The Writing Woman and Queenie the Bag Lady

Three days to go! Count down to the launch of Paulie'a web (see sidebar) on Wednesday 16th October

I had terrific local response to the article (below) that I wrote for Jenny Needham Features Editor of the Northern Echo, focusing on South Durham references in my the prison expereince that lead to the writing of Paulie's Web.

Recent government proposals to build large super-prisons, involving the closure of smaller local prisons like Northallerton, have chilled my heart. We all have opinions about prisons, depending on whether our views are about justice, rehabilitation, revenge, or restitution. For some people prisons can seem hidden, secret places but others have more personal experience of them  that might involve working in prison or having an acquaintance, friend or family member serving time inside.

Some people here the North East will be in this position - having a sister, mother, daughter or niece serving a sentence behind bars. I know this because over several years, for two days a week, I was Writer in Residence at HMP Low Newton just outside Durham City.

 Inside this prison – as well as women from all parts of the country – I worked with women from County Durham. Teesside and North Yorkshire, serving sentences for every kind of offence. In the main they were ordinary people, women you might see any day in Bishop Auckland’s Newgate Street or Darlington’s Cornmill Shopping Centre.

In fact, I was once walking down Newgate Street  when a young woman wheeling a baby in a buggy with her mother by her side  swerved to a stop, saying, ‘Hi Wendy!’ She turned to her mother, saying ‘This is her I was telling you about from Low Newton - The Writing Woman.’

When I started being a ‘Writing Woman’, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. But what happened to me in prison was the most life-enhancing, the most life changing experience. Afterwards, I was a different person, a different writer.

My job was to help these women of all ages to find their voice through private, written words on the page. In my time at HMP Low Newton we published two substantial collected editions of women’s writing – editions that travelled the length of the country. We wrote poems, prose fragments, short stories, plays. We had two open-to-the-public performances inside the prison, of the women’s work. We ran a parallel Litfest Inside at the time of the Durham Litfest. One woman had her story broadcast on the BBC. We had our own Orange Prize Project… and so on.

We had lots of purposeful fun and rueful laughter. The women learned that ‘writing down’ was making sense of things. Writing down  can give order to what might be a chaotic life. In those small workshops we all learned a lot about ourselves. Some stories, well-formed and written down, stayed in the woman’s possession and – by their own decision - never saw the light of day because the content was too raw.

These positive experiences were only possible because of my collaboration with  teacher and Head of Learning and Skills Avril Joy, (now a published writer herself), and the compassionate support of the then governor Mike Kirby, to whom my new novel Paulie’s Web is dedicated.

Paulie’s Web is a novel, not a documentary account. But its true nature was inspired by hundreds and hundreds of days working shoulder to shoulder with a whole range of women who defied the reductive stereotype one finds in some fiction and dramas - even in some documentaries where the researchers clearly find the story they’re already looking for.

My novel is not a case study. It is a fiction that tells a special truth in distilling the tragedies, comedies and ironies of five women’s lives not just behind bars but out in society. These women meet each other in the white van on their way to their first prison. As well as Paulie - rebel, ex teacher and emerging writer - there is Queenie, the old bag lady who sees giants and angels, Maritza who has disguised her life-long pain with an ultra-conventional life, and serious drug addict, Lilah, who has been the apple of her mother’s eye. Then there is the tragic Christine – the one with the real scars, inside and out.

In Paulie’s Web there is the light and shade that I found in prison. Likewise here is the laughter, comradeship and tears. Here is the bullying and night-time fear. Here is the learning and self–revelation.

The stories of these five women merge as Paulie – free now after six years – goes looking for the women she first met in the white prison van. The truth of their lives unravels as, one by one, she finds them and what they have made of their lives ‘on the out’.

On the surface, this novel might seem to be a straightforward read. But as you read you might recognise, as I did, that there, but for the grace of God, go your mother, your daughter, your sister or your friend, who have fallen seriously foul of normal expectations of how a woman should be, what a woman should do.

The women I met and worked with took responsibility for what they had done and served their time. In their writing they looked inside themselves, made some sense of their experience and looked to the future. If Paulie’s Web expresses a fraction of this truth and alters to any degree the public perception of women who end up in prison, then Paulie has done her job, and the novel will fulfil my hope that fiction will reach places where stereotyped facts will never reach.

The Writing Game: Writing Behind Bars

My preoccupation on this month's  Writing Game programme is Writing Behind Bars

It's always good to talk to other writers. This week it has been a special inspirational treat to talk to two other writers with  experience of working in prisons.

I will begin with a story. One day I was walking down Newgate Street in Bishop Auckland. Towards me came a group of three people: a woman in her forties, a woman in her early Twenties and a little girl of three of or four. The young woman tugged her mother’s arm ands said, ‘Look Mam, this is the writing woman.’

We all smiled and nodded and I said how beautiful the little girl was. I had seen her photo as a baby when her mother was in prison. I asked the young woman if she was still writing. She shrugged and said there was no time, on the out. ‘But I still have my poems.’ She turned to her mother. ‘Don’t I Mam?’

This can happen to me now and then because the prison where I was writer in residence was in the main a local prison with many of the women there from our local communities.

On the programme (broadcast Sunday 4th March at 12 noon) I share the experience of working creatively in prison with my two guests

They are Avril Joy – a friend of the Writing Game – who worked for twenty five years at Low Newton Women’s prison as a teacher and later as head of Learning and Skills before becoming a full time writer. (see her blog on imprisonment at http://www.avriljoy.com/ )

She has now published two great novels The Sweet Track and The Orchid House, and has a novella and a short story collection on Kindle about women who end up in prison - When You hear the Birds Sing, and Susie Drew and Other Stories.

