PAIRINGS

BY TRACY SCHLAPP

While we love publishing the PonyXpress and mostly enjoy writing grants, and certainly appreciate the management of a non-profit, the best part of this Bridgeworks project is the two-hour face-to-face with our workshop members. We have a weekly meeting at Oregon State Penitentiary and a monthly rotation at the other prisons. Over time, we have cultivated a group dynamic that encourages sharing and listening, with the result that we each exercise our empathetic muscles. We provide space for different points of view and we recognize how life experiences shape our perspectives. Conversation topics range from how to organize a group project, or the difficulty of parenting from prison, to responding to pieces of an artist’s work. Each new person entering the group changes the dynamic, and we make room for them. Folks who get shipped off to another prison are missed (we continue to correspond) and we make room for more writers. There are folks who jump right in and participate, while some sit at the table and suss it out. This keeps the creative pool energetic. The one thing we cannot orchestrate is the mixing of people across prisons. Danny and I sometimes imagine how lively it would be to have crossover between our established groups.

This week, we organized the pile of submissions that have rolled in over the few months. Manuscripts needed to be logged, typed, proofread by our OSP readers, and sorted. I make piles of drafts on a huge worktable in the studio, making mental notes of subcategories I notice within the theme. I think of it as brainstorming session to help me prep these introductions. Thursday, I pulled writing from two people who seemed strangely aligned. It amused me to think of them sitting together. Well, mostly because they seem so very different. And so with the theme of connection, I thought I would create an interesting pairing of writers.

From day one, Carolyn Stickley has rolled her walker into our writing group at Coffee Creek’s medium facility with quiet determination. She came to prison at seventy-three, after spending her professional life as a special education teacher, travelling in her free time, and being with her family. In “Crocheting Granny” she writes: “Sleeping in, smelling the fresh air all around me, swimming, playing golf, and soft, green grass under my feet; this was my every day, until I made the wrong choice.” The women on her unit call her Granny, and while I typically use a person’s given name, I can’t help but address her with this term of endearment and respect. Now in her eighties, Granny says she is the oldest female prisoner in the state. Life is difficult for her as she moves in and out of her cell, tries to get the medical care she needs, negotiates the facilities. Her faith is a stronghold for her survival inside. She hands in her pieces in the tidy handwriting of a teacher. She is deliberate as she moves from one place to often surprising observations and conclusions. She asks her reader questions and you imagine her sitting patiently listening to their answers. She is funny and we all look forward to seeing her reunited with her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

J. Hunter is a new writer in our group — one of those people who likes to assess before he jumps headlong into the water. We know little about him except that he has a life story etched in tattoos, and from clues that come in the pieces he has submitted. And so, it is interesting to imagine this reserved person in conversation with Granny. Granny spools out the wisdom of long-lived life and in Hunter we read the wisdom of battles won and lost in half that time and the lessons they have delivered, from Finally, I Am:

Philosopher minds, carrying a soldier’s heart,
More so, showing love without end ... guaranteed ceilings to only rise, being ready, for
this comes certain demise ...        
All which has been shown,
In the unknown number of years, written many times before ...
Only hardens a heart, for this man knows, intimate parts of war
As a father knows family needs be, raised & led,
So a soldier strolls, along dug trenches,
Taking life if needed to defend ...

I have paired Carolyn’s Shadows with Hunter’s Shadow’s Light

Carolyn’s My Stone Maze with Hunter’s A True Trophy

and Carolyn’s Difficult Roads with Finally, I Am  | TDS