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Episode 28—Sarah Shotland Takes Us to Prison
127 Plays8 years ago
Sarah Shotland, essayist and novelist, won Proximity Magazine's personal essay contest for her "On Visiting Prison Again" essay. We talk about that and much, much more.
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Transcript
Introduction to Sarah Shotland
00:00:01
Speaker
Okay. Hey, CNFers. It's your buddy Brendan here, host of the hashtag CNF podcast. Conversations with tellers of true stories, whether that be essayists, reporters, authors, filmmakers, you name it.
Essay Reading: Insights from Prison
00:00:21
Speaker
We have something a little different here to sort of kick off the show. Today's guest for episode 28 is Sarah Shotland, who was the winner of Proximity Magazine's Personal Essay Prize with the theme Inside Out. And it was judged by Paul Lisicki, who was actually the guest on episode 27.
00:00:45
Speaker
the podcast go and check it out here's what he had to say about Sarah's essay on visiting prison again quote this is a piece by a writer who's willing to be lost a little while as readers we encounter a mind at work thinking perceiving questioning bewildered
00:01:08
Speaker
were invited into the speaker's contradictions, her wish to be seen and known, her wish to be invisible, and get a window into an aspect of the American prison system that's rarely represented, especially with such nuance and intimacy." So that's a pretty nice endorsement for the essay, and Sarah's going to read a little bit of it right now, and then we're going to kick right into the interview.
Themes of Danger and Visibility
00:01:37
Speaker
Hope you dig it.
00:01:39
Speaker
On visiting prison again, you have learned many things in prison, and here's one of them. Your body is dangerous. It's neon. From the moment you pass through the metal detector until the moment you walk back along the fence that separates the recreation area from chapel, classroom, chow hall, it's a flashing sign. Open, open.
00:02:05
Speaker
For most of your life, you have worked hard to be invisible, which is what you prefer. You've only felt physically or sexually picked out of a crowd twice in your life. When you walk through the teasing open air of the prison yard, don't think about these times. Don't think about the gun held to your head in Cincinnati. Don't think about the weight of the stranger pushing you against a brick wall in Seattle.
00:02:33
Speaker
Try not to remember the way every part of you, even your elbows knew he was going to rape you if you didn't run.
Sarah's Artistic and Educational Journey
00:02:41
Speaker
Instead of letting your elbows remember the fear, think instead of the damning details surrounding those circumstances. Focus on the part you played in that fear. That in Cincinnati you were copping heroin in the wrong neighborhood. That in Seattle you were trying to buy crack.
00:03:00
Speaker
Focus on your own rash and violent self-destruction and convince yourself that this is part of the reason you belong here now. Remind yourself that for being alive 35 years as a woman, your statistics are good. You're lucky. You've played invisibility well. Instead of letting yourself melt into the past, try to remember you're here in the prison yard, neon in your possession of a woman's body,
00:03:30
Speaker
When you walk past the chain link fence where small groups of men play cards and basketball and slowly walk the perimeter, feel the actual fear that radiates from the bodies of the guards who escort you. They need you to behave yourself. Instead of letting yourself melt into the past, focus on how the students here treat you with respect, a kind of reverence you've never experienced.
00:03:56
Speaker
You wonder if it has something to do with a combination of that neon womanness and your forbiddenness, your impenetrability. Because there's no possibility of sex here, there's an increased desire for intimacy. In your classes at the prison, it always feels like a first date until it feels like you've been married your whole lives, and it happens in an instant.
Nomadic Artistic Pursuits
00:04:21
Speaker
Hesitation and hunger followed by deep silence and coming back through irreconcilable difference. You are intimate with these men like no other people in your life. Aside from writing, what might be some things that interest you, some hobbies that take you out of writer Sarah and those kind of interests that unplug you from a lot of the stuff that is a part of your daily life?
00:04:51
Speaker
Sure. Well, my bachelor's degree is actually in theater. So I love theater and the performing arts, and I love to go see theater and dance. I love seeing dance and movies. And I love to travel. I live a really pretty far away from
00:05:19
Speaker
my family and I'm one of five siblings so I really like to travel and go spend time with with my fam and I love to swim and Yeah Seems like like what I do when I'm not doing this stuff
00:05:44
Speaker
So, you're in Pittsburgh now, correct? Yes. Okay. So, where did you grow up? So, I grew up in Dallas, Texas. And then I went, I moved to New Orleans, went to school in New Orleans and lived there for seven years. And then I actually, after Hurricane Katrina, I moved to Yosemite National Park.
