Author’s note: In those rare moments when the animals rest, I pray that this pain is not in vain. That there is some bigger purpose to all this nonsense I struggle to endure. Could this be part of a grander plan, a divine hand, that insists I endure a life incarcerated as part of my creative journey as a writer?
Maybe I needed to be born again in the fashion of many great artists so that some light can come from all this darkness? That it is this very pain that is molding my evolution. We’ve all read about the tortured creator destined to a life lived on the fringes. Many of the greats are a little crazy, aren’t they. I’ve heard the argument that having suffered is the very reason they become great. Could that be? Are the cosmic forces so fickle?
So, in my hubris, I imagine that prison is the catalyst for great growth. That this very ordeal is the conduit to my understanding of the human condition in a manner I would have never been able to manifest in my old life. That the concrete jungle is my dressing room, my real, purposeful life has yet to begin. That I needed this training to have the writer’s tools (self-reflection, creativity, misery, and anguish) necessary to truly write something that matters.
But to do this, I must believe I can. I must sit myself behind my dreaded nemesis – the blank page – and hunt and peck my way forward. Alone. Always alone.
I am six years into my sentence, and I have been writing pretty much non-stop since I arrived and still, I am not ready (clearly). I am not good enough. Lack talent. Not worthy. Maybe I need more pain and suffering? Good thing I still have six more years left to serve.
I decided to write about myself today because it is one of the few subjects where I alone am the expert. I wanted to attempt to write about my writing. I wanted to take a deep dive into my psyche and examine what drives me to return to the taunting horror of the bank page.
Where did it begin?
As a kid, I loved listening to stories. My mom would read me stories about young boys and their dogs. My father would read me the Marmaduke comic strip on Sundays. Dogs become my go-to. Favorite cartoon: Scooby Doo, favorite toy: My Snoopy stuffed animal, favorite movies: Benji and Lassie. You get the picture.
Cut to me at 10 years old. I discover the local library: “Ms. Librarian, where do I find the books about dogs?” I read Where the Red Fern Grows and Dominic (a lesser-known book by William Steig about a sleuthing dog that walks like a human and wears a hat with a green feather). I become a regular visitor and could often be found in a corner, nose deep in a book. It is not something anyone particularly encouraged – no teacher who took a special interest or parents who brought home books – but I wasn’t discouraged either.
Throughout junior high and high school I did my English papers about books like Call of the Wild and Cujo. They weren’t particularly special, but it was an early indicator that I liked to write. In college, I majored in Communications and eventually worked in PR where writing was necessary. I enjoyed college (duh) and my career, but I was never really inspired by the writing demands.
As you may have deduced, my youth wasn’t particularly unique. I had no real trauma to endure. No life altering events that would forever skew my perspective. So, I am left to wonder what influenced me to think about writing in any real way? As noted, I wasn’t a great student. No teacher ever pulled me aside and recommended I consider a career as an author. No family or friends are successful writers. To date, I have never met a professional writer. I guess maybe what influences our decisions isn’t always external. Maybe there is some sort of internal engine driving some of us towards something whether we know (or like) it at all? (And, truth be told, I don’t always like it.)
So, is it in our DNA?
“I don’t know much about the writer’s life, but I do know this: wanting to write or being a writer means accepting a life of anonymity, constant rejection, almost certain destitution, and exhaustive self-doubt” But yet, I am driven to return to the page. I cannot resist it. Too much time away and my ends begin to frazzle. The reasons seem hidden in secret chambers of my heart.
To begin again:
For most of my youth, I lived in the near southside of Chicago in a gang-infested Latino ghetto. Reading was my escape, and since it was too dangerous for me to play outside, I was forced to explore my world through the adventures of my canine friends.
Fast forward a few years and we move to a new neighborhood without armed guards and metal detectors at the doors of our schools. It was there in this new community that I found the respite of the local library. I would search out rare books like The Dog by Kerstin Ekman – books that often broke my heart and had me running to the bathroom to hide my tears. Why do so many of the best books about dogs always end with the dog dying? (I am looking at you Marley and Me!). I read them all and reread them until I knew them by heart. It was then, in the details of these characters that I would recognize parts of myself and that was also the first time I remember thinking how cool it must be to be a writer. It was just a passing thought – gone in the blink of an eye. I mean, it was something other people did, creative, important, smart people, not a buck-toothed C student. But maybe a seed had been planted?
