SILVER LININGS
BY TRACY SCHLAPP
At the beginning of 2023, Nolan James Briden organized a group of people at Oregon State Penitentiary interested in writing. Many of the group with whom we wrote our anthology during the pandemic had happily joined us on the outside, and we were able to present the fruits of our labor to the community-at-large. In response to the dwindling numbers in our group still inside, Nolan initiated the search for more people at OSP. The goal was to restart our writing program in the spring, and in Nolan’s words: “weed out people who aren’t serious.” Using PEN America’s anthology The Sentences That Create Us, Nolan selected writing exercises and prepared six-week’s worth of lesson plans. Once we saw Nolan’s well-read and annotated copy of The Sentences That Create Us, we arranged the delivery of free books from the publisher Haymarket Books (we have since distributed over 80 copies to people who are incarcerated in Oregon.)
When our travel schedule allowed, we looked forward to attending Nolan’s workshops. His approach from the pacing of the sessions to his teaching sensibilities provided great lessons for us, as we developed the PonyXpress workshops. We learned the importance of starting with an icebreaker (physical movement, introductions, centering in the space) and that stand-alone sessions allowed people who were unable to attend the previous meeting to be in synch with the rest of the group. In one talk, Nolan subdivided the word vocabulary on the board. VO CAB U LARY and circled CAB, pointing out the power that words have in transporting us from one situation to the next — “the more words you have the farther you can travel.” Just the other day, I watched Stressla and Nolan encounter a new word, they wandered off to find a dictionary and returned in deep discussion.
Nolan asked us to write about silver linings in one session. Stressla Lynn Johnson wrote an initial thought piece that eventually became the poem Silver Linings. Stressla is keenly aware of language as transportation and language as trigger: “…to stay peaceful when encountering a soul that is actively practicing its suffering. I am keenly aware that these space are created for me to see myself in others. Unaddressed/Unresolved by Chin Yeyin is an interesting companion to Stressla’s poem. Chin measures the weight of those unaddressed and unresolved issues that like a “personal sandbag of feelings” can be carried unnoticed for days, years on end and then, hold a person down. And finally, we have Clay Faro writing from Powder River Correctional Facility and his New Life promises the fresh start we all crave at the end of a full year. | TDS
