CAUGHT

BY TRACY SCHLAPP

We ask our workshop participants to listen closely to one another as they read from their free write exercises. When we share the passages, we ask listeners to jot down words or phrases that catch their ears. After a person reads, I jump up to the white board to collect that language as the group shouts out — it can get fairly … uhm, enthusiastic. This process of moving from the intimate, private world of a journal to seeing those ideas scrawled across the board, jumbled together with other ideas around the same topic works to shake things up in the room. The energy changes from the quiet to the collective. This is where we find shared experience, build understanding, and strengthen our empathetic muscles. The white board attempts to corral our shared vocabulary and prepare us for the next piece of writing.

In April 2024, Melissa Black collected a list from our white board and reformed these ingredients into her poem Embracing Nature:
If only you can see the beauty
In the flood.
The ripples and all the things of change.
Language woven like a “Navajo blanket that cover our earth” captures a moment on a Saturday morning in the medium side of Coffee Creek. We conjure beauty and connection with nature in our classroom during our short two hours together. All the while, we understand that the women will need to hurry back to their units to be counted and celled.

From Deer Ridge in Madras, Oregon, Tom Deer’s Caught imagines the blue and gold flash of wings, the warning of mother, feelings and songs and the call of a wild heart. I think of the landscape flashing past me as we travel through the Eastern Oregon landscape. This week, I saw fleeting images of mountain goats around mile marker 117 and a convocation of eight bald eagles perched in a leafless tree along the Columbia River. These pictures live in my imagination alone, I was not quick enough to capture them with my camera. Tom writes:
Well please come back, oh, please do. Because — I admit —
you are caught … yet free to go.

From Oregon State Penitentiary, Jai’s Phobic. Bee-ing reads like boots stepping through the thick, sticky mud of a bog. He describes the physicality of living trapped in the ever-onward agony:
The ever-onward agony in human bee-ing
Great googely moogelies why can't I be free;
of the glut and clamor, the needs and wants
and in considerations, always on call, ever more at
this station, incessant plucking and pruning and
managing of the encroaching weeds, true beauty
and blossoms so few and far between.
Jai’s poem draws deep into a cycle of human dynamics “feeding faces and forming alliances, guarantees that surely they will in no way be leaving.” From his vantage point, there is no escaping the hive.

The white board (above) was collected this week at Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton, Oregon. We wrote about tribal scars — the formative cultural, familial influence that melded baby flesh into the lanky-armed strategies for survival: “win or lose everybody had to fight.” We heard stories of running away, of becoming the man of the house, we heard stories of food scarcity. These men described being caught in the eddy of generational trauma and poverty. We all heard Walter Thomas when he read: “As my grandmother grew blind, I stopped seeing my future.” | TDS