August 14th — How did that happen? It seems like just yesterday I was planning my trip to New Jersey to attend a family wedding and heading up to the Catskills for a reunion with my book club of 30+ years. I missed my July blog completely and now I’m wondering how to get in all the summer delights like baseball games and pool time in the few remaining weeks of summer.
Yesterday I stopped mid-chapter 41 of Book 2 in my Holly and Ivy mystery series and was eager to get back to it this morning, but in addition to planning summer pleasures, I’ve got this growing list of things to do, and at the top of the list for days has been a note to post an announcement about the wonderfully inspiring speakers, Anna Katherine Freeland and Carole Gallagher, who presented at our Sisters in Crime local chapter on August 3rd. Then I remembered I’d previously written a blog about The Writers Block, a workshop these two women facilitate at Perry Correctional Institute, a maximum security detention facility here in South Carolina. I decided I had to sit right down and get this blog out to the world.
Every Tuesday Anna Katherine Freeland and Carole Gallagher drive to Perry and work with a group of men who are part of the prisoners Character Based Unit, a program initiated by prisoners and “composed of men who have indicated a desire to make changes in their lives, even if they will spend the rest of their lives there.” The two women co-facilitate a weekly writing workshop where the men write in response to writing prompts, and the entire group participates in reading and discussing each piece, offering constructive critiques, starting with the strengths of the pieces they share.
Available at: www.thewritersblockproject.org.
The Writers Block has published Didn’t See It Coming, an anthology of their work. Reading their words, I find it just a little heart-crushing on this cloudy morning thinking that perhaps if these men had such inspiring teachers as Anna Katherine and Carole when they were in school to help them articulate in writing their universal feelings of anger, frustration and despair, they might not have committed the crimes they did.
The fact that these men now write to express their deepest feelings is quite moving. The fact that they do it so well is downright awesome. Learning that the men in The Writers Block write with a limited library, no internet access, no computers, with pen and paper, I am ashamed of my all-too-often, self-indulgent complaints and excuses for procrastinating when I know I should be writing.
In a blog I wrote last October, I was voicing the lamentations of a writer riddled with self-doubts, “wringing my hands, feeling like a fraud and a failure, wondering what in the world makes me think I can write.” That’s when I read the poem below written by Arimatia Buggs, a member of The Writers Block, in response to the writing prompt: “I write because”.
I write because I must
I write to release
To bring inner peace
To make sense of confusion
To focus life’s kaleidoscopic illusion
To mend the souls of those broken kindred spirits
Who feel what I feel and see what I see
But never penned the words so it was left up to me
I write because I must
I write because of peace, love, joy and pain
Stress, hurt and strain
I write to appreciate
I write to innovate
I write to reveal
What I see, know and feel
To cry and to vent
To forgive and relent
To reminisce of time spent
I write because I must
I write to breathe
I write because I believe
You can achieve everlasting life when you write
Living forever on a page
Then reincarnated–through reading–through windows of
The soul to stand again upon life’s stage
I write because I realize I am who I am because of words.
Words that moved me, taught me, grew me
Made me into the man that I am
I write because I must.
Inspiring words, indeed. To get a copy of Didn’t See it Coming (only $15), to donate to the project, or to learn more about The Writers Block, visit www.thewritersblockproject.org.