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Laddar... Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer (2007)av Richard Shelton
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Gå med i LibraryThing för att få reda på om du skulle tycka om den här boken. Det finns inga diskussioner på LibraryThing om den här boken. This is the heart wrenching story of one man's experience teaching creative writing in the Arizona prisons over the course of 30+ years. The stories of various individuals and situations all serve to support the book's inditement of the American prison system as completely untenable and counter-productive. Excellent. ( ) A terrific book. Poignant without being sentimental, moving without being naive. Shelton is an inspiring example of how a writer can make a difference in the world. As someone who also teaches in a prison, I found his perspective on the moral ambiguity of caring about people who have often, undeniably, done terrible things, extremely valuable. His examples of people who have transcended their pasts and their horrible, stupid choices, as well as those who have endured terrible miscarriages of justice and sometimes inhumane treatment is humbling. He is not, as I have said before, naive. He sees quite clearly the violence and twisted thinking of the men he comes in contact with behind bars...he also points out that a good number of them are not inmates, but guards/staff. The lines of who is a criminal and who is not are thought-provokingly blurred. I would be surprised by anyone who could read this book and not have their thinking changed by it. We are all, in one way or another, criminals, and all the victims of crime. Shelton successfully breaks down the barriers of us vs them. As Robert Benchley once said, "There are only two kinds of people in the world -- those who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don't." inga recensioner | lägg till en recension
Ever since he was asked to critique the poetry of a convicted murderer, he has lived in two worlds. Richard Shelton was a young English professor in 1970 when a convict named Charles Schmid--a serial killer dubbed the "Pied Piper of Tucson" in national magazines--shared his brooding verse. But for Shelton, the novelty of meeting a death-row monster became a thirty-year commitment to helping prisoners express themselves. Shelton began organizing creative writing workshops behind bars, and in this gritty memoir he offers up a chronicle of reaching out to forgotten men and women--and of creativity blossoming in a repressive environment. He tells of published students such as Paul Ashley, Greg Forker, Ken Lamberton, and Jimmy Santiago Baca who have made names for themselves through their writing instead of their crimes. Shelton also recounts the bittersweet triumph of seeing work published by men who later met with agonizing deaths, and the despair of seeing the creative strides of inmates broken by politically motivated transfers to private prisons. And his memoir bristles with hard-edged experiences, ranging from inside knowledge of prison breaks to a workshop conducted while a riot raged outside a barricaded door. Reflecting on his decision to tutor Schmid, Shelton sees that the choice "has led me through bloody tragedies and terrible disappointments to a better understanding of what it means to be human." Crossing the Yard is a rare story of professional fulfillment--and a testament to the transformative power of writing. Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
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