$50,000 Challenge Grant from the NEH!

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We're thrilled to announce that Words Without Walls is recipient of a $50,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Challenge Grant.

What does "challenge" mean?  It means we're going to be raising an additional $50,000 in order to get the full benefit of the NEH grant award. 

For more information about this grant, you can read our press release here.

And, if you want to help us meet the challenge of our challenge grant, you can donate here.

 

 

 

Home

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It was the oddest pairing, but I had a feeling good things were going to come from this week’s class. I had invited Tenzin, a classmate of mine and a Tibetan refugee who grew up in India, to be a guest speaker in my class. My class this fall is centered on the theme of home. Tenzin writes about growing up in India without Indian citizenship, never able to go to return to the land her father and mother call home. She writes about being in the US for grad school—making a semi-permanent home in Pittsburgh. She knows the multi-facets of home and that gut-wrenching longing. She has a talent for writing but doubts it. She has an important story to tell.

My students know homesickness too. They are, after all, in jail. They too are away from home, not by choice. One student came in one week with a worried brow. He couldn’t get a hold of his daughter and worries something is wrong. Another student wrote about how he misses his girlfriend. One week a student’s mother died and he wrote about his mom’s cooking that he’ll never be able to taste again. Every week they ask me what they weather is like outside. They doubt their writing abilities, and doubt that they have anything to say.

Tenzin brings a piece about a houseplant our class. The plant looks like it’s dying so she sings to it, talks to it, and begs it not to die. The plant represents her other side, the part of her that hopes for home.

“Have you published this?” the students ask Tenzin.

Tenzin laughs and says she’s hasn’t because she’s too scared to submit it.

“It’s amazing,” the students encourage her. They tell her she is a good writer and a good teacher. I beam with pride as I watch them point to specific sentences, images, symbols in Tenzin’s work that spoke to them.

Inspired by Tenzin’s piece, we do an in-class prompt: pick an object in your cell and make it a symbol for something in your life. One student writes about a cold air vent as a symbol for his terminally ill friend who committed suicide in jail.

I glance at Tenzin. I can tell she is outside of herself, absorbed in these men’s lives—too filled with empathy in that moment to think about how much she misses her home. 

This class changes teachers’ lives too.

Rachel Kaufman, teacher

 

 

A Physicist Dog-Walker

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My most heartening teaching moment this fall came from working in the State Correctional Institute in Pittsburgh. My co-teacher, Mike Bennett, and I led a class on characterization and scene setting.

We laid out the glossy heads of rock stars and soldiers, teen girls and amputees, and asked the men to pick one character to write about. The first takers in the all-male class tried to pick out the most masculine figures—“I gotta go with the boxer”—but I was happy to see a couple of guys grab pictures of women, a hippie girl in a poppy field, a serious intern at a sewing machine.

Mike and I also grabbed our pens and creased our notebooks. We decided early on we wanted to write with our students. (It beats staring, bored, at them while they work.) Before writing, though, we had a short conversation about how to bring a character to life just by asking questions. What is your character wearing? Is their head shaved? What do you think they do for a living? Emphasis on conversation. Mike and I, and our other co-teacher Sarah Shotland—absent this class—never lectured to the men. For one, discussion is much more productive than authoritarian teaching, but, for two, our students are already pros.

We have a class full of amazing writers. One student, Malakki, serving life, just wrote his own op-ed piece proving with efficient data, biting commentary, and personal narrative why he should be considered for parole. Others describe the prison atmosphere, cells, the grounds with enough sensory detail to put Capote to shame. Sometimes, as far as teaching goes, it’s just about giving names to techniques students already use—controlling metaphor, refrain, point of view.

When I mentioned defying stereotypes, throwing out the notion that you want your characters to be strange, the guys perked up. A couple of them seemed to genuinely be hearing something new. It was a moment of improv for me. I just knew I wanted to address stereotypes. Prison does have a culture that encourages strict boundaries and labels. But I didn’t really know what I was going to say about it. The idea partly came from our program director, Sheryl St. Germain’s, line, “Revise into strangeness.” Strangeness seemed the best way to describe how you want to surprise the reader with characters who defy expectations: a physicist dog-walker. And when the men did write, and share, they kept mentioning the word “strange” before reading their pieces aloud. Hearing this gave me joy.

The moment was so refreshing because I often struggle with explaining concepts clearly enough so others understand what’s in my head. Shoot, sometimes I have to break it down to my own self. Forget le mot juste for writing. Teachers struggle to find the right word all the time. But it was obvious that day that Mike and the guys and I connected as a group. It was obvious they were having fun with the prompt. Thinking of that day gets me through the not-so-smooth graduate program days. When I was in undergrad, my professors told us one of the greatest moments is when the bulb over a student’s head lights up during class. I too can say I’ve experienced this with a student in a classroom, and they were right: it’s wonderful.

Cedric Rudolph

The Poem is A Gun

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I’ve come back to ACJ. I taught three semesters and then left. I busied with post-MFA life—multiple jobs, attempting to craft at night, etc. About six months out of the Words Without Walls program, I started to feel disconnected. I didn’t miss poetry. I didn’t miss a classroom. I still, in various realms, had these things. What I missed was sitting in a circle with strong, kind men and women who need this art. Human beings who take a pencil to paper and know each word they craft is a step to recovery, to re-purposing the story they’ve already fallen into.

 What I miss doesn’t compare to what they miss. This month my student walked into the classroom saying he had a terrible week. When asked why, he answered, my mother died. No matter what I teach about the necessity of words, there is nothing to fill this moment.

Still, he comes each week. He is consistently one of the most engaged and dedicated writers. When we tell him it might be too soon he responds I need to get this out. He is brave in a way that embarrasses my own writing.

Two weeks ago a new student joined my class. He is stoic and tall. He looks like a baseball player, the kind who would tuck a mitt into his back pocket and all the girls would watch. His first class he doesn’t talk. When he comes back the following week, he places his notebook in my hands. Half is full. He spends the final hour of class telling me of helping his dying friend in jail, carrying him from cell to cell. He describes the smell of decay, asks, can I write from the perspective of these walls? He leans in close, nervously flips his notebook pages. I think not only of what these men and women miss, but what we miss about these men and women. What we forget. What we never see. He towers over me and his eyes are eager, alive, as he whispers, I’ve had a gun pointed at me. I’m not afraid. I can talk my way out of it. But writing these poems, I’m scared. I’m more scared than a gun right at my chest. I haven’t felt vulnerable in a long time and I can’t stop wanting this feeling now. I can’t stop writing. 

Alison Taverna, teacher