True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall

"Mark Salzman is also a novelist. He stumbles into offering a writing workshop at a juvenile detention center in California for kids who were in gangs, many of them with very serious charges. He comes in in much the same way Wally Lamb does. Wally Lamb was not looking to do a writing workshop. Ge was invited to come in and he reluctantly said, ‘Ok, I’ll do it this one time’ and then he kind of fell in love with the process. It was the same thing with Salzman. He was going in because a friend invited him and he thinks he could use it as research for his next novel. He enjoys it and comes again and then, the second or third time he visits, a very charismatic nun, who organizes all the volunteers, says, ‘When would you like your class to start? I think Thursday would be good. You can work with these boys. They’ll love you.’ And before he can say no, she’s set it up. He tells his class, ‘I’ll give you a topic if you want me to. But really I just want you to write and express yourself. Then we’re going to share what your wrote about and analyze it.’ So that’s what they do. And he’s pulled into these incredible paradoxes. You can teach somebody to gain insight into how they really ought to be living and how they really fell short of that when they were in a gang. But they’re in prison now. Now they have this new insight—that you should trust people, for example—you’re surrounded by guards who don’t encourage you and by prisoners who are trying to steal stuff from you. So how do you put into practice what you’ve learned? The boys all go through their own journeys of developing insights like that and Salzman also has to wrestle with his own. He calls the book True Notebooks , because he always keeps a notebook where you’re supposed to tell the truth. That’s what he teaches the boys, that if you write it and believe it, it can be your truth. What do you do with truth when you’re stuck with injustice? It really opens up important questions. It’s worth it to struggle to find the truth. In one of the scenes at the end, the question of why it matters comes up. Salzman gets a letter from one of the boys, one of his favourite students, Kevin, who is now old enough and has been sent to an adult prison. It’s a simple card saying, ‘I miss you, friend.’ It’s very moving. Salzman is an amateur astronomer. He had shared that he likes watching stars with the boys in one of the classes and Kevin writes this poem to him. Mark wants to know where he’s going to go, whether he’s going to be alright and Kevin explains to him what his new life is like, in this new prison. And he thanks him for being his teacher. In the very last line,he says, ‘I’ll always look up to the sky and see you, my North Star.’ I’m getting teary just thinking about it. It’s very understated that book. It’s very subtle, but it’s very emotional. This is the story of filial love, between two men, cutting across the injustice of a system designed by other men to prevent growth through love. To kill it. Prison kills love. It’s horrible. I hate prison. I try not to think too much about what I hate, because I want to save energy to love. And that’s what he’s doing. He sees all the injustices the boys are going through. He’s very clear that they perpetuated injustices when they killed people. There’s plenty of blame to go around. But blaming doesn’t solve anything. “There are a lot of ways you can get involved and there’s a lot of ways that the literature can inspire you to do it.” What are you going to do now? Are you going to let somebody languish? Where’s the humanity? You get stuck in this loop. They killed somebody so they don’t deserve any humanity. Well, you know what? I disagree. If everybody is defined by the one worst thing they ever did, nobody would have the chance to grow. It’s impossibly dark and stupidly negative, to lock people into one scene in their life. But that’s what mass incarceration has done. Hundreds of thousands of people are locked in a hopeless cycle. Maybe 10 years ago you sold a lot of marijuana to someone and because of the war on drugs you get to sit and do next to nothing in a prison. I met a guy at our jail last year who is doing 5 years for barely 5 ounces of crack. You could hold it in your hand! But it’s five years of his life. There’s no rationality to this. Love—in the civil rights, Fanny Lou Hamer/Septima Clark/Martin Luther King sense—is rational. It’s a response to the injustices you see in the world. When you see an injustice, you don’t make it worse by ignoring it. You go in there and you try to correct it. The movement to mass incarcerate some of our most vulnerable, struggling citizens is a loveless, cruel and irrational movement. It’s truly thoughtless and nobody has to claim responsibility for it. That’s the evil genius of it. It’s starting to shift a little bit now, but we locked ourselves into a loveless, cruel way of imagining justice. There are a lot of reasons. One is that when you open yourself up to someone’s story—anybody’s story, but especially somebody who has been through a horrific experience, a Shaka Senghor, for example, who has been through a difficult childhood, a violent life as a young man and structural poverty, racism and the violence of the crack wars—when you see them overcoming it all, through the most heroic methods (what Senghor calls ‘atonement’) it’s inspiring. Why wouldn’t you want to be inspired? Why would you keep reading prison writing? To become more aware of the many ways in which the people who come into the prisons are the same people that we have always known. Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Chicano: we’ve all known Latinos in America. We’ve known African Americans like Shaka Senghor. We’ve known Muslims like Malcolm X, we’ve known women like Barbara Parsons Lane (who won the PEN award in Wally Lamb’s book): women who have been abused and suffered through addiction. We’ve known these men and women in our lives. Most times we care about them. If it’s our neighbour, for example, who is being physically abused by her husband, we become concerned about our neighbour. We have a harder time becoming concerned about somebody whose life we’ve never known because they live in a different city or they’re a different race. How do we become more compassionate? How do we develop the incentive to care about the neighbour that we don’t know? “The movement to mass incarcerate some of our most vulnerable, struggling citizens is a loveless, cruel and irrational movement. It’s truly thoughtless and nobody has to claim responsibility for it. That’s the evil genius of it” Why do you read? I read so I can learn. Some people just want to hear what they already know affirmed. I read to learn, I want to know about the lives of people that I’ve never heard about before and I want to see if there’s a way that we can imagine a better life for everybody. I don’t like seeing Chicanos like young Jimmy discriminated against, because he was. I don’t like knowing that he couldn’t succeed in school, that he didn’t have a family that knew English that could support him, that he was beaten too much to feel confident. That even when he had opportunities to have father figures and mentors (because his own father was never around in a consistently positive way) that Jimmy could not accept the love of his white teacher, who tried to help him. I need to know that. I think we all need to know that. I think we all need to have some empathy that the young Chicano who seems to be cutting up in school and has now joined a gang is facing pressures that you don’t have to face, and you should care about what he’s facing. You should care because if you don’t care, it’s going to get worse for everybody. Some people think you’re on your own, you’re raised by your bootstraps or not at all, you sink or swim, it’s all on the individual. We have a culture of individualism in America. We used to have more of a culture of collective responsibility but it sort of died in the 1970s. You go back and you read your Malcolm X or your Assata Shakur and you remember the Black Liberation Army or the Black Panthers, and you realize there was a time when we dared to think that the community could face up, that we didn’t have to incarcerate our way out of our social problems. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter We’ve lost a great deal of that. We’ve ceded that territory. The state has given up its responsibility and we’ve allowed corporations to come in there. So the corporations do the work programmes that exploit prison labour. The private, evangelical, corporate churches come in and do the education ministry. But where are the rest of us, who don’t necessarily believe capitalism is an unfettered good? Or that evangelical Christianity is the only way? Where is higher education? Where are the progressive churches? Where are the citizens? They’re all there, just not to the extent that they could be. If you’re in any of those categories you can read prison literature and realize that they need me! I can contribute! If I don’t go volunteer, I can work with a group on the outside that does. I can contribute to their cause. If I’m more of a political activist and want to do legislative reform I can get involved in trying to change the laws so that we don’t send so many people to prison. So there are a lot of ways you can get involved and there’s a lot of ways that the literature can inspire you to do it. People should become more curious about what they don’t know and see if they can become part of the solution."