Michigan Quarterly Review reader Caroline New introduces “The Table” from MQR’s Fall 2021 Issue. You can purchase the issue here.
“The Table” offers us testimonies of Writer’s Block, a writing group for presently and formerly incarcerated people. From a bird’s-eye view, this essay reminds us of the inhumanities of our “justice” system, where goals of healing must be carved, with effort, from the punitive structure of prison. But stepping closer, this essay takes that bird’s-eye view and drops its soft feathers in your palms. As readers, we are left with this vulnerable creature to tend.
These writers make us reckon with the uncomfortable question: What does writing look like when the choice to include anger, grief, laughter, and anxiety in our poems is no longer a choice, but a necessity? They turn our attention away from the technical formulations of craft that writers absorb and regurgitate, perhaps unwittingly, for the sake of approval, leaving us to gouge uncomfortably into how writing makes us human. Reading this, I was reminded of how humans have been using written language for over 5,000 years to grieve, rejoice, and connect, but also of the writing attitudes that so often shroud those aims today.
These authors present Writer’s Block as a rare chance to define one’s own rules and shirk some of the unspoken restrictions of the insular prison culture. But despite this, Writer’s Block is not a place of restriction. The writers adhere only to their own guidelines: to express freely and challenge each other toward vulnerability. Through this community, they hold each other to humanity in a place that works so hard to strip them of it.
For me, the most poignant moment comes when Palm asks: What happens when your safe workshop space is shared by those on the other side of that pain? As she writes about grieving her loved ones amongst others who have taken life, Palm forces us into such a depth of empathy, facing us with the unsettling acknowledgement that death binds us all, no matter the role we play in its enactment.
This reckoning with empathy gives this essay its pulse. After reading this, I was awed, humbled, and reminded of the inevitability of compassion we must maintain as writers.
The Table
This piece should have been written around “the table”—the massive, faux-hardwood centerpiece of the small, neon-lit conference room at Macomb Correctional Facility, outside Detroit, where the Writer’s Block poetry workshop has been meeting every Wednesday evening for the last eleven years. We take the same seats each week, sometimes making space for a prospective new member, sometimes freezing one out (there is deep knowledge about who comes with good intentions and who doesn’t). But our last meeting was February 19, 2020. For two weeks after this, we were informed by prison officials that all volunteer activities were cancelled due to a flu outbreak. There has been no communication since. In accordance with prison rules about volunteers, the outside and inside members of the group have been permitted no contact with one another during this year-and-counting hiatus. While it manifests much differently depending on which side of the razor wire you are on, each of us has felt, acutely, the absence of our two hours together each week.
Our workshop doesn’t have many rules—there are more than enough of those outside the conference room walls—but we are bound by three cardinal ones: everyone brings in a new poem every week, stand up when you read, and no disclaimers. To read without disclaimers is to move toward a life without disclaimers, a powerful prospect no matter your past actions or current conditions. We have had the deepest sorrow around the table (there is so little room for grieving in prison). And anger (in our poems and, at times, with one another). Anxiety beyond measure (several in the group are juvenile lifers awaiting resentencing in a state that has been woefully slow to heed a Supreme Court order mandating this). And, what surprises people most when they read or hear our work, laughter. Never is there a workshop without laughter.
“Creative writing is repressed by the system because the system’s strategy is to make sure nothing gets out. Messages get out anyway. Of all the arts in jail, I think creative writing is the most repressed,” observes Tongo Eisen-Martin. Writing, together, disrupts this system and its attempted humiliations. In a place designed to degrade and demoralize, for two hours each week, we are free to express—and experience—emotions forbidden by the codes that dictate life outside our small room. We are free to be fully human.
People have this idea of prison that it’s this depressing, laughless, lifeless hell. That is their go-to stereotype, so when they hear something that doesn’t fit that mold, it’s shocking to them. They don’t know that humans need to laugh, even if the laughter is the cruelest laughter in the world—bullying and pulling the wings off of flies cruel—but that doesn’t mean that laughter doesn’t exist there. But there is an artifice to everything we do until we find ourselves in a space where it has been explicitly said that we are going to be genuine. That’s why several of us have problems with guys who dip in and out of the group, because it feels like they aren’t being genuine with us.
