DELIVERING: stories across the walls
DELIVERING: stories across the walls
BUILDING WRITING COMMUNITIES IN OREGON PRISONS
YOU ARE READING AN INVITATION…an experiment…the first whispers of an idea born from meeting with a group of unpublished writers at Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution.
In September 2022, we at Bridgeworks Oregon visited Lakeview, Baker City, and Pendleton to meet with folks inside and outside of prison. We read from Prisons Have A Long Memory, an anthology of poetry, memoir, and essays by men who participate in our writing workshop at Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. Following this tour, some of our recently released writers join us as we presented in Portland to the Multnomah County DA’s office, Oregon Jewish Museum, Willamette University, and even inside Columbia River Correctional Institution. We attended a reading at OSP where our writers represented themselves at the Lakota Oyate-Ki club’s meeting.
The writing of our stories is a process as varied as humans, marked by false steps and erasure as much as it is by flowing ink. How do we know that what we wish to say will ever be received? How is that compounded by incarceration? The EOCI audience arrived with their own stories to tell and voiced the helplessness and frustration of not knowing how to get their writing into the world. The image of a man holding a portfolio of his writing stuck with us as we followed the Columbia River back to Portland.
This newsletter is a proposal: Join us as we create a remote writing communities in prisons across Oregon. The desire to tell stories will fuel the effort. That drive combines with a bit of instruction and organization from Bridgeworks mentors; coordination with Life Skills administrators in each prison facility; the sponsorship of the Lakota Oyate-ki Culture Club at Oregon State Penitentiary and the editorial hub of the Ground Beneath Us writers; and finally this publishing platform. Meet the ponyXpress writing project — an effort to nourish a creative life inside. We welcome your encouragement be way of reading, responding, subscribing, and sharing this work. What might we do together?