To write. To read. In prison.

The white board at last week’s BookExpo convention was a jumble of post-its, each with the scribbled name of a book, each an answer to the question: What book changed your life? I stood there for a long time reading the titles, delighted at the diversity, the scope, the quirkiness. (The Bible, Handmaid’s Tale, Winnie the Poo, To Kill a Mockingbird)

And I thought about the men at Oregon State Penitentiary in the writing group I’ve been running for going on four years. Behind bars, their access to books, books that could change their lives, is extraordinarily limited.

How limited? Have you read the recent coverage of book banning in prison? More than 120 books — ranging from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (okay, I get that) to a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Attica prison uprisings (and including books on how to make ramen noodles, tattooing, witchcraft) — are on a list of books banned from New Hampshire prisons, according to a prison human rights group.

Outright banning is one way to block access to books in prison. Another is to underfund and undervalue prison libraries. Budgets for buying books can range from nonexistent to skimpy. Yet another is to make it difficult (or impossible) for people to donate books to a prison library.

When I first started coming into OSP to work with Lifers who wanted to write, I had the opportunity to peruse the prison library and saw what was available to them: The shelves were lined with alcohol and drug recovery self-help books, religious tracks, pot-boiler mysteries, Zane Grey-era westerns and not much else.

These men were potential writers of narrative nonfiction. I wanted them to read great narrative nonfiction. I didn’t see any on the shelves. With permission, I started bringing in books from my own home library supplemented by used books from local bookstores.

Three years later, our Lifers Writers “library” (a cabinet made in the prison’s furniture shop) includes work by Alex Kotlowitz and Bryan Stephenson, Joan Didion and Katherine Boo, Anne Lamott, John McPhee, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Gay Talese, Jane Kramer, Tom Wicker (yes, the original Attica book), Mary Roach, Tony Horowitz (RIP), James Baldwin, Steve Lopez, William Least Heat Moon—and close to 75 others. They’ve read Evicted, Hillbilly Elegy, The Geography of Bliss, even my coming-of-(middle)-age ballet book, Raising the Barre.

They read. They love to read. Books open the world to them. Reading is helping to make them into the fine writers they are becoming. What book title would they scribble on a post-it? Stay tuned. I’m going to ask them at our next session.

(For me, the book was The Yearling. It was the first book that made me forget who I was and where I was. It transported me. It was the book that made me want to be a writer.)

Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days,
will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage,
and the possibility of meaningfulness,
and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries,
so we may feel again their majesty and power?”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life