00:06:13
Speaker
worked there, and then moved to China, and moved to Spain, and then moved to Austin, Texas. And from Austin, Texas, I moved here to Pittsburgh. Wow. So those are some big stepping stones. Like leaps. Yeah, no kidding. So what took you from place to place, really globetrotting?
00:06:37
Speaker
Um, mostly just the opportunity to, um, make art with people who I knew I wanted to make art with. Um, so when I lived in New Orleans, I started a production company with a couple, um, of my girlfriends and, um, we produce new work. And then, um, when Katrina happened, um, we all
00:07:08
Speaker
went to different places and one of the women I worked with ended up moving to China because she had a friend in the Peace Corps there. And then I just kind of followed her there and we made theater there. And then I had another friend who had an opportunity to do a show in Spain that needed somebody to come in and basically be a script doctor.
00:07:35
Speaker
And so I did that. And then I had friends who were making theater in Austin. So I basically was willing to move wherever there was a show I could work on. Nice. And how long did you spend in each place? How long did you spend in China and then Spain? So I was in China for a little over a year. I was in Spain for almost a year. And then
00:08:04
Speaker
other places like California and Cincinnati and Austin, I spent varying amounts of time. Austin is a place that I tend to go back to a lot, so I've lived there for between six and nine months, several times. And I suspect that it's a place that I will keep doing that with.
00:08:32
Speaker
What do you think it is about you that likes to pick up and move so much? Well, that's an interesting question because I've actually been in Pittsburgh for seven years now. Ah. So I think that part of me may be changing. But when I was moving a lot, I think part of it was about the fact that when you work in theater,
00:09:01
Speaker
you have to be willing to move on to the next project. And the truth is there aren't that many cities where there's enough theater work where you can constantly pick up a new show. I think Chicago is a place like that and it's one of the reasons I love Chicago and
00:09:23
Speaker
tend to, you know, I've gone there and worked on shows. I think Minneapolis, in some ways, can be like that. But there aren't a lot of American, mid-sized American cities that you can just consistently work in
Pittsburgh's Literary Community
00:09:40
Speaker
the theater. So I was pretty committed to that idea. And I think as a writer, also, it's really helpful not to stay in one place.
00:09:51
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because when you are in a new environment you can see the small things that become invisible in our daily lives so much easier you know so now having been in pittsburgh for seven years i have a totally different challenge i'm like i have a very stable life here i have you know routine here which is sometimes what you sort of sacrifice
00:10:16
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if you travel a lot, but I have to find ways to stay awake to those daily moments that can really open a door to a new piece or be the key that unlocks some problem that you've been having in a piece where you're like, Oh, I understand exactly where it needs to go now. But I think in order to have that kind of awareness,
00:10:40
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Now I've had to come up with ways to sort of jog that kind of observation in my daily life since I'm mostly in Pittsburgh now. Now since you're more sort of spatially sedentary, has that hindered or helped your writing? So I think there are benefits and drawbacks. The benefit is that I have a writing community here.
00:11:09
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And I've never had a writing community, a literary community, because I was in a place for such a short amount of time that I didn't have the opportunity to create those kinds of relationships. That I think is invaluable. Pittsburgh has a pretty incredible literary community.
Writer's Journey and Self-Doubt
00:11:31
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It's definitely a city where going to readings is part of people's social lives. It's part of the social culture here.
00:11:39
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We have sort of an enormous amount of independent bookstores and small presses in Pittsburgh for the size of the city it is. I find that people here, even if you don't identify as a writer, are readers, which is really nice. That is a benefit. Another benefit is that I've had time to do the work that I'm doing right now, which is part of my work is teaching in jails and prisons.
00:12:08
Speaker
And that's the sort of work that you really kind of have to build relationships and lay a foundation and sort of keep showing up even when it doesn't work. And doing that, engaging in that teaching at the prison and the jail has really transformed my writing. And so that is really a benefit of taking the time to sort of plant roots and
00:12:36
Speaker
nurture those relationships. The drawback is that, you know, ordinary life becomes ordinary. And it's sometimes hard to make the time and space to inspire yourself in the everyday. So what were the events that led to you becoming a writer?
