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Chapter 3 Writing Your Way to Freedom Autobiography as Inquiry in Prison Writing Workshops David Coogan I’m sitting in a circle with a few dozen men in a classroom sanctuary, a respite from the noise, violence, and negativity of a jail built to house 800 prisoners but that routinely houses more than 1,500. The walls of this sanctuary within the Richmond City Jail are covered with posters of Mother Teresa and Malcolm X, photos of prisoners doing their work, and photocopies of GED and Career Readiness Certificates. The room is full of books by poets and historians, computers, study guides, and plastic chairs filled with imprisoned men working on the craft of authoring new lives. On this afternoon, I am reading “The Builder” from Pablo Neruda’s (1967) poetrycollectionFullyEmpowered.Thepoembeginswiththespeakerannouncing that he “chose” his “own illusion” and let his “long mastery” of it “divide up” his “dreams.” After dwelling a little in the experience of mastery, the narrator sees salvation in the shape of a ship. He even touches it. But “when it did not come back / the ship did not come back” and “everyone drowned in his own tears”; still, the speaker summons the strength to build a new ship. With an ax he enters the woods, concluding, “I have no recourse but to live” (p. 33). The men before me also have no recourse but to live. Building from this key assumption, I make another: our “long mastery” of a “false illusion” can prevent us from truly living. It could even be one of the reasons that the men before me are incarcerated. There are other reasons, of course, as Michelle Alexander (2012), PCARE (2007), and many of the other contributors to this volume make clear, including unjust drug laws, rigid sentencing guidelines, a lack of jobs in the inner city, entrenched racism and poverty, and cultures of violence. We could multiply the external reasons, but we are writing about the internal reasons. And we’re doing this not only for ourselves, but for one another. We’re writing to try to learn hard lessons about the characters that Writing Your Way to Freedom 61 we’ve been and to try to imagine our characters in new plots. We write to steer the drama away from crime and jail. In this chapter, I explain how I have built autobiographical writing workshops in prisons. I share some scenes and writings from these workshops and probe the deeper communication issues that structure narratives of criminality and violence but that also, when addressed truthfully, enable imprisoned men to begin to author new lives. To give readers a broader understanding of these problems, I then contextualize the men’s autobiographies within the larger field of prison writing since the 1970s, in particular, the emergent genre of prison autobiography. Though I have taught autobiography to women prisoners and read published autobiographies by women prisoners, I limit my discussion to work published by men primarily because the workshops I discuss here are filledwithmen.However,theprocessofcraftingnewselvesviaautobiographical writing is not inherently different for men and women any more than it is for black or white prisoners. What I am calling “writing your way to freedom” is a process of discovering and developing new characters amid the old plot lines that led to jail—it’s also a process of writing new plot lines that lead out of jail. Face to Face with Your Life Script After reading Neruda’s poem, I ask the men to stir things up by writing about a false illusion that they had chosen, an illusion that divided their dreams. “Did you have a ship that got away?” I ask. Some study my face. Others are already writing. “How will you rebuild?” When I call time after fifteen minutes of inclass drafting, Emanuel is already on his feet ready to go: The fortune, the fame, it’s all in the game. Nice cars, big chains: crack to cocaine. Dope man serving dope man to whomever—rain sleet or snow man. My illusions came from dudes cruising with broads on Broad Street. Weekends popping, bodies dropping that’s shhh. Money, power, respect is what I need to be that dude. My crooked teeth, Eddie Monster look and bow legged feet. Low self-esteem is what was causing my defeat. I had to cover these things up so people wouldn’t pick on me no more. Then I could be the man. Then I got older and became the man. But I...

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