A woman in jail must learn to cultivate hope for herself, or she will become despondent and bitter.
Writing is a healthy, pro-social exercise that can cultivate hopeful visions of life-to-come.
By Toni Holopainen
Some of our long-term women writers at Chittenden Correctional Facility in Vermont have been trickling out of the facility, making those left behind miss their circle members.
I decided it was time to pull out Lisel Mueller’s poem Hope to help us rekindle that eternal well-spring within ourselves.
Incarcerated writers were encouraged to imitate Mueller’s style by visually describing what hope looks and feels and sounds like–to them.
The first piece, written by a younger 20-something, is rich in insight about the unbreakable bond she carries with her child. The second is whimsical and fun–please enjoy!
HOPE
“It is the mouth that inflates the lungs
of the child that has just been born.”
Hope is love. Unconditional and pure
as snow falling fresh from bitter skies.
Stinging and painful with all its beauty. Read more…
Each month, women behind bars in Burlington, VT write with their community mentors as part of writinginsideVT. Of course, the mentors will leave after the two hour session – a fact that always tugs at their hearts.
In this particular session, after mentor/mentee pairs shared individual writings prompted by the poem ‘Prayer’ by Lisa Colt, they were invited to put their words together in joint found poems. The poem, below, weaves all those words into one found poem that truly expresses the universality of our lives as women, inside or out. Our desires, our fears, our longings for personal growth and change.
Let the Heart Lead the Beat
let me abandon shame
blame that solves nothing
the deepest wound, the misguided light
that demonize one’s misfortunes
let my inner darkness peel away
let me step into the light of my own soul
filled with exhilaration and fear –
abundance is not shameful Read more…
Last Thursday, we sat in a stuffy, overly hot and overly filled windowless room to write about women. The women we admire, the women we wish to become, the women we wish to emulate, the women who raised us. Women who honor their lives, who author their lives, who tell the stories of their lives. We were inspired by the poem, “Imagine a Woman (Patricia Lynn Reilly) and many incarcerated women chose to start their writing with a line from that poem.
At the end of our 90 minutes together, we had 17 pieces ranging from letters to deceased great-grandmothers, to poems naming powerful women influences in our lives that included aunt and sisters, to gratitudes for mothers we had missed growing up, to a memorial for a dear service provider recently deceased. Read more…
Mother & Child by Bev Draper
(Sorrento, Italy)
The latest endorsement for our soon-to-be-published book Hear Me, See Me: Incarcerated Women Write arrived this week.
It comes from Elizabeth Gaynes, J.D., executive director, of The Osborne Association in New York City. One of Osborne’s missions is to advocate for and develop alternatives to incarceration that respect the dignity of people and their capacity to change.
In particular, Osborne works to support and develop programs that keep mothers and their children together while a woman is serving her sentence.
..like JusticeHouse, a 45-bed program in Brooklyn announced this week that will allow carefully screened women with felonies to live with and continue to care for their children with supervision.
The participants will be visited several times a week by case managers, receive counseling about jobs, schools, and parenting. Some will be required to have treatment for drug addiction and mental illness.
The aim is to undergird and hopefully strengthen the mother-child relationship during this precarious time. Read more…
by ursylla
For me, I was raised the right way by my mom.
When we moved to Vermont, everything changed.
I met my dad, the real dad I’d never known.
He seemed so cool at first, let me smoke cigarettes
when I was about 12, and then come 13 to 15,
I was doing my first pill with him. After that first
pill came crack, then heroin. Now this affected
my whole life! I’ve never known any different,
just what I’ve seen and done through my dad’s eyes.
I left my mom to stay with him. My mom told me
not to, but she was not smart enough or
strong enough to say “no” to my father. I hurt
her to no repair. I regret that every day! Read more…
sarahwbartlett
Marybeth