For me, Writer’s Block was therapy. I got out all of the angst and rage and all the weird thoughts. I have stuff I’ve written that I’ve never shown anybody. I’ve got stuff I’ve written that I’ve shown all types of people. I’ve got stuff I’ve written that I’ve shown only one or two people. Now that I’m out, I’m not writing as much, and I feel different. It’s taken me a while to realize that it’s the lack of writing that’s been bothering me. Writer’s Block gave me a refuge. It gave me people who understood a piece of me that other people didn’t understand. I used to write and rant. That was because I had to get that energy out. I’m trying to learn how to write to people that I care about. I’ve written a couple pointed emails since I’ve been home, because I understand what writing does. Writing forces you to stop. It forces one to stop and focus on that which has been written.
—Kyle Daniel-Bey
When I arrived at Writer’s Block three years ago, my father had just died. My mother had died four years before that. That I would grieve in that room was a given. That I grieved among men who have taken the lives of others is unremarkable—there is no one at that table who does not understand loss profoundly. But I am always cognizant of, if not stricken by, the knowledge that the time and space I’ve had to grieve (confined as it may be by a society that cannot handle grief and would be so much more humane if it could) is mine alone. I was with my father for the two days and nights he lay unconscious in a hospital room. I was lying next to my mother when she took her last breath. There are men in Writer’s Block who could not attend the funerals of their parents or siblings because it was cost-prohibitive or because their release date had not yet been set by the parole board or because they had not served at least fifteen calendar years with good institutional adjustment. There are men who followed the last days of loved ones over payphones and via JPay messages. There are men whose family members were murdered. All of them are grieving. The table is where we make space for this.
—Kristin Palm
When I joined Writer’s Block, I was coming up on the end of my incarceration. I had a lot of emotions and feelings. I think that was some of my best writing. I had so much going on in my mind. Being a part of the group meant everything. When you’re incarcerated, you have certain guys that you bond with, but very rarely are you sitting down, bonding with guys over poetry or writing. Not a lot of guys are willing to be vulnerable like that. For tough guys to decide to come in there and be vulnerable—and for me to be vulnerable—in a place where you’re not always able to be that, it was definitely a release from the everyday life of incarceration. Also, the community of writers was critical. Everybody’s writing style is different, and we were always challenging or pushing each other.
I wrote a poem in response to the prompt “Absent but Present” about the only woman besides my mother who I ever loved in my life. She died of cancer. I learned about it from a mutual friend. I had to bring that poem in to the workshop. If I hadn’t, I would have felt like I was cheating everyone. When I wrote it, I couldn’t make it through it without crying, so I knew that, when it came out, it was real and I just had to share it. I couldn’t have taken that poem anywhere else. I couldn’t take it to the yard or to the day room. If I hadn’t had that space for it, nobody would have ever gotten to hear that poem.
—Kenneth Tello
I don’t want to admit that Writer’s Block was instrumental in my early sobriety. I don’t want to admit I have a sobriety at all. I want to tell you that I like a beer with dinner, as opposed to liking all of them and then all of the rest of everything else. And you, the reader, would never know this about me if I chose not to tell you. I hate talking about it. I don’t want to write about it now.
I know eight men who contain similar multitudes and complexities. Eight men who, like everyone else breathing, have wrought both great beauty and great terror in their time here. The difference between my circumstances and theirs is that they live without the luxury of choosing what parts of their story to show to the world. It’s easy to punch their names into a computer database and learn the parts of their stories that the state (often erroneously but, most importantly, always unjustly) has decided are the most important. Thus, until every single one of them is home, the least I can do is help pass it along when they write stories the way they want it told. The whole story, as one of our weekly writing prompts put it.
A year ago, attending a Restorative Justice graduation at the prison, I shook in the face of the permanent debt I felt I had incurred at that long table in the Education Building. In hindsight, I trembled before the realization that the debt predates my physical form and consciousness by centuries, and will never be paid back. In the face of such futility, one which I papered over with poisons for years, I’ve realized I can only live an honest and meaningful life if I try anyway. In many ways, I started trying when I sat down at that long table. September 2019, then, isn’t when I started to incur a debt. It’s when I started to pay.
—Walter Lucken IV
To read more from “Why We Right,” you can purchase the issue here.