00:13:00
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the events that led to me becoming a writer. Well, even like a, you know, if events seems like a funny word, like maybe that, maybe that moment where the light bulb went off that this was something you wanted to pursue as a vocation. Yeah, I'm definitely one of those people who we, you know, was a writer from a really young age. My aunt has a funny story that when I was in
00:13:25
Speaker
like second or third grade. She asked me if I wanted to go Christmas shopping with her. And I said, oh, I'm already done with my Christmas presents. I wrote poems for everyone. I would say that, you know, there were brief periods of time when I was interested in other things. So like I was very interested in performance. I was really interested in like directing for the theater, but more or less, I think,
00:13:55
Speaker
Writing has always been my primary way to process the world from the time I was really little. And going to school and getting the chance to see work of mine produced, sort of just reinforced that that's what I really wanted to spend my time and energy investing in.
00:14:23
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Was there a key story, you know, fiction, nonfiction play or otherwise that
00:14:31
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that you were that received a certain degree of my validation that this is something that you realize you had had some talent and that you could really lean into it as something that wasn't completely delusional to lean into. Gosh, maybe the jury is still out on that. But I mean,
00:14:54
Speaker
Ooh, I don't want to paint myself as too stable a person here. I guess that when I was like 16, I guess 15 or 16, I had my first play produced. And going through that process,
00:15:15
Speaker
was so exciting to me. I mean, I loved every single second of it. I loved the, you know, six hour tech rehearsal where you're going over the same light cue for an hour and a half. I mean, that's how much I loved it. So I think that was like a really early moment when I thought, man, if I can keep doing this, that would be, you know, incredible. I think, you know, as a more recent moment
00:15:45
Speaker
I think that the day you find out that your first book is going to be published, that's a really big day. In terms of my work, that's probably the day that's the high point. You're referring to Junket? Is that your first novel? Yeah.
00:16:09
Speaker
And just, you know, once you work on, I know you, you know, you also have a book out and I think that for so long, you think, God, when I, when I have a book that I can hold in my hand, rather than like a series of links, I can send people or
00:16:30
Speaker
you know, this stack of journals that no one reads, on my bookshelf, when you have that book and you can say to your family and other people, you know, who maybe aren't super involved in the literary world, that they can go buy your book like any other book in the world, there's like a degree of validation that feels, you know, pretty,
00:17:00
Speaker
unparalleled in my life in terms of like, I can keep doing this. And this is not delusional, as you said. Yeah. Well, there's artists have to toe that line between the self belief and delusion, you know, there is that. Yeah.
00:17:19
Speaker
It's because you have to have a certain degree of that delusional self-belief that what you're doing isn't entirely foolish and then it's to have the courage to get up and do the work every day. Especially if you're looking to in some ways
00:17:38
Speaker
you know make a little make a little bit of money from it and to publish so you these little kernels of validation put fuel in your tank and say well I'm not a complete and total fool for pursuing this line of work that you know there are people that do connect
00:17:54
Speaker
to my work so it is worthwhile to keep pursuing. So I think even those things going back to when you were 16 years old and having your first play produced, that's something like, okay, there is a seed of talent here. And then when you get that first book and you're able to hand that to people who might not necessarily understand the artistic pursuit, but they can understand something concrete.
00:18:16
Speaker
It is just one of those things that it allows you to keep going and to keep pushing through. So that's, I think you're really hitting upon something that's universal among all creators, no matter how successful or how visible you are as an artist, for sure. And I also wonder, along your path, what struggles and obstacles did you face? And do you face? Yeah, I mean, I totally agree that
00:18:43
Speaker
you know, a large portion of your time as a creative person is spent sort of, um, walking this line between self-doubt and trying to believe that your work is going to land somewhere and have an audience and it's, it's going to be received somewhere.
00:19:06
Speaker
So I definitely have that same, you know, healthy dose of self-doubt. That's like a daily thing. It's like check in with me before lunch and I'm probably feeling, you know, pretty, pretty crummy. Then, you know, I get a little salad and I'm feeling like, you know, I might publish something again. I also think that I've spent a fair amount of time
00:19:32
Speaker
avoiding writing about the thing that I really wanted to write about for fear that I would be judged or misunderstood or embarrassed. So my novel Junkette is about heroin addiction. And it takes place in the year before Hurricane Katrina. And it's about a woman who is a junkie.
00:20:02
Speaker
And it was really important for me to write that book, but it was also really frightening for me to write that book. And so it took a really long time. I mean, it took me 10 years to do that because it took me 10 years to convince myself that this was a worthy topic and that it was a topic that I could approach in a way that I was proud of and that was
00:20:28
Speaker
not only about the content but about the language and the craft and all of the other things that writers are concerned with besides the content. Now I've really gotten over that and I have no qualms about writing whatever I write about.
