ON THE ROAD

BY TRACY SCHLAPP

The PonyXpress was named for a week like this one — one that has us on the road picking up writing and dropping off pieces that have published. We travel to our weekly meeting at OSP in Salem and then head east to Pendleton for our monthly Eastern Oregon Correctional Institute workshop. From there, we drive to the Oregon-Idaho border to establish a new workshop at Snake River Correctional Institution’s minimum facility in Ontario. A few writers in our writing groups have moved to Snake and they have been sending submissions through the prison kyte system to the Lakota Oyate-ki Culture Club at OSP. We are excited to see one of our founding members at Snake and hope that we can cultivate a supportive writing environment in this prison 5.5 hours from Portland.

Correspondence through kytes and the US mail are life-giving communication for prisoners. Phone calls and tablet minutes are expensive and temporal. In the past, we have written about the pleasure of reading and rereading a letter. Of course, face-to-face is the preferred connection. Keep in mind that it comes with a complicated set of logistics whether you live close to the prison or far from it. If you live in the valley and need to visit a loved one at Snake, you have a costly journey — time off from work, travel time, food, lodging, and gas. The economic impact is indisputable. Even visits in town are based on the prison’s schedule which may not correspond with one’s work schedule. Our own project suffers from the difficulty of connection as we need to organize all our workshops with a staff advisor and do not have access to individual prisoners until they arrive to the workshop. This means that all edits and questions are addressed in person.

We have collected pieces that open the window into aspects of these writers’ lives. Here are those details that illuminate the frustrations, the discouragement and strategies, and the hope that they manage to conjure in the face of these obstacles. Walter Thomas at EOCI joined the group with the comfort and confidence that makes it seem like he has always been with us. What Having a Connection Means to the Incarcerated is the collective experience of Walter and his peers. They are talking and explaining, dreaming and singing an EVERlasting song of lost connections.

The chaos of the voices can produce cacophony. In Little and Orange Phillip Luna IV extols the virtue of a go-to solution to keep himself sane:

These hermetic seals must be around
A return to sanity if they’re found
Such a discord of notes, please, no encore
It’s pollution of chords I cannot ignore

From Coffee Creek, Hannah Brophy recognizes that as important as it is to connect, the reverse can also be true. In Prison Is Not Real Life she unpacks the distorted lens of her prison existence. She quits a job that she rather likes, but feels she needs to get away from it. She is aware that she is performing poorly in a job interview, but knows that it doesn’t likely matter. The solutions she might have used in her former life, do not apply — as she reminds us, Prison is Not Real Life.

Melissa Black pushes our ideas of what it means to live free in Freedom Connection to Seeing Beyond the Skeleton Keyhole.

Freedom of speech that reaches the streets. With a tongue that needs to be sung and heard.

Freedom of every step I take as I wake, with the beautiful movement of my body so magnetically majestic.

Within the confines of the prison walls, Melissa constructs a skeleton key for her senses to express herself, to celebrate her life and to find the joy that she needs to stay hopeful and productive. | TDS