Life Inside

This is NOT a “humble brag,” a concept I detest for what I humbly believe to be its gross insincerity. (As in: What a humbling experience it is to my humble self to have all this great stuff happen to me. Let me tell you just how great. But humbly. Puh-lease. Spare me.)

This is a BRAG, BRAG. I am unabashedly bragging about the men I have worked with for the past four years, all inmates at Oregon State Penitentiary. I am bragging—without an ounce of humility—because today Eugene Weekly launches a regular monthly column, Life Inside, which will feature essays written by these men. Readers will be transported inside the walls of a maximum security prison to learn about the everyday lives experienced by the men who, for decades, have called this place “home.”

Working with these men, helping them craft stories that reflect their experience, stories that empower them in a powerless place, stories that help give them voice when they had none…this has been the single most rewarding work I have ever done as a teacher or an editor.

These men all committed crimes, bad ones. None claim they were wrongly accused or convicted. What they do claim—now 20, 30, 35 years into their “grip of time” behind bars—is that they are human beings capable of growth and change. Of deep remorse. Maybe, even, of a kind of forgiveness. In one terrible moment they ruined lives: the lives of their victims, their victims’ families, the lives of their own families, of themselves. They know that. They live with that.

But they also just live. They eat and sleep and work. They make and lose friends. They visit with family. And now, they write. They want to be thought of, to be remembered, for something other than the worst thing they did.

I hope you will read their work, today and in the future.

I write this with deep gratitude to Camilla Mortenson, Eugene Weekly editor, and Anita Johnson, one of the paper’s owners, who embraced the idea of a monthly column. And I write with everlasting gratitude to OSP Recreation Specialist Steven Finster, who supported, with enthusiasm, compassion and never-say-die energy, the formation of the group.

To learn/read more about the writing group, the men, and what I learned from them, may I (humbly!) suggest my latest book, A Grip of Time: When prison is your life.