Shame, Punishment, and the Creative Writing Workshop

It was close to dark when I arrived at the Juvenile Detention Center. I had been teaching creative writing workshops there once a week for the last five weeks. That day I drove carefully through the cool gloom, around the rural roads and farm houses to arrive at a facility tucked along the side of an isolated, low-traffic road in rural Northeast Ohio. That day, I prepared a lesson about odes.

C wrote a poem celebrating the bible he began to read. He waved me over to ask about the title. On his paper, he wrote “Ode to Jail.”

He asked if I liked it. “It’s really powerful,” I said, beginning to explain the surprise of it, how jail isn’t something we typically celebrate, how his poem isn’t really celebrating it, but rather explaining the pain of it, how that subversion would trouble the reader, trouble the poem that follows.

“So it’s good?” he asked again. He didn’t want my poetic waxing, he wanted my approval, a nod that he was on track.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s good.”

He came up with it independently, but he modeled it after the poem I introduced, “Ode to Joy,” by a local writer. I explained that “ode” often meant “in praise of” or “in celebration of,” but I was never sure the residents could hear me, were listening.

Writers in Residence, the organization for which I worked as a Teaching Artist, refers to the incarcerated youth of JDCs as “residents.” The word seeks to remove connotations from the kids’ identities, focusing on their status as living in a certain place rather than being imprisoned in a certain place. Other language used includes “justice-involved” or the person-forward “youth who are incarcerated.”

After the writing workshop each week, the residents enjoyed a snack and chat with the student volunteers from Hiram College who sat with them during each workshop. I was the Teaching Artist, which made me an authority in the room, the teacher whose directions everyone followed. I worked with the residents individually as much as possible, peering over their shoulders while they were writing, asking questions, stepping in when they were stuck. During snack time, though, I let the residents enjoy social time with the volunteers. They sometimes talked about the organization’s Reentry and Mentorship program. Sometimes they’d talk about college, the world outside. Chatting and snacking. Asking questions of kids not much older than themselves. I stood in the back of the room and listened without interrupting.

When C wrote “Ode to Jail,” I doubted he was thinking about the history of odes, the complexities they might hold. I’m not sure he understood that “Ode to Jail” could be read as “Celebration of Jail,” or “Direct Address of Jail,” and could invite the reader to consider the “you” the speaker spoke of as Jail itself, not the bible C told me about, the bible that was beginning to help him find clarity, or at least pass the time. But he was proud of his poem. Proud enough that he read it to me, to his table, and to the whole room.

C wanted to keep talking about the bible he began to read. He spoke with seriousness and intensity. Even when he was writing silly, playful poems, he demanded attention, his tone deliberate and commanding, each word, each syllable, each rhyme. In my individual conversations with him, if he thought I was misunderstanding him, he would look at me, brow furrowed, lips slightly pouted, and say, simply, “No.”

When he addressed his table, fingers covered in Cheeto dust, to tell them the story of Adam and Eve, he did so with the fervor of a priest. He spoke in his slow and careful way, eyes locking back and forth between his tablemates to be sure he had everyone’s attention.

Some things he misremembered, had to correct. He said God made Eve first, then remembered it was Adam. God made them both with free will, and they didn’t wear clothes, and the only rule was to never eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.

Important in teaching is watching. Being witness to. Offering up and stepping back. I bring the tools, the structure, the foundation. I say, “Here is a poem that might be different from what you think a poem is. How does it speak to you?” The participants talk about the poem as it talks to us. What’s familiar? What’s relatable? What is surprising or confusing? What jogs a memory? What kicks the cobwebs out of you? What leaps?

One week, I brought in Chen Chen’s poem “When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities.” To introduce the poem, I asked the residents what they wanted to be when they grew up. Answers included voice actor, construction worker, and athlete. When they wrote on their own, though, they didn’t write about voice acting or football. A wrote about an imagined life partner. D wrote about the pain of love. L wrote about wanting to be true to herself, but to be normal and without pain. What they wanted, each one of them, was to be loved.

The one rule God gave Adam and Eve was simple. But Eve couldn’t listen, C explained to the table, as though none of them had ever heard this story before. As though once they heard it, everything might click. Everything might join together and fall into its correct order.

I often talk about teaching poetry as providing tools. As a teaching artist, I travel independently to a variety of sites working with people of different demographics to generate poetry or expressive writing responses to a model text or idea. I don’t teach craft, per se, though it often comes up. I don’t teach vocabulary terms, though they often come up. I don’t teach literary history, though it often comes up. A colleague who has taught in an adult mental health support group for nearly six years has pointed out that his regular workshop participants would have completed an MFA by now. The context or rigor of a writing lesson isn’t its inherent value.

In JDCs, the tool of writing is invaluable. The residents are controlled every minute of every day. They can be punished for any small infraction, or anything the correction officers perceive as infraction. They are intentionally isolated from the outside world, and often intentionally isolated from each other. The realities they face are purposefully clouded from the general public. Though many on the outside might have a general sense of what goes on in a JDC, few truly know.

The tool of poetry then has multiple uses. Notably, to share information. No one will know what life in a JDC looks like unless they experience it themselves, or unless someone who has experienced that life shares it. Writing of any kind can spread this information, though poetry can hold the tension and emotional weight that might accompany the telling of this reality. Writers in Residence produces chapbooks at the end of each program session (usually 10-12 weeks of writing) that include the work of the residents, as well as information about incarceration in the state of Ohio.