Balancing Writing and Life
00:20:46
Speaker
struggle or process that almost everybody I know is in, which is juggling a life where you are putting together money. You have enough time to do your own work. You have enough time to generate experiences that will lead to new work.
00:21:12
Speaker
And you're taking care of yourself and are a relatively sane human being. I'm an adjunct and a freelancer, and that can be stressful. So you say before you have your afternoon power salad that you might have a healthy dose of self-doubt. And how do you process that? And how do you dance with that fear and overcome that?
00:21:41
Speaker
You know, I'm a teacher as well. And I think that teaching has been so unbelievably good for that sort of self-doubt and that self-criticism because I see so many, every single student I've ever encountered has been confronting that self-doubt. And so in seeing that this is a universal experience,
00:22:09
Speaker
even in the best students, the students who I read their work and I think, I have nothing I can teach you. Like just keep doing what you're doing. Sometimes they're the ones that have the most self-doubt. And so I think my work as a teacher has allowed me to de-center my own neuroses and be like, you know, I am not terminally unique.
00:22:35
Speaker
When I am feeling self-doubt, I need to remember that, you know, my amazing student Clara Dragala feels self-doubt and I would encourage her. So it forces you to take your own advice and it forces you to see yourself as one of these many, many people who are on this same path and take yourself a little less seriously. Sure, I experienced self-doubt, but my God, I mean, at the end of the day, I'm trying to like,
00:23:07
Speaker
write an essay, I'm not trying to like splice genes or, you know, no one's life is hanging in the balance here. Right. So I think sort of coming back to that and remembering that on a daily basis, also very helpful.
00:23:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny, you mentioning advice. What advice as you were developing early on, what advice were you given along the way by maybe a treasured mentor? So definitely best advice is tell the truth. And I've gotten that several times in my writing life from various mentors and teachers. And I got to say, that's the one that
00:23:57
Speaker
I have to come back to all the time, even as a fiction writer. Another great piece of advice that I got from a mentor, and this is really a piece of practical advice, is lower your overhead. And I think that's great advice because we tend to spend a lot of time thinking about like, how do I increase my income? How can I get more gigs? How can I get paid for more work? When a lot of, for me at least, a lot of what
00:24:24
Speaker
takes time in writing is not the process of selling the piece or finding a home for the piece. The part of writing that's time consuming is writing, writing something good, thinking about something, enough to have something insightful to say about it. And giving yourself time to do that sometimes means not selling more, but spending less and finding ways to
Teaching and Writing Fusion
00:24:53
Speaker
to lower your overhead. How have you approached that? What are some of those things that you noticed were fat that you could trim to keep you on the straight and narrow and focused on the work? Well, I think that, one, I live in Pittsburgh, and I think that more and more artists are actually thinking about what are the alternatives to New York City and LA.
00:25:19
Speaker
Why do I want to live in New York City or LA when we live in a world that we're having this discussion in two different states? My publisher is in a different state. I've only ever met him one time. So our proximity to each other physically is no longer the most important part of being able to produce work.
00:25:50
Speaker
for writers, for other artists that may be a little different. So I think staying somewhere that's affordable is step one. I think the other thing is like last year I moved back in with roommates because I felt like even though I loved living alone, there was no real reason for me to be living alone. I don't have kids. I don't need a lot of space.
00:26:19
Speaker
So that really lowered my overhead. And I think just like living in community and sharing stuff, which makes you feel good too.
00:26:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's really, it's easy as most writers and freelancers, too, to kind of cocoon yourself in a lot of ways. But it's nice that you have found a way to sort of force yourself into these social circles that, in a lot of ways, the sharing of work, in a way, by giving, it actually fuels you and stuff. And I wonder to what extent does that sharing
00:26:59
Speaker
fuel your capacity to do more and more work and keep you going. How does that nourish you? The essay in proximity, for example, is a total example of sharing and receiving at the same time. My work at the prison is this incredible example of when I go in there
00:27:29
Speaker
my students share these incredibly generous stories with me. I'm a stranger. They have no idea what my background is, where I'm from. Many of them have no idea why I would come and do this. But just writing in the same room with each other, hearing each other's stories, I think is generative. I think a lot of times people think you need to work in a room alone.