I graduated high school and joined the Army. I didn’t overthink it. We were poor and this was a way to pay for college. “Where do I sign sir?” Basic Training was a crash course in fitness and endurance. My war was brief. I read a few books. My Dog Tulip by Ackerly stands out. I also did some writing. I wrote daily letters in the Army: long, forlorn love letters to Peachy (real name): brief, explanatory letters to my family, and lots of journal entries. I tried to write stories about what I saw, like when I saw Luthi eat a razor blade in a half-assed attempt to get a Section 8 discharge or when I carried Peltier two miles to a medical van when he suffered a seizure. But it is hard to write while you’re living through an experience – at least it is for me. So those stories have yet to be told. The rest of those years were uneventful and quickly behind me.
Then I went to the Nation’s #1 party school (Playboy 1998). In college, I wrote the obligatory papers, essays, and stories for my English and Journalism classes. I enjoyed it, (as much as one can enjoy homework), but had not yet embraced the power of revision and my grades reflected that. Truth be told, not much has changed. I still write by the seat of my pants: OMG rambles of brain dumps – streams of consciousness jump around and it’s easy to get lost. A professor once noted, “I didn’t know what your piece was even about until the last paragraph.” (Ouch!). So, I figured I just wasn’t a very good writer. Dreams of me becoming a writer were as far away from me as being an astronaut. That’s just fact.
I did not know Southern Illinois University was some famous party school, they simply offered the best financial aid package. It took me six and a half years, four majors, and two transfers to graduate. I partied hard, like the Housewives in Vegas. I had to take a semester off my junior year as I didn’t return from Spring Break for a month. I drank too much. Womanized. I also toyed with the idea of becoming an actor and took another semester off my senior year to travel with a professional Chicago Theatre Group performing The Secret Garden as a children’s show. Looking back today, I can see I liked the idea of being an actor more so than actual acting which I found tedious and boring. (My bad, that was me reminiscing. You’re bored and fell asleep with the lights one.)
On the road, I picked up titles at local bookstores – remember those? Dogsong (Gary Paulsen, 1985) showed me how lean, action-oriented language can push a story forward like the boy and his team of sled dogs did in the tundra in this Newbery Honor – award winning tale. I re-read My Dog Tulip (Ackerly, 1956) finding it sadder and weirder in how the human-animal relationships were written. These brief interludes with great authors made me feel smart and sophisticated. Who cares if they are stories about dogs, they are no less impactful and important to a young mind than Thoreau or Emerson, (who I also came to enjoy).
Then, my daughter Hope was born when I was 21.
I did not read her bedtime stories from books. I whispered tales of puppies I conjured from my imagination. As my first critic, she was kind. “Daddy, story,” she would ask in her tiny pink onesie. I’d ask her if she liked a certain story and she would dutifully shake her head slowly up and down. She didn’t like stories about mean people and would quickly cover my mouth with her tiny hand if I started in that direction. I would begin…there was a mean wolf who lived by the sea… “No, Daddy,” she’d yelp. Okay, okay. There was a kind wolf who lived by the sea. She would smile and lay her head on her frilly Wonder Woman pillow.
It is at this point that I must jump ahead…
One day while serving ten days in the Hole for knocking my celly unconscious with a sock full of batteries, I had what some might call a revelation. I don’t mean to sound douchey, but I don’t know how else to describe it. In the Hole all there is to do is read or write (in some ways, it was marvelous that way). I would read whatever the library cart had to offer. I’d ask for any books about dogs, but mostly they were novels by Grisham, Patterson, and King. Occasionally, they might have a classic from Twain or Hemmingway. And that is how I slowly began to shift away from my obsession with canine narratives. I quickly realized that there are a helluva lot of good books and authors in the world. They weren’t all bestsellers or classics, but you know it’s a good read when you forgot to breathe and must force yourself to tear away for a few minutes to eat.
