Reality of Prison Writer 5, –E.C. Theus-Roberts
My literary colleague and friend, a rarity in prison, and I had a conversation recently about the “void of prison life.”
Few people, scholars and expert or average people and prisoners themselves, write about prison being the “land of the living dead.” The void of prison life is something everybody incarcerated feels to some degree. For writers, like myself and my friend who writes plays and TV pilots, confronting the void is indivisible.
Writers write first and foremost for themselves. Selfish or not, it’s still true. I write therefore I am, as does every other scribbler. My audience comes second but I’m also part of that audience. I, like every other writer, write things I’d like to read and tell myself others would too.
We prison writers encounter the void when we attempt to communicate our creative product with the rest of the world.
Like my colleague and countless others, the most frequent and habitual response when I submit an essay, story or even a query letter is white noise. Most times people don’t respond. After all, it’s only a prisoner. Not as if James Patterson is writing or anything.
It gets to be much more than discouraging even for myself today, receiving responses more often than not. White noise’s frequency speaks to a deeper problem: Society’s indifference toward the prisoner. This is why we term prison the land of the living dead. Society shuts us up here and forgets about us being people.
Prison writers wage a constant battle against such perspectives by and through their creativity and attempt to share it with the land of the living,
Some efforts garner small successes.
Many, many, many more fail to pierce the shroud.
But to quote my friend, “that’s the prisoner life, I suspect.”
Perseverance is most necessary for a prison writer. A prison writer is most definitely one of the people Oscar Wilde was speaking of when he said, “It is a sign of a noble nature to refuse to be broken by force.”
Prison Writers Support Organization 