00:27:59
Speaker
with the door closed and the windows drawn in order to be a serious writer. But I've found that actually sharing space, sharing the writing room with someone else really is interesting and generative for my work. Like I write differently when I'm writing next to someone who's also writing. And I think that that's really good for my work. And it's like that shared energy can really fuel a piece because
00:28:26
Speaker
If I know that by the end of this class I really want to be able to share this piece with you, I'm gonna write the damn thing. Whereas if I'm in my room alone, I don't really have any urgency to work out the thought. I could just sit and think about it forever. Having someone to be accountable to in a lot of ways provides you with a certain set of stakes that
00:28:54
Speaker
I don't know, it holds you some. It holds your feet to the fire. Totally. So yeah, that's great. That's a wonderful piece of advice, just to get people out of their own head, in a sense. But also, it definitely helps to foster that anti-loneliness that can cripple us in a lot of ways. I like that. Anti-loneliness.
00:29:25
Speaker
And so I wonder, how do you take control of your day? What habits do you exercise to ensure that you're getting your work done and that you, now that you've been in this place for seven years, you've been able to, I imagine, foster a routine that you might not have had when you were hopping around from city to city. So what does maybe the first 60 to 90 minutes of your day look like as you're priming the pump and getting ready to get going?
00:29:55
Speaker
Okay, so I'm going to be totally honest here. I do not have an idyllic, writerly routine in the morning. I teach five days a week from 7.45 in the morning until 11.
00:30:10
Speaker
So my first 60 minutes of being awake are generally like a admonition of myself for staying in bed too long, a mad dash to get to work, and then sort of like a conversation with my students. So I try to make the first part of every class a writing exercise so that I also get to write and wake up. Yeah. Are you a coffee drinker?
00:30:36
Speaker
I am not a coffee drinker. You have found the one writer who does not drink coffee. Tea? I am a tea person. What kind of tea do you drink and how do you take it? I love red tea and I love red tea with like steamed milk. I feel like that's very luxurious.
00:30:56
Speaker
Usually, again, my tea routine is like, oh my God, have I put the electric kettle on? Can I get away with microwaving water in the school microwave while my students are trickling in? Yeah, I am definitely not like, you know, everything, all the rituals have to be in place in order for me to like start my day or write. If I was, I would like never write anything.
00:31:27
Speaker
So who now, getting to some of the influences of your career and your writing life, who are some of those North Star writers that you look to that really inspire you to do what you do? Fiction or non-fiction, otherwise.
00:31:48
Speaker
So definitely Joan Didion, Margaret Atwood, Amy Bloom. As far as local writers go here in Pittsburgh, I have this incredible local community here whose work really inspires me. I came to Pittsburgh because I had read the poetry of Cheryl St. Germain. And when I read it, I just knew that I had to work with her.
00:32:18
Speaker
And that's really why I chose Pittsburgh. And so she's she's really a writer, but also like a mentor that has really helped me. And then I think that one of the things that I've learned in the last couple years as I've been, you know, trying to work on a new project is that internet and even like as silly as it sounds Facebook,
00:32:44
Speaker
is this really amazing way to find writers who aren't well known, who are also just like in it right now. So, you know, something like submitting an essay to a contest, like the proximity contest. Once those pieces were published, suddenly now I have nine new writers
00:33:13
Speaker
whose work I probably wouldn't have found otherwise or would have found months or years from now, whose work I can read and whose work I can think about in a way that's not necessarily me in dialogue with somebody like Margaret Atwood, but me in dialogue with somebody who's working right now. Not that Margaret Atwood is not working right now, but who's
00:33:38
Speaker
Working out the same things at the same point in their career as I am. Yeah Yeah, that's a that was a lot of big inspiration for why I started this podcast too was to promote people's work I admire who are are like you said still working through it and Aren't superstars yet, and they're not headlining the concerts. You know they're they're
00:34:03
Speaker
people doing wonderful work who are supremely talented, but because there's such a flood of talented artists out there, it's very hard to get noticed. And so if I stumble across, you know, someone in a relatively obscure literary journal or any one of the essay writers in the Pittsburgh-based creative nonfiction magazine, it's like, well, that person's doing really outstanding work, but
Words Without Walls: Teaching in Prisons
00:34:31
Speaker
95% of the people probably haven't heard of them outside of the community of essay writers, which is real small. If my small little service is getting that person's personality out there a little more,
00:34:45
Speaker
Someone like yourself too and then that's, I'm not trying to blow smoke up my own ass, but that's my small service to people who are working writers who might not otherwise be getting on.