In the Big House, life sucks (duh!), but you don’t have to worry about cooking your own meals, paying bills, and all the typical bullshit regular free people have to worry about. Free time is both your blessing and your curse. So, I read everything I could get my hands on. I came across an article written by an inmate in an old Playboy magazine. Lightening struck. I could do that…no, I thought, I could do better than that.
And so, a plan began to develop, a plan to become a writer (or at least write). I wasn’t exactly sure what I meant by “becoming a writer” – I still don’t. I just knew it was something I wanted to pursue. And so, I did.
To figure out my competition, I ordered books written by inmate writers. I was shocked to find there are hundreds, if not thousands, of inmate written books and I’ll be damned if some of them aren’t flat-0ut wonderful; Prisoner of Tehran, Orange is the New Black, Writing My Wrongs, The Hate Factory, Mother California, Cherry, Felon, etc. They’re everything one can imagine fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays, EVERTHING! I was only limited by my budget. I devoured these tomes, highlighting a certain burn of phrase I liked or ear-marking whole pages I felt were especially interesting. I spent a whole year doing this.
The second year was harder than the first. I joined a makeshift writer’s group at my prison but soon found the politics of group endeavors existed and the stress in here, just like anywhere else, hindered my progress more than helped. I had dreamt of a creative writing fellowship where we stoked our ambition and helped raise each other’s quality of work. Silly dreams when you live in a dream killer.
So, it was back to the books, but now it was time for Stage 2: books on writing craft. First, the classics: On Writing (is there anything this man can’t write? I bet his grocery list has narrative arc and fleshed out characters.). The Elements of Style, Bird by Bird, Down the Bones. I tried to start reading the dictionary while on the toilet to increase my vocabulary but found it futile and ridiculous. Instead, I used it to look up words I didn’t know from zines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker which at first was frustrating. It took me hours just to get through one article, but I soon learned there’s only a few hundred of these “literary” words I needed to learn.
Stage 3: Start writing. I tried to adhere to the writing advice by the experts, use some of the literary tricks I enjoyed in other’s writings.
I soon felt myself losing my voice as I tried to mimic James Parker of The Atlantic or Corrie Ten Boom in The Hiding Place. So, in a righteous rage, I threw away all my books (except my dictionary) – which is not to say they are unworthy, the opposite really: they are necessary parts of my writing journey. I had simply decided if I was going to be a writer, above all else I had to stay honest to myself.
I worried about the “writer’s block” often mentioned in my self-help manuals, but human warehouses on the fringes of the world are a treasure trove (a tired character cliché) of interesting and great stories. I would find that the hardest part would be choosing what to write about first.
At this time, many years after I began this journey in earnest, I shifted from studying books on writing and reading books by inmate authors to writing my first piece. Welcome to the Mindfuck, about my year in county jail. “There is nothing like living in hell, but there is something close to it: Cook County Jail. In my hell, where I spent the majority of 2014 and 2015, there is, as Dante understood, no hope. People think the worst part of incarceration is the loss of freedom. They are wrong. The worst part is the loss of hope and purpose. You wake up every morning realizing your nightmares will continue into your waking hours. The loss you have suffered is permanent. Life will never be the same. In many real ways you are dead, just unburied. There is no healing or improvement awaiting you, but even worse, there is no possibility of any to come. The most unbearable thing about your unbearable life is that you will always be forced to bear it.”
I submitted to a few magazines. Mostly crickets. One editor did ask if I was schizophrenic. I didn’t know how to take that. I still have the letter. I wish writing nonfiction was easy, but writing about my own struggles takes more courage than I can often muster. Too often I found that if I was honest, I wasn’t the hero of my own stories. Not really. And what does that say about me?
There’s a scene in the Will Smith movie Hancock where he is reflecting on his backstory. He explains how his first memory is waking up in a hospital with no memory of who he is. He is told that they have supplied the media with his photo, but no one has come forward to claim him. Months pass, nothing. He is left with the question, What kind of asshole must he have been that no one came looking for him? No one?
