter’s privileged access to the computer. Each contributor will get a copy.

The writing lesson that has yielded the best results is the usual “go for the details.” It’s hard to believe now how sparse some of their initial writing samples were. They also respond heartily to exercises in imagery. With a magazine photo of an iceberg on the table in front of her, J depicted herself as an iceberg, her identity as an offender jutting up above the surface of the sea while all that she has lived and known and cherished in her 60-plus years stays hidden from view beneath. The class found her image breathtaking, so I asked them to spend ten minutes or so creating images for their experience of incarceration. KE’s was a sound night’s sleep in the assurance that she is safe from the evil that stole her previous life away. KA chose her own body, covered with wounds, some self-inflicted but finally healing over, no longer at risk of infection. Yet the scars will always be there to remind her. BL portrayed herself as an old, dried-up hunk of clay, full of cracks, stuck away on a shelf. Then her face brightened: all it needs is water, and it can be shaped into anything at all, even something beautiful.

In my brief conversations after class with Andrea Smith, I bubble over with enthusiasm about what my writers have come up with this time. Andrea is admirably respectful of the women who come into her library, making it a haven in an environment where respect is not always the order of the day. Yet she is also clear-eyed and realistic. She helps me understand that I am, indeed, dealing with the most motivated women in the place, and that I am lucky to have convened a group that is free of rivalries and hostility. Not all the Shakopee residents willingly opt for transformation. The recidivism rate is upward of 25 percent. Nearly every time we meet, the PA system breaks into our class discussion to announce a “situation in the facility,” some offense that requires everyone to stay put. Once a situation delayed the start of class, and I looked out the door to see the gentle, competent, thoughtful C frozen to a bench down the hall, prohibited from taking the last few steps to class until the voice on the PA allowed “movement.”

I certainly have no illusions about “saving” poor prisoners; the ones I know are already doing what they can to rescue themselves, and maybe some writing skills will equip them better for that effort. Ultimately, I have the same hope for my Shakopee students that I have for my Loft students: that writing will become an indispensable and ever fulfilling aspect of their lives—a vehicle for self-discovery, communication with others, and exploration, both imaginative and intellectual, of the larger world. One of KE’s essays asked whether years spent in incarceration are lost years: are they lost if they teach you something or bring a contentment you didn’t know before? On a similar note, I like to tell students that no writing is ever wasted. Those hours spent on inarticulate scratching that winds up in the wastebasket open your imagination to release the words that come easily the next day. No writing is ever wasted, and no time spent writing is ever lost.

Every two-hour session I spend with the Shakopee writing class leaves me enlightened, energized, and, dare I say, optimistic. I look forward to more such Saturdays and more encounters with women of earnest intent writing stories that affirm our common humanity. Yet, as the guard at the exit buzzes me out through the double set of locked doors, and I trade my volunteer badge for my driver’s license and claim my purse from the locker, I know that this place is no island paradise. I drive away with stories still spinning, moved to see what I can do to make the world outside a more hospitable place for the next woman released from incarceration.

Cheri Register is a writer of memoir, essay, and local history who has taught creative nonfiction courses at the Loft for 18 years. She has also served on the Loft board and won a creative nonfiction mentorship, a faculty grant, and a Minnesota Writers’ Career Initiative Grant through the Loft. She is in pursuit of a story about the drainage of an 18,000-acre wetland in southern Minnesota between 1895 and 1925.