00:35:02
Speaker
fresh air or the big podcast. It's like, it's a little something just to, you know, if it helps draw a couple extra eyeballs to your essay, then then that's, then that's a victory in and of itself. And now maybe someone else now is like, Oh, she wrote Junkette, I'm gonna go buy her book now. And if you got it, so now people will hopefully that'll snowball over time, because this is, as you know, I believe, I think you'll believe it is a long game.
00:35:30
Speaker
Oh yeah totally yes and I think for those of us who maybe aren't always interested in writing super commercial work it's so important to feel like you have a tribe of people whether they're in your city or whether they're in your digital
00:35:52
Speaker
world who are also doing that and who are saying we we're your audience we want to read that we don't want to read another article today that's like a list of 12 ways to I don't know you know show off your cat or you know what I mean like and I think that goes back to you know the
00:36:14
Speaker
Do you really need to be in New York or LA? What's happening outside the huge publishing houses? What's happening outside major motion picture releases? What are those projects?
00:36:27
Speaker
Yeah, because a lot of really small, independent publishers are turning out wonderful work. Amazing books. Yeah. Unfortunately, just by virtue of a crowded marketplace, but also being maybe strong armed or muscled out of bookstores, the shrinking bookstores and the shrinking bookshelves by the big five.
00:36:54
Speaker
It's hard to get that visibility and to get those people's work out there. So it is a constant hustle. But yeah, it's tough. It's tough to get noticed. And it's tough to gain that audience. But I think it's upon
00:37:12
Speaker
Like people like you and me to maybe shine a spotlight in some dark corner and some small place across the country where people are doing wonderful work. And you see it all the time, I'm sure, with your students. Oh, yeah, definitely. So talk a little bit about Words Without Walls and how you came to that.
00:37:36
Speaker
Okay, so Words Without Walls is a program of Chatham University's MFA in creative writing program. So I did my MFA at Chatham, and while I was a graduate student, the director of that program, Cheryl St. Germain, mentioned that she had taught in a women's prison, and that she would be interested if students, again, so immediately
00:38:06
Speaker
I contacted her and said, I really want to do that. And I researched a bunch of places in town that might be interested. And about eight months later, I started teaching at the Allegheny County Jail with some other graduate students. And that was in 2009. And since then, we've expanded the program. We teach 18 classes a year.
00:38:32
Speaker
And we teach classes in everything from like multi-genre to sometimes we do like a literature class, we do all the genres, workshops. At Allegheny County Jail, that's with men and women and youth. At State Correctional Institution of Pittsburgh, which is a state prison for men. And at this place called Sojourner House, which is this amazing residential drug treatment center for women who are mothers.
00:39:02
Speaker
Our classes are taught by graduate students. So part of my work and work without walls isn't just teaching the class at the prison. It's also training and teaching graduate students to do this work. One of the things that I'm really the most proud of in terms of the program is that we have students who after they graduate from Chatham, they go on to do this work wherever they're from.
00:39:32
Speaker
So we have students in North Carolina, in Kentucky, in Louisiana, who have started programs of their own. Because I think once you do this work, once you sort of reconnect with the reason that you started writing in the first place, and you engage with people who are writing for really, really crucial reasons in their lives, you never want to give that up. I don't think I'd be
00:40:00
Speaker
as satisfied if I was only teaching at a university or I was only teaching, you know, at a high school. The work is just every single time you go in and do it, you are reminded of this essential piece of why people feel the need to write something down.
00:40:25
Speaker
and to have proof and evidence that it happened, that it was real, that they were there. And that's something that once you've been doing it a while and once you are in that literary world of like submit your work and hope you get the prize and hope you get the recognition and who reviewed it and how many copies did you sell. That sort of essential quality of why are you doing it in the first place can get lost
00:40:56
Speaker
very quickly and so doing the work I hope is really beneficial to the people who we teach but I can't really speak to that you know I can speak to what what they tell me but in terms of my experience I know that it keeps me writing and keeps me engaged with the really important things I want to write about
00:41:21
Speaker
What surprised you the most as you taught these classes inside these prisons? Hmm. That's a great question. I think maybe one thing that has surprised me is how different the stories are from each other that I've heard there because I think we get a pretty, uh, monolithic story of how do you wind up in prison?