I know that feeling. It’s a fate worse than death, to feel completely and utterly alone in the world when you are at your most vulnerable and scared. When I first came to prison and most of my so-called friends and family turned their back on me or worse, were simply indifferent to my suffering, I questioned myself. How much of an asshole must I have been?
So, I try to write about those moments that eat away at me in an effort to purge my mind of these thoughts. In here, I live in my mind more so than anywhere else, constantly contemplating and analyzing my past, and to a lesser degree my future.
So, I keep writing, sit my butt in a chair and open a vein, (a great metaphor I once heard).
Meanwhile, new questions begin to arise.
Am I an essayist? Memoirist? Journalist? Playwright? I start to suffer from imposter syndrome. Why in the HELL do you think anyone would want to read ANYTHING you write? Why do you deserve to be heard? I have no answers. Mostly, I agree. I write anyway, because “Fuck It.”
One year later, I win a prestigious (in my world) PEN America Prison Writing Award. Then, another. My work is nominated for a PuSheart and in Best Essays in America. I am published in a couple prison writing anthologies. I am a regular contributor to various prison inmate focused publications, but secretly I fear they have lower standards and aren’t helping me grow (plus, they don’t pay) as a writer. But I like to see my byline.
Also, I’m a human sloth and would rather pick up shards of glass with my tongue than edit and revise, which even as a novice writer I understand is the difference between okay and good versus good and great.
One of the perks of winning a prison writing award is that they often offer the winners a writing mentor. Sometimes it could just be a grad student, but other times you could be linked up with a hotshot author with a writing career (by which I mean they can actually support themselves based on their craft). It was from some of these mentorships that I learned that writing about my pain was fine but for it to become a memoir it must be related to other things greater than itself. That’s the art, they explained. But I didn’t get it. So, I kept writing my little slices-of-prison-life stories and seeing them published in obscure prison zines, blogs, newsletters and stuff like that. I could not wrap my head around how to tell my story as a tool with which to excavate the larger truth which explores the depths of our humanity or, as is so often in social justice writing, our lack thereof.
And so began a new phase in my writing journey; stealing. If I couldn’t write that style naturally, I had no choice but to hijack it from those that could.
(Not blatant plagiarism). I didn’t want to mimic someone else’s style or tricks, (I had fought against it even when the writing books encouraged it), but desperate times. So, I went back to reading some of my favorite prison writers (many of which most people don’t know were prison writers like O’Henry or Dostoyeski). I even allow myself a new dog book, The Art of Racing in the Rain (Stein), about a philosopher dog Enzo, who believes he will be reincarnated as a man. I borrow anything that might work for me. I try new styles. I write a play. A poem. Fiction. Even straight journalism (which for me, is where creative writing goes to die-no offense to any journalists reading this). It was working…sort of.
A non-inmate related publication editor asked me, “Do you consider yourself an inmate writer and if so, why?” Why was I not just a writer who, at the moment, happens to be in prison. I admit I did not have a quick response. After about a month, I wrote them back:
Well, because as a normal writer you may not have to think about where you are, but everything done in prison is oriented toward it in one way or another. The gravity of the mass of pain and suffering is too great – like the blackhole that pulls everything into its depths. It affects (and effects) everything we do in ways both seen and unseen. To try to write around it would be dishonest and disingenuous. And if my writing is to ever mean anything to me or anyone else above all it must be true.
See, prison writers…let me stop and not lump us all together. As a nonfiction prison writer, I am not mainly writing for an audience, even less often for an actual payday. I am an explorer. I am seeking the truth about myself and my new world (planet Mindfuck). I am spelunking into the dark wrinkles of my mind, a place of harrowing loneliness that screams for me to stay away. I gently tug and pull memories out of the muck. They are muddy and filthy and will require me to get dirty as well.
