FEATURED GIRLS
Tarray
Chimere
Jeni
Miranda
Molly
HOTCHKISS STUDENTS
Lacey
Carla
Becca
Brady
Caroline
Lois
TOUCHSTONE GIRLS IN HOTCHKISS GROUP
Kimani
Molly
Miranda
Ja’Keria
Dominique
Marissa
HOTCHKISS TEACHERS
Nancy
Athena
BOSTON TRIP GIRLS
Molly
Miranda
Ja’Keria
Artrese
Dominique
OTHERS
Sister Benedicta (my mentor as a young woman)
Cecile (Tarray’s grandmother)
Suzanne (Danbury High teacher)
Stewart Wilson (Artwell director)
Brian Judd (TV interviewer)
Dennis Watlington (one of first African American students at the Hotchkiss school)
Pam (Hartford Academy liason)
Denise (Tarray’s mentor for the Sunken Garden performance)
Jon Baskin (documentary filmmaker)
Matthew (my son)
John (my husband)
What pulls any of us to do this kind of work? It can be hard to trace the source of such a fierce call, although Sharon—in the aftermath of her son’s death and the closing of her family therapy practice—clearly sought new direction and meaning for her life. And despite the roadblocks, second guessing, and myriad other challenges along the way, it is undeniably true that writing with women who have been caught in “the system” as a result of all kinds of abuse and addiction can be both humbling and healing. In the right hands, layers of need and fulfillment manifest in process, product, and belonging. As Sharon wrote, “things don’t go away; they become you.”
And so the world of young women she worked with at Touchstone became Sharon’s. Like anyone entering the uniquely chaotic world of justice-involved institutions, she quickly acclimated to the physical restraints of locked doors; the constant chatter among those charged with keeping order; the unpredictability of schedules, staff, and group members; the challenging borders between plan and execution. And beneath it all, she gently midwifed the deep expressiveness that the girls soon enough learned to share in a safe and confidential space set apart in the otherwise regimented and restricted environment. She learned the rules and how to bend them to support each young woman’s emerging voice. She put herself in front of them week after week, for two hours, at her own volition and out of her own love for writing which soon enough morphed into love for these struggling young women.
One of the more humbling experiences of holding writing space in such a setting—once you have “proven” yourself by showing up again and again, regardless of whether any group members do; by acting consistently, showing mutual respect; and treating each story/voice as worthy of engaged listening—is the mutual enrichment of shared stories from such different worlds. Sharon was wise to keep putting “her” girls’ stories before wider outside audiences. I know from our Vermont readings, audiences were consistently awed by the power of these women’s voices, their courage, their determination to grow and change. As Sharon wrote elsewhere, “I pull words from a deeper place, feelings from behind doors I didn’t know were closed. I face fears and change, look into mirrors side by side with the girls in my 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