Untold stories

Untold stories. There are so many of them.

I started coming into Oregon State Penitentiary almost four years ago with the idea of starting a writers group for men serving life sentences. Behind bars, encircled by 30-foot high concrete walls, the men who joined the writers’ group (like the other 2.3 million men and women currently in U.S. prisons and jails) were living lives few of us knew anything about. I wanted to give them the tools (but more important, the encouragement, the opportunity) to write about those lives. I wanted them to consider the idea that they were the authors of their lives. That meant, even behind bars, even living these severely constricted lives, they had power over the narrative. They did not have physical freedom. But, at least for two and a half hours twice a month, they had freedom of expression.

I’ve written about the group, what the men taught me about their lives and how it changed me, in A Grip of Time: When prison is your life. The men have developed into powerful storytellers. Four of them have won highly competitive Pen America Prison Writing Contest awards (in 2018 and 2019). Several of them have been published by the Marshall Project. One of them became the first inmate ever to be awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship.

The writers’ group continues. The stories continue. I wanted to create a public space to share some of the small ones. Most are the products of the 10-minute prompts that begin each writers’ group session. So, after many months of planning, yeoman-like volunteer efforts by artist/designer Liza Burns and man-of-many-parts Brian Burk, I am launching TRUTH TO POWER.  The site will feature short essays and even shorter stories written by the men in the writers’ group. I hope their words offer a window–many windows–into this hidden world and the people who live there. Sometimes for their entire lives.