In this way, I try to make sense of my place in the universe. I try to exert some control of a life long ago unmoored. It is what I try to do every time I put ink to paper, but sometimes, it is better to avoid looking directly at something – like an eclipse. I needed some sort of device to write through to the heart of my pieces. Like when, during COVID quarantine lockdowns, I felt a compulsion to write about my mental journey since arriving in prison. It came from a place of need to explore my darkest moments as catharsis and desire to help someone else see the possibility of hope in an otherwise dreary existence. I knew this was going to be difficult, and I had to be brutally open about my own shortcomings and battles with my mental health, otherwise, those suffering similar fates would be able to detect a fraud. I knew I just had to sit and let those dark feedings return and write about what I felt, but the fear of going back to that place was overwhelming. Instead, I chose to write from the wings of the stage, seeing my life at an angle, slightly skewed and safely away.
I wanted to be honest and yet save my mind. I wanted to feel enough to convey the magnitude of what I was feeling without allowing myself to get consumed by the deep, dark well…again.
The process of pulling those memories and writing them into a memoir is an alchemy I cannot put into words because I am not sure I am even doing it. It begins with the simple act of engaging with your past, but quickly devolves into a more primal language where, eventually, it dies on the page only to be brought back to life with new perspective in a safe place. It is both perfectly rational and inconceivably irrational. It has a process I have tried to master time and again, but it is not one that I have ever felt confident with.
When I was done, that piece, Prison blues: My Story of Battling Depression on the Inside, was published by a few reputable outlets and over the course of the next year turned into an award winning play that was produced as a puppet show in NYC (in collaboration with the Brooklyn Public Library), a radio play in L.A. and is scheduled for a professional production in Chicago this Fall. It was in adapting it to a play that I was able to convey the depth of my feelings. I preserved the truth by allowing another (a character) to inhibit them. A play, once preformed, will inevitably distort the original concept, but that isn’t a bad thing. The change, the evolution it goes through, is also what I went through to explore those feelings to grasp and understand my journey through the writing process. And now, best of all, I can safely return to those moments. I see my work brought to life. I hear stories about how it has helped others and it is as if the sun shines on me from all sides.
My writing still ebbs and flows. These days I find myself less likely to sit and write and instead, scouring the prison library for more books about dogs. I found a great book of poems, Dog Songs (Mary Oliver 2013) and The Friend (Sigrid Nunez 2018) about a dog-human relationship (spoiler alert: the damn dog dies…again!). But my original question still lingers: Why write? Why writer?
Writing, I’ve come to believe, is my escape whether I’ll ever be considered a real writer or not. Writing is the invisible force that drives me. If I am not neck deep in chicken scratch notes and butt sore from my hard steel stool, I am lost. I don’t know what to do with myself. But when I’m immersed in a flash memoir the world goes from dull grays to color, from mono to stereo, – to complete the cliché. Everything is important and useful content for my stories. I am fully engaged – all senses firing. I feel…free, like a dog off his leash.
So yeah, I can accept that I may never have the commercial success I crave, but maybe I’ll have something better.
Recommended Books with Dogs
My Dog Tulip
J.R. Ackerley, 1956 memoir
“A dog has one aim in life…to bestow his heart.”
A curious look into the nuances of the dog-human relationship written by someone who deeply loves dogs, especially his own, Queenie
A love story for grown-ups
Dominic
William Steig, 1972, Children’s Book
Detective dog turn fairy tale love story. A must-read to young children before bed.
Dogsong
Gary Paulsen 1985, Teen Fiction
A young Inuit boy and his team of sled dogs’ adventures I the tundra. Notes of Call of the Wild.
The Dog
Kerstin Ekman, 1986
This originally Swedish novel is the story of a puppy lost in the wilderness.
Spoiler alert: He does not recover his mother or owner. Cue the tissues.
Dog Songs
Mary Oliver, 2013
Poems about dogs. For example, describing a dog off his leash:
“expressing the pleasures of the body in this world.”
The Friend
Sigrid Nunez, 2018
The classic dog tale, with a twist. The thinking man’s Turner and Hooch meets Marley and Me.
The Art of Racing in the Rain
Garth Stein, 2008
A made for the screen novel narrated by Enzo (great dog name), the philosopher dog, about his musings of his race-car-driver owner’s life challenges.
The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves
Alexandra Horowitz, 2022
So far, so good…stay tuned
No Comments