ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 16, 1996 TAG: 9612160009
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
MEMO: ***CORRECTION***
Published correction ran on December 17, 1996.
Hollins College English Professor Eric Trethewey's name was
misspelled in photo captions accompanying a story Monday.
The discussion - sometimes lively, always thoughtful - about the proper use of ellipses, past perfect tense and narrative flow was not your average jailhouse banter.
But these were not your average inmates.
As members of the Roanoke City Jail's creative writing class, these convicted bank robbers, burglars and drug dealers have found an escape from incarceration through poetry and fiction.
In writing about their troubled lives and criminal exploits, they have also found what one cellblock author calls "the purest form of rehabilitation we've experienced throughout our respective incarcerations."
"I think writing is a way of looking at your own experiences and coming to grips with them," said Eric Trethewey, a Hollins College English professor and author who teaches the class.
On a recent Monday night, six men wearing navy blue jail suits and slippers shuffled into a jail classroom and pushed their desks into a semicircle. They listened quietly as A. James Hester read one of his poems:
... What a very strange house
to seek peace of mind, while we
are surrounded by the transgressions
responsible for us being here.
Our days are consistent -
a few pros, but chock full of con
in this house of calamity -
where boys and men spur one another
daily, conforming, like sheep in a herd.
The poem was five pages long, which Trethewey said is not unusual for this particular group of students. "That's a joke they make all the time; they tell me they have lots of time to write," he said.
The topics include religion, criminal autobiographies and daily jail life.
John Philbrook Jr. looked out the window one day and found inspiration in the reactions of a small crowd that had gathered when a fire truck, lights flashing and siren shrieking, pulled up to the jail.
In a piece called "The Fire Within," Philbrook wrote about the crowd's apparent lack of concern over the possibility that hundreds of inmates might be trapped in a burning, five-story building.
People were pointing, but the look on their faces were not those of concern, dismay or despair. The firemen were milling about, but smiling and joking with one another, apparently in no hurry to conduct their business.
Telling the story through a man who was older and wiser than most of his cellmates, Philbrook wrote of how "Rodolfo" caught the eye of a young boy on the street as he peered out a fifth-story window.
Rodolfo sensed a feeling of near delight coming from the boy. ... He assumed it was the result of the hatred, resentment and bitter sarcasm engulfing him in an invisible mist.
Philbrook concluded the story with "Rudolfo's" comment to another inmate, who watched the crowd disperse and assumed that the fire had been put out.
``Well, the way I look at it," Rodolfo said solemnly, "they might've extinguished the fire, but they didn't put it out." He shook his head slowly. "They can never put it out.''
In some of the inmates' writing, raw anger seems to pour from their pens.
Thanks to our oppressive judicial system, instead of being the home of the free and the land of the brave, this country ... has become the home of the incarcerated and the land of the intimidated, Timothy Hairston wrote in arguing that overzealous police, prosecutors and judges have enslaved America in a national police state.
In a discussion that followed, Trethewey made it clear that he didn't buy in to Hairston's conspiracy theories. At first, Trethewey said later, he was a bit hesitant to give such blunt criticism to the kind of writers that reside in the city jail.
But Trethewey, who himself grew up in a rough neighborhood and learned to hold his own in the ring as an amateur boxer, said it didn't take him long to feel at ease with the inmates.
In fact, Trethewey has forged such a close relationship with his students that he agreed to testify as a character witness for Philbrook in federal court when he was recently sentenced for robbing a bank.
The class - the first of its kind in the jail - was started this year after Trethewey got the idea from jail chaplain Gene Edmonds during a conversation at a political gathering. For security reasons, the class is limited to six people, and there's a short waiting list of prisoners who want to participate.
Trethewey volunteers his time for the two-hour weekly class, so it is offered at no cost to taxpayers. A Hollins College graduate student teaches a similar creative writing class for female inmates at the jail.
Among other services, the jail provides classroom instruction for inmates seeking their GEDs. But the creative writing class fills a void for the more intellectual prisoners, some of them college-educated, who yearn for discussions that go deeper than the typical cellblock chatter and the blare of the television.
The class does not end with a final grade. Most of the students leave with little notice, as they are transferred to a prison to serve their sentences.
Most of them say that wherever they go - in the penal system and in the life that follows - they will continue to write.
"There's a lot of anger and a lot of torment in these pods," Philbrook said. "Just to have the opportunity to go into your cell and be able to vent it out on paper, it's a good outlet."
LENGTH: Long : 115 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: NHAT MEYER/Staff. 1. Timothy Hairston reads along asby CNBanother inmate reads an essay during their creative writing course
at the Roanoke City Jail. 2. Andre Hester listens as a poem is read
during class at the Roanoke City Jail. Hollins College professor
Eric Tretheway (left) reads a poem to start class. He has become
close with the class, and will testify as a character witness for
one student in federal court. color. 3. Professor Eric Tretheway
(right) listens to a question by an inmate concerning a poem as
(left to right) Andre Hester, Timothy Hairston and John Philbrook
Jr. listen. 4. John Philbrook Jr. reads a story he wrote for
creative writing class. The inmates write their stories ahead of
time and read them during class before they are critiqued by the
group.