Another function of the tool of poetry is to process or heal. The residents I worked with often shared traumatic experiences they survived. Some experienced mental illness. Those without trauma or mental illness still struggle under the conditions of supervision and isolation inherent in being incarcerated. The healing benefits of writing have long been discussed and understood. It’s often easier to write something than it is to speak it. Even easier when it stays private, when it’s a reflection of the self only for the self to see. Writers in Residence seeks to capture the healing benefit of poetry by aksing the residents to complete a pre- and post-workshop survey indicating their mental state before and after writing. The post-workshop surveys tend to show a trend of improved mental wellbeing after the workshop.

I want to believe that poetry and expressive writing can also reclaim agency. In a space where the residents are monitored, surveilled, ordered, tracked, and trapped, little freedom exists. The point is they are not free.

At a different facility, where I briefly taught through a different organization, A wrote about her experiences of being incarcerated:

They say stay calm and have hope but it slowly sounds like a joke.
The joke is this place is slowly starting to feel like home.
They use their power against us but they’re supposedly here to help.
They got our whole life in the palms of their hands and it’s starting to fold.

What happens when a life stops belonging to the person living it?

C explained that when Eve ate the apple—she couldn’t help herself—she realized that she was naked. She and Adam were embarrassed. For the first time, God’s creatures felt shame.

Snack time was almost over, and the corrections officers began walking around the room with a trash can. C was talking so much he had to rush to finish his cheetos. He tilted the bag over his mouth so the last of the crumbs filled his cheeks.

Sometimes I asked the residents how it felt for them to write their poems. Especially if the content felt emotionally charged, like it came from somewhere beyond the walls of the activity room, the walls of the model poem and prompt. They usually said “I don’t know,” or “Good”—maybe the answer they felt comfortable putting into the room, or the only answer they could register at the time of my asking. I asked them because I wanted them to think about the writing. Did they access something new? Did they discover something? Was the discovery beneficial? Was it harmful?

Writing helps me iron out the wrinkles of my memory. I can wade through a troubling realization, a loss, a gain, a pain, using lines and stanzas and voltas and metaphor. But I have accidentally retraumatized myself in writing what I was not ready to write. I have found myself dwelling in distressing waters for too long trying to dive for the appropriate image. It can be easy to end up there, flailing arms and kicking legs, the water overwhelming. And no matter what, when our hour ends, the residents return to their blocks without us, without pens and paper. If we lead them out to water, we risk leading them to drown.

Was my responsibility to explain to C that maybe “Ode to Jail” wasn’t what he meant? To recommend “Ode to the Bible” or “Anti-Ode to Jail?” Should I have interrupted the sermon, aksed C how he felt about that shame, that disobedience, if he saw himself in that story, if he saw himself turning his back to it?

For ten weeks, I taught a rotating group of children who were incarcerated. I called them “residents” so we could see, together, identities not defined by criminality. But I also wondered who else that language served. Once, at the second facility where I taught, I asked the residents what made a place feel welcoming to them. G asked me, smartly, if I felt welcome there, in that room, with them. No one is meant to feel welcome in prison.

Calling them residents over and over, to myself, to the people who will never see inside a Juvenile Detention Center, to the student volunteers, allowed me to distance myself from their experiences. “Residents” implying choice. “Residents” of an apartment complex. Of a dorm. Of a village, a community. While the language empowers the youth to see beyond the way systems see them, I wonder if it empowers those adjacent to (me) and complicit in the systems to get comfortable, kick up our legs, relax into the life where kids can be separated from the outside world for indefinite periods of time.

That week’s session was the last I interacted closely with C. He was gone two weeks later. When I left that night, it was not quite snowing, but it felt like it could. And if it did, every kid I left in the facility behind me would miss the first snowfall of the year. Mostly, I was sad for myself. None of them ever told me missing the first snowfall would be something that made them sad. I imagined it, inferred it. Thought kids ought to enjoy that sort of thing, be present for it.

A job of teaching is to become a mirror. I brought tools lent to me by others, and I could not dictate the best way for each resident to use them. Or if they should use them at all. That would have to be for them to discover. When L wrote about her mom’s death, when R puzzled over what he could ask future generations, when J refused over and over again to share anything he wrote, though he always wrote, I was there to affirm. To say yes, you’re on track, if it feels right, keep going. I asked questions and offered possibilities, other avenues for their writing, other ways of coming at it.

C got out, and maybe never finished reading the bible. He may never write another poem. He may end up back in the facility, as his recent time there was not his first, and recidivism is high when there’s no focus on rehabilitation, no support for reformation, no mechanism (generally) for the conditions on the outside to change when the resident is released. But once a week, for a few weeks, he wrote with his fellow residents, about things that comforted him, about loved ones he’d lost, about his favorite foods and songs and planets. And everyone produced something that had nothing to do with what we called them or where they were. Or, had everything to do with that. And maybe it was a light. A feeling like snow in October. A feeling like an alternative is possible. A bite of fruit that is just a bite of fruit.

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Carrie George is a poet and teacher living in Akron, OH. She is coeditor of Light Enters the Grove: Exploring Cuyahoga Valley National Park Through Poetry (Kent State University Press, 2024) and her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere.