The Castle Inside the Prison
The Castle Inside the Prison
Elizabeth Genovise
On Teaching Literature in a Jail Cell
It might be the ultimate cliché: “My students teach me.” It’s not a phrase I would have used until my experience as a college instructor at a Tennessee State correctional facility in 2023, teaching modern American literature and eventually a seminar in creative writing. As a writer, I’ve long practiced following my intuition, and it was this raw intuition that pulled me toward the job. Those who knew I’d taken the position expressed concern for my well-being and wondered whether I might have some self-destructive tendencies. I punted these emails and phone calls with the words, “I’m looking for a challenge,” which, in a way, was true. Yet I could not adequately explain why I chose to do it nor why I fell in love with the work.
Those first few weeks, it was purely the educator in me who responded to the situation. Initially frustrated with the classroom conditions (tiny room, no Internet, miniature whiteboard, zoo-level ambient noise screaming through