Reality of a Prison Writer 12—Emmanuel Theus-Roberts
Prison is a bad place to be stuck in your head. People stuck inside the four walls of their minds, all alone with their delusions of grandeur, surrounded by similarly situated people, all stashed away behind actual walls and steel doors. Definitely not the best scenario for a writer, Still, being inside your own head is a requisite for the craft. Least of all a prison writer’s worries is whether their current project will garner a Nobel.
Prison is a place of Machiavellian connivance where disinformation meets self-delusion accompanied by volatile, aggressive paranoias. Prison is tense. For creatives, it’s the balancing of this environment that is most necessary and labor intensive.
While prisoners and administrators are notorious for having a spectacular lack of imagination. Beyond their particular delusion pathology is the everyday struggle to circumnavigate many prisoners and correctional officers all in their heads. How do you create the next “Count of Monte Cristo”, “Taming of the Shrew”, or “Maya’s Notebook” when you have to deal with this or that inebriated prisoner who’s gotten it in his head that you’re the reason he isn’t happier drunk? Are you supposed to pull through, under the pressure and torments of some correctional officer who just happens not to be living in domestic bliss at home that decides you’re her new favorite point of ire? Are you seriously expecting to create poetic art like John Clare’s “An Invite to Eternity” or “To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars,” by Richard Lovelace with those conditions?
If you’re incarcerated there is no choice. A prison writer following their flight of fancy often creates beauty. In general, though, imprisoned flights of fancy translate to further unfortunate events. In pursuit of the former one must follow the three D’s of writing in and out of prison:
DISTANCE
DETERMINATION
DISCIPLINE
These apply to being in your head as well as out of it. Otherwise. You’d start believing you’re Napoleon, perhaps you’d prefer Julius Caesar?
Prison Writers Support Organization 