writing group.” It is impossible to do this work with authenticity and not be deeply affected by it. And slowly, in the unlikeliest of places, mutual healing begins.
Perhaps the most difficult part of these intense sessions is how attached the facilitator becomes to the group members. Beyond the logistical concerns and manipulations to make the program work—and they are considerable, involving a seemingly endless learning curve filled with sharp turns and reversals—this deeper connection is what can keep us going for ten years, week after week after week. You identify with those “empty spaces that yearn for fullness” and learn from “the certainty of impermanence, the folly of desiring things to be other than how they are.” You struggle to hold firm the boundaries between them and all the former versions of yourself that keep popping up in their/your writing. You, as Sharon says, “want to spring us all out of prison and into freedom with the magic of writing… to change the world, their worlds, my world, the world of our bigger communities, with our loud, wild voices.”
But there are boundaries, bigger and more forbidding than the barbed wire of a physical prison or the locked doors of the heart, or the reach of one woman’s passionate vision. While inside, the young women have enough structure to get them to classes, assigned jobs, therapy, even writing group. Once outside, you can only provide so much incentive, facilitation, cheerleading, and other personal resources. At some point you, too, need to learn to let go. You can’t, as Sharon says, “keep wanting for them if they didn’t want for themselves.” And so, after ten brave and incredibly rich years, she was able to step back and evaluate the balance between what she could offer and what she needed, knowing she had gained what she came for through all she had given of herself, her time, her talents. There can be no greater gift to her struggling writers; no firmer path to their mutual growth. At some point, each of us must move onward—even with the occasional backward step. And as both Sharon and I can tell you, a wealth of these girls-become-women will remain active in our hearts and our lives well into the future.
Sarah Bartlett
Westport, MA
• • •
In 2010, Sarah W. Bartlett created writinginsideVT for Vermont’s incarcerated women to write for personal and social change within a supportive community. She co-edited two collections of their writings. Hear Me, See Me: Incarcerated Women Write (Orbis Books, 2013) and LifeLines: Re-Writing Lives from Inside Out (Green Writers Press, 2019). Learn more at: https://writinginsidevt.com/.
It wasn’t very long after I began volunteering at Touchstone that I began taking notes on our sessions, forcing myself to record everything that had happened each day as soon as I got home. Meeting with the girls (as I affectionately call them), dealing with the staff and administration, finding pertinent prompts and material, all held so much emotion, power, and drama that I must have somehow known there was a bigger story there, even though that idea was certainly not at the forefront of my mind at the time. I just knew I had to get the details, the dialogue, the anecdotes—all of it—scribbled into my red notebook, or typed hurriedly on my computer, exhausted or not.
With no paradigm to follow, I had to make one up. And revise what I’d planned more often than not, as the girls challenged my every strategy. After many sessions, I realized I had to start typing up their work so they could see what amazing poets they truly were. I brought in plastic folders so they could gather their poems into a collection, and this delighted them. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to eventually get them to sign publication releases, imagining the creation of an anthology of their work one day, which I did publish in 2005.
So all the details in I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent are as close as possible to what actually happened in our sessions, public readings, and other time together. The young women, Touchstone staff members, Hotchkiss teachers, students, and others you will read about are real, and most have given consent to use their actual names, though a few have been changed for various reasons.
But there is much not told, many young women not written about, many poems still in files in cabinets and my computer, as ten years is a long time. I wish you could know them all, these splendid, courageous, profound human beings. I wish you could know more of what they’ve endured as girls in “the system,” in their homes, classrooms, and neighborhoods. I wish you could know them now, women in their twenties and thirties, raising children, trying to make it in this troubled world, determined to give those children the best of themselves, struggling to make it with their partners.
I want you to know their humanity, their beauty, their gifts, without the cruel labels assigned to them by society. I want you to know how unsurprising it is that they’ve been incarcerated for doing what they did—selling and using drugs, truancy, assault, prostitution, running away—in most cases, to survive impossible situations. I want you to know how much they have to offer the world.
Perhaps this book can elucidate some of those things; I hope so.
But what I can tell you is this: those young women saved me. And my gratitude for them, each and every one, is immeasurable. This book is a small expression of that gratitude. Thank you, my dearest, dearest girls.
Sharon Charde
Lakeville, CT
January 28, 2020
“I am always doing things I can’t do.
That’s how I get to do them.”
—Pablo Picasso
I was wild, raw, still crazed with grief twelve years after my son had fallen from a wall in Rome and died alone in the night. Despite the details gleaned from the embassy and investigation, the autopsy, his teachers in the junior year abroad program, and the friend who was with him that night, his death continued to be an unsolved mystery in my mind. I thought I’d tried everything possible to heal myself—becoming a shaman, falling in love with a woman, writing poetry, traveling the world, going to therapy, living alone on an island for nine months, meditating long hours on Buddhist retreats. But my world continued crumbled and unredeemed. My husband and I grieved differently, so often found it difficult to offer the comfort we so badly needed to each other.
I was stuck in a black hole, blind and dumb, staring at what Pema Chodron, esteemed Buddhist scholar and teacher, called “the gorilla in the mirror.”
Me.
I couldn’t bear what I saw.
Someone, maybe one of my therapy clients, gave me a book, Ophelia Speaks, a collection of first-person pieces written by teen girls. I ripped through it, remembering the inner-city girls I’d taught so long ago, my adolescent clients, and how I’d loved them. The girls in the book—their pain felt like my pain, somehow. And they were writing about it, pouring out their stories as I’d been prompting the women in my writing workshops to do.
Around the same time I heard about Touchstone, a residential treatment center for young women that had opened up in a town not too far from mine. I thought, Maybe I could go there, volunteer myself, start a group, get the girls to write about their lives ? I called the place and talked with
