WORD BEADING

BY TRACY SCHLAPP

Little Mike tells us, “beading is my language” in our first meeting with the new group out at the medium side of Snake River Correction Institution in Ontario, Oregon. This group has been a long time coming, it reunites us with two of our original PonyXpress writers from Oregon State Penitentiary, Nolan James Briden and Chris Lewis. The Snake medium complex has a population of roughly 3000 people broken into three buildings. We have been invited by the Native and Asian Pacific Islander groups at SRCI medium and will be hosted by the chaplains. Prisons in rural Oregon tend to have fewer programs, so we have an initial list of 40 people who would like to participate. There are details to sort out. In this first meeting, I’m throwing them right into the water, so we can splash around a bit and figure each other out when we return at the beginning of November. The guys are attentive as I read Where the Circles Overlap by Ada Limon and give them a prompt from the poem to move us right into free writing. I figure writing is a good way to warm up the space between us and settle our brains. Little Mike’s comment inspires me to jump up to the white board and draw a beading pattern schematic. If beads are words, we simply need to pick one at a time. We can work loose or we can have a pattern in mind — the difference between free writing and writing in a form.

This summer, we experimented with the pantoum, a poem traditionally composed of a series of quatrains and repeating lines that move and shift through the poem. We gave our writers the instructions and let them loose. Three of our Coffee Creek writers experimented with the form and made it their own.

Hannah Brophy, We Sit
Together we sit side-by-side
Telling ourselves this is not our fault
Telling ourselves there was nothing we could do
Telling ourselves this too will pass

Robin Thatcher, I Am Inside
That bitters me to cry
For what I did for what you did
That threads the reasons why
What was said and what was read

Carolyn Stickley, I Am Inside
Resolute as the matador
Being the aggressor
Red confetti in the wind
Entering the ring alone

Words and writing play such an important part in our participants’ lives. Letters, poems, and family stories pull deeply held values and memories to the world. Making pictures of a life before (life after) are part of the survival mechanism. We have a double header with two pieces by our resident short story writer Ricky Fay from Deer Ridge Correctional Institution. Nerd Valhalla and Justice, My Name is Jimmy highlight Ricky’s love of asides and unbridled affection for the endnote. His eye is trained to find the humor in life and his pen follows the trail.

And a follow up: last week’s lost abalone earring remains missing. On Wednesday, I brought the lone earring back to Smiling Timmy at Oregon State Penitentiary. Little did I know, the guys had a replacement pair waiting for me. | TDS