00:41:51
Speaker
you know, there's this sort of template that we get, you know, you come from a really disadvantaged background, maybe there's abuse in your background, neglect, poverty, which is all true. I mean, of course that's true, but there are a lot of other stories that are there in that space too. And part of that is just because our,
00:42:21
Speaker
system of mass incarceration is so giant. I mean, it's breathtaking how many people are incarcerated. And if you put that many people into a system, of course they're going to have amazingly diverse stories. So I think just the sheer magnitude of people who are incarcerated was the thing that really shocked me.
00:42:51
Speaker
at first, even though I had read the statistics, I knew that in my head, it's a different kind of knowing to meet people and meet people month after month and then hear their stories over and over and over again.
00:43:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think as the tyrant Joseph Stalin said, like one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic. Yeah. So it's like loosely saying, you could read all the statistics and see those numbers of all the people incarcerated. But when you get into a classroom with, oh, I don't know how many students there are, like 15, 20, 30, I don't know. But all of a sudden, that becomes much more
00:43:35
Speaker
Much more personal and then you realize that it is there there are these very like I these isolated pockets of of Individuality instead of like this overarching umbrella of the numbers that you that you studied Yeah, I mean I have I have 20 guys in my class right now and I have had guys who are in their late 70s and
00:44:02
Speaker
And I've had guys who are 17 years old, and guys who are from rural areas, guys who are from urban areas, the suburbs, every religion, every color, every socioeconomic background, every different kind of education, work experience.
Ethical Writing and Public Curiosity
00:44:27
Speaker
It's just- It's like college.
00:44:30
Speaker
It's more diverse than college. Yeah. It really is because so often I mean I teach at a college too and you know a lot of times when you go into a classroom at a college you have one or two people who sort of have a story that veers from well.
00:44:49
Speaker
I've been in school my whole life, and I'm still in school. Whereas in these classrooms, you have people who have had just enormously varied life experience. So how did you come to write your essay, which will restate the title again, on visiting prison again? So you've had this experience teaching in the prison. And so how did you come to want to write this piece? And how did you approach the writing of it?
00:45:19
Speaker
So one of the things we do in our program is we bring nationally known visiting writers to our students at the prison and jail. And one of those that came a couple years ago was Jimmy Santiago Baca, who is, you know, a world renowned poet and memoirist and screenwriter. And I got to spend some time with him and he said to me, it's your responsibility to write about this.
00:45:49
Speaker
Um, if you don't write about this, why do it at all? And you know, he spent a lot of time in prison as a young man and having him tell me that I needed to write about it as a person who hasn't served any time in prison, um, was a challenge to me and also, uh, you know, some permission.
00:46:14
Speaker
to do this. I was of course writing about it privately, but I had a little bit of an ethical dilemma as to whether it's my place to write about these people because their stories are not my story.
00:46:31
Speaker
Aside from the small moments where our stories intersect in that classroom. And so that was one of the reasons I wanted to write about my experience in those three hours that I'm there. Rather than get into a piece about why are so many people in prison? How do people get there? What are the solutions for mass incarceration? You know, I don't have those answers.
00:46:55
Speaker
And really, my part that I can own is my personal experience of it. So that's one of the reasons I wanted to write the piece the way I did. And the sort of idea that I'm toying with in the essay about being seen and the power to be seen versus the power to be invisible is something that was sort of evident to me from the very first time
00:47:25
Speaker
that I went into one of these spaces and then got to leave. You know, when you're in a class and teaching and writing, the space around you can disappear to some degree and it's just like any other class. But once you leave that space, it sort of hits you like a ton of bricks that you didn't just leave a classroom.
00:47:49
Speaker
you got to leave a space that 99% of the people who you just worked with don't get to leave. Some of them will never get to leave that space. Being a woman working at a men's prison is especially complicated in terms of how I'm seen, both in the classroom and just in the sort of transit from the parking lot
00:48:18
Speaker
to the classroom. And that's from the people who work there and the people who have to live there. And I think that that probably shouldn't have been a surprising thing to me, but has been a surprising thing to me and has made me way, way, way, way more aware of my body than I ever have been before. And so I really wanted to write about that in the piece because
00:48:48
Speaker
I felt like there were so many contradictory things I felt about it. And I think when you stumble across an idea that holds a lot of contradiction, that's a really ripe place to write from.
00:49:04
Speaker
At what point did you know you had something worth writing about? How long did it take you to come to this idea? And did you have the idea, had you had the essay written before you knew about the contest and you were able to sort of shoehorn it into the theme of the issue, which was inside, outside? Yeah, the piece was written like a year before the contest.
