Some days are just wonderful. It’s My Best Beloved’s birthday, and it’s Bailey’s birthday (our dog, known asThe Rescuepoo), and the hot-off-the-presses copy of my new novel arrived in the mail, which just makes me giddy with grinning . . . . but. . . the most wonderful thing about today happened in a prison.
novelist, essayist, teacher
Paul Muldoon — A Poet in the Prison
December 22, 2010 by 2 Comments
Poet Paul Muldoon
Last week, Paul Muldoon, Pulitzer Prize and T.S. Elliot Prize winning poet and poetry editor of the New Yorker, came to visit the weekly class I teach at a prison here in New Jersey.
The classroom is in the basement of the prison. Bright primary-colored squares on the floor tiles, and pale blue walls strive for a cheerful atmosphere, but the bars on the windows and the presence of large armed men just down the hall make it clear where we are. Now and again the PA systems squawks out orders for inmates to report to this place or that, calling the men to class, to work, to the administrator’s office…
What Can’t Be Taught
December 1, 2010 by 4 Comments
"The Writing Class" by Izhar Cohen
Being a writer, I write, but I also teach creative writing. I teach a workshop once a month in a lovely bright room in a cafe in Princeton, New Jersey; and I teach once a week in a dim, goatish-smelling, basement cubbyhole in a prison in Bordentown, New Jersey. Except for the setting, and perhaps the level of self-confidence in the students, there’s very little difference between the two classes. Both are filled with people who want to make sense of their lives through the written word, who hope they have something worthwhile both to say and to discover, and who hope to have readers.
A City of Crumpled Paper
September 17, 2010 by 10 Comments
During my prison writing class this week, one of my students approached me and said he wanted to talk. Like all the men, he wears khaki scrubs and enormous khaki lace-up hiking boots (which seems a rather cruel joke). Like most of the men, he towers above me. I always forget how short I am until the end of class when they unravel themselves from those tiny desks. This particular student is thoughtful and cheerful and shows talent. The week before he had shown me the first few pages of a story he’s writing about a young girl struggling to find a better life. Last month he shared the first part of a memoir he’s writing.
Antidote to arrogance
August 20, 2010 by 6 Comments
Once a week, I teach creative writing in a correctional facility for men. We meet in a classroom on the lower floor of the prison, which one gets to by negotiating the usual labyrinth of corridors, past armed ‘threshold guardians’ of various sorts, descending flights of stairs going down, down, down, and a number of clanging gates. The classroom has a noisy window air conditioner – a GREAT luxury in this place — a clutter of locked cabinets and battered chairs with built-in writing shelves that look far too small for many of the big-footed, hulking men who must fit into them. (I always forget how SHORT I am, until the end of the class and they all stand up!)