The other writer is Richard Hardwick who is at present writer in residence at Frankland men’s prison in Durham. He has previously worked in neuro-linguistic programming and worked with young people in social care. He has since published a well received novel Kicked Out and a moving memoir Andalucia. Avril and Richard read from their work on the programme. (Contact: www.richardwhardwick.co.uk )

On the programme the three of us sit around the fire in my study and discuss our experiences working as teachers and writers in prison. I worked out that between us we have nearly thirty four years between us, so there was a lot to talk about. The talk ranges from the difficult context of prison, the dark times, the laughter the ordinary and the extraordinary nature of the people one meets inside. We talk about the way the creative writing process can contribute to the lives of prisoners and how it affects the work of the writers who go into prison to do this work.

This was quite an emotional programme. One of my conclusions is that the hard experiences discussed here are not far from any of us. When I was working with women in prison I often thought, there but the grace of god go I. or my sister, or my daughter. I wrote a book about it, Paulie's Web.  (see sidebar)

If you want to listen again, remember that this programme is available as a podcast from Bishop FM or as a free download on iTunes. You can also listen to it on your computer.

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Desert Islands and Prison Life : Two Posts in One…

(Later…)

The Event seemed to go very well. The room was full of interested people and Durham City Arts Director Alison Redshaw – vision in her clothes of many colours – had everything in hand. The Durham Book Festival has started with a bang and our event was one cracker of the evening.

Librarian Charlie Darby Villis talked eloquently about the potent and dynamic role of books and reading in prison life. In fact without his hard work this year none of this would have happened)

Avril Joy talked passionately about her commitment to the women and her deep understanding of the social and political dilemma of women in prison. Then she read from her ne novel Bad Girl. (She had read from it yesterday in prison and the women loved it).

Then Richard Walker Hardwick gave his take on teaching original writing to the men in a high security prison. He read from his novel, Kicked Out which emerged from his work in shelters and hostels for homeless young people. The way he catches the voice of his young protagonist is uncanny.

Then me! I mostly stuck to my proposed script (below) and read from Knives and The Woman Who Drew Buildings (Extracts below here…)

Then Derek Sanders, Head of Learning and Skills gave his views on the technology of literacy and learning provision inside Low Newton.

The highlight of the evening was the interlinking performance, by professional actresses Zoe Lambert and Libby Davison (directed by Tess Denman Cleaver), mostly sampling some of the excellent work in the book we produced inside The Self Revealed. Through these two actresses the voices of the women we were all talking about came eerily into this studio theatre in the middle of the city of Durham.

Afterwards there were some interesting questions – not excluding the question from one gentlemen about the ‘bad’ language used both in the women’s writing and our own. It was a very interesting question, though to debate this crucial issue of authenticity, self, mutual respect and the link between fact and fiction would have taken a whole other meeting…

Earlier: What I thought I would say at a talk given as part of a panel at the Gala Theatre at the Durham Book Festival 2009:

‘Being a writer in Residence in any prison is to walk and work on the margins of society and the esoteric margins within the prison environment. We are outsiders who can only achieve anything if empathise with the prisoners in an environment where over-empathising with prisoners can be seen as perverse.

We experience - as do permanent staff - the borderland between freedom and incarceration. The fact that we come through the gates at the end of the day does not obviate the fact that for six or more hours we have not been free to act intuitively; to speak off the top of our heads; to hug a person who has made us laugh; to swap gossip about our history, our homes, our lovers and our children.

In this environment we have to create a desert island of personal freedom and invite the people we meet – staff as well as prisoners – to join us there. The treasures on my island include great books to read and the opportunity to write out of one’s boots, to write hot, and write well. The nice thing is that all you need is a pen and a notebook and you can take them back to your pad.

I think that inside or outside prison everyone can learn how to write well, and will certainly write better if they write a lot, with a waiting audience and a willing collaborator in mind.

In my residency totalling five years ( a stretch of three and a stretch of two) there emerged hundreds of pieces of writing from a wide range of women, a selection of which survive in dozens of pamphlets and leaflets culminating in two books Why Am I Running? And The Self Revealed. These are permanent records of what can seem an ephemeral sometimes unaccountable experience. Paradoxically this very free activity ticks many boxes in a box-ticking society.

During that time as well as the books we wrote a radio play. One woman, now safely back in China, wrote a short story that was broadcast by the BBC. One woman used her writing collection to illustrate her state of mind which helped to secure more appropriate sentencing. We participated in the international Changing Lives Through Literature Project. We invented the first Litfest Inside, where the women worked with seven published writers in fourteen days. We had two performances of women’s work to insiders and outsiders. We initiated a shadow Orange Project where women, read discussed and reviewed the shortlisted books for the Orange Prize. And so on.

The most wonderful thing was that for a few hours a day we could inhabit our Desert Island and remind ourselves of our unique humanity and remember we were citizens of the world…’

Extracts Read From Knives Short Story Collection

‘…So lets get back to this screaming of brakes. This noise of traffic in my ear. The lions roaring like people. The people growling like lions. And this girl! Her hand was digging in my shoulder. I could hardly see her through the haze, but she I knew from the very scent of her she was young. What was she saying? …

2 Extract from The Woman Who Drew Buildings:  

‘… But prison had succeeded where Sam with all his cocky charm had failed. Inside prison, smoking tobacco was the least-worst thing you could do to numb the pain, to while away the time….Of course prison had been a shock, terrifying. But in the end it was not so hard as Adam first feared. The worst thing was being warehoused and moved around like an object, with no sovereignty over your body, your possessions, or your daily routines. The fear inside those places was not about what happened but about what might happen: that something bad might happen even when in the end it didn’t. Dark tales and myths about what had happened to others in this same place flew about the place like black moths. Being suspended in such uncertainty could twang the steadiest of nerves and in the end he learned that a smoke could steady the nerves…’