00:49:29
Speaker
you rarely get a contest that's so perfect for a piece that you have. But yeah, I've written a lot about the work because it's so complicated and because writing about it really helps me to understand it more and helps me to see things that
00:49:47
Speaker
I may not be totally conscious of in the classroom.
00:50:07
Speaker
What was the sort of conversation you had with yourself to give yourself permission to write a piece of this nature, like knowing that the people that are sort of tangentially involved with it don't get to leave the prison the way you can? Yeah, so I would say it's because, you know, now I've been doing this teaching for like seven years. And when I tell people that I do it,
00:50:36
Speaker
It wouldn't matter if like the building behind me was on fire. That's what people want to talk to me about. I mean, seriously, once people find out that I do this work, they have like a million questions for me. So I felt like I got to follow that people have questions about this. And and I think you see now that there is a huge interest in
00:51:04
Speaker
in work, you know, whether it's something super mainstream like Orange is the New Black or something like the New Jim Crow that, that we're all, you know, everybody who's living in America is living with this.
Current and Future Writing Projects
00:51:22
Speaker
Whether you realize that you're part of it or not, we have so many people in prison that it is difficult to find somebody whose life isn't at least
00:51:35
Speaker
peripherally connected to the idea of it. Whether that's you have somebody who works in the criminal justice system, somebody who has been involved in some kind of case, caught some kind of case, whether that's your teenage kid who got a minor in possession charge or something minor like that.
00:52:00
Speaker
a relative, if you live in a town whose main source of economy is a prison, if you work, if you're a social worker, I mean, it just, it permeates our lives, including through addiction, since so many people who are incarcerated are there because of the drug war. And because people seemed so, so
00:52:27
Speaker
Hungry to talk about it when when they would find out I did it. I felt like oh, I gotta write about this What uh, what are you? Working on these days. What's what's uh, you know, what are you finding interesting and what are you looking to dive into? Now that you've as you as you go forward
00:52:48
Speaker
So, um, I'm working on like a book length manuscript about teaching, um, in prisons. Um, and right now it's tentatively titled how to disappear. And right now I'm working on it actually in the form of an encyclopedia. So there are a lot of short,
00:53:13
Speaker
entries, you know, that are listed alphabetically, like an encyclopedia. And it covers sort of my experiences, some of the relationships that I've had with students that have been most transformative for me in both positive and really negative ways. What I've sort of seen as an outsider coming in,
00:53:38
Speaker
And also the book is a little bit about specifically writing and reading and how that is changed and impacted by a space like a prison.
00:53:50
Speaker
And how do you identify yourself as a writer? Do you see yourself more as a fiction writer or non-fiction? Like, granted, you have Junk Cat as your novel, as your book, but now you're working on a non-fiction book, and you've won this essay contest. So you've got to boot in both puddles. Yeah, and I mean, I'd say more than that,
00:54:18
Speaker
If you look at my entire body of work, the vast majority of it is playwriting. So I really don't subscribe to identifying in a genre. I think that this myth that we're so specific to our genre is that. It's a myth. Every writer I know writes in almost every genre. Yeah.
00:54:46
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. The bookstores, they need to put you on a shelf, so they really like it if you can just stick to one thing.
Where to Find Sarah's Work
00:54:53
Speaker
Exactly. Exactly. Very nice. And lastly, before I let you go, where can people find you online, sir?
00:55:02
Speaker
I have a personal website. It's sarahshotland.com. And Words Without Walls also has a website, wordswithoutwalls.com. And you can find work from our students there. And you can also find work from the graduate students who teach and are visiting writers. You know, I'm probably way more comfortable promoting that website than my own. Because there's just so much work there.
00:55:31
Speaker
to explore. Yeah. Well, let this podcast stand as a way for us to promote your work, your own wonderful work, and your winning essay, and all the wonderful teaching you're doing as well. So I'll let you get out of here, Sarah, and be respectful of your time. So I just want to say one more time that thank you so much for coming on the podcast. And now we're now connected in this writerly way. So thank you. Thank you so much for covering out the time. And we'll certainly be in touch.
00:56:01
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me and for hosting the show in general, and I'm really happy to be connected to you now. Thanks. Thanks so much. All right. Well, you take care, and we'll certainly keep in touch, all right? OK. Sounds good. All right. Bye, Sarah. Bye-bye.