I’ll be honest, when I first encountered a group of large, tattooed men at Oregon State Penitentiary, I was intimidated. Certainly I was responding to the very scale of people physically larger than me. More so, I was uncertain how to read these people behind their masks. I would remind myself: You were a baby in someone’s arms. And then, stick out my hand and say hello. Tattoos, hair styles, even the recognizable swagger operate in important ways. In a sea of uniforms, they tell a personal story of place and cultural identification. The mask like any armor (power suit in business culture, say) broadcast a signal to the world: I am somebody and I have a story to tell. Those stories are why we are here. In the spirit of seeing beyond the mask, we have gathered baby stories.
This fall, we met KV Fisher on the yard at Powder River Correctional Facility in Baker City. He had recently transferred from Oregon State Pen. PRCI is a final stop before folks release. The institution has involved programming to help prepare people for life outside, which means that it is difficult for us to run a regular writing program onsite. The staff is fantastic there, so we visit and Danny plays a show. I’ll recruit writing person by person on the yard. KV meditates on the space before our flesh meets the world in his piece, Into My Mortal Form:
Floating. Slosh and shuffle. Sounds muted by the walls of the Universe interact with this new sense of self. Fire through flesh and matter. The kinetic proliferation of electricity tells my cells to Become.
MDKS writes from Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton. Hello World was written for his daughter:
People pray to the skies above,
For their family, friends, and those they love.
Say hello to the world my dear,
And all the things we have here.
Jeremiah Walford comes to us from Snake River Correctional Institution in Ontario and looks forward to rejoining his very large family in a few months. Writing doesn’t come easily to him, so he worked hard on his poem Family as he does with his parenting:
No matter how much of the positives
or the negatives you put into your
self or your child, independence and individuality
cannot be controlled by someone else.
Chris Gonzales writes from Deer Ridge Correctional Institution in Madras. He submitted Bittersweet at the beginning of the year and we have been holding for the proper pairing. Chris shares his son’s birth story: Watching the birth of my son was unlike anything I had ever experienced in my life. I was relieved that it was finally over and was becoming increasingly overwhelmed with emotion as the reality of the situation was sinking in. There wasn't a time in my life that even remotely matched the feelings I was experiencing in this moment. When I held L for the first time, I couldn't help but to consider how my life had suddenly and instantaneously changed. I was so excited and proud to be a father yet absolutely terrified of what I didn't know.
A friend recommended Songs from the Hole, a hybrid documentary that combines an autobiographical visual album by musician JJ’88, with film making written and directed by Contessa Gayles. The film has made the independent film circuit and is currently showing on Netflix, read about it in Rolling Stone. Visually compelling sequences are woven together with recorded interviews with his family as they negotiate the California carceral system. JJ’88 (James Jacobs) fell at fifteen years old. He narrates much of the film from recorded phone calls made inside. While we come to know our writers and hear about their family struggles, we do not know their people at home. The documentary fills in the blanks as we watch his parents negotiate the loss of two sons to street violence and the great pain of parenting a child in prison. His father William speaks about the long walk home, a path well-trodden by our writers.