Reality of a Prison Writer 15–E.C. Theus-Roberts

Reality of a Prison Writer 15—E.C. Theus-Roberts

                Being incarcerated means several unavoidable conveniences. If you’re a writer it means even more.

                People ask me about my “coping mechanisms”; about how, as a writer, I come to terms with all that prison imposes. The how is probably the most difficult of all to answer.

                Writing is an expansive endeavor. Creation of alternate realities, alien worlds, lively characters, addictive plots and storylines, construction of answers to deeply important questions, challenging the given assumptions of humanity, even and especially harnessing poetic fire. A writer’s world and worldview are infinitely far reaching. There aren’t walls capable of confining them.

                Then, there is prison. Prison is deprivation and immense constraint. Above and beyond the ever-relevant violence, rampant dejection, paucity of purpose-driven living, degrees of delusion and derangement.. Worse than the chicanery of facility management and detrimental, systemic “professional detachment” of prisoncrats in mid to upper administration. The special Kafka-esque hell that is modern prison is meant to “close-in” on you.

                Generally prison takes an already precariously balanced mind and warps it beyond recognition. Freud once said “the delusional do not recognize their delusion.” When the walls close in, nothing is truer nor has more consequences. Paranoia, suspicion, pent up aggression and violent urges mix and mingle with deliberate and unintentional disinformation, the slanted perception unique to prison resulting in most unfortunate events.

                There is a bright side because “the lunatic is a dreamer in the waking state.” I like to imagine Immanuel Kant was talking about the writer when he said that. For writers, walls don’t close in—they fade to nothing.

                Whenever I sit down to write, I’m not considering the hardship of writing less than eighth tall letters to conserve paper. No concern for cramps from writing with a four-inch pen cartridge inside a flexible clear plastic tube. Nor am I worried about how sore my lower back will be after 12 hours hunched over my writing perched on the edge of a concrete slab for want of a chair. None of this. In writing I lose any care whatsoever for environment, conditions, those in my immediate surroundings. Se vale la pena.

                I’d love to claim I’m just that resilient. Though truth is closer to me being too stubborn to break. In all honesty, I don’t cope. When I write, I’m no longer in prison. For me, the thing to be coped with is coming back to prison from that creative Eden engaging in the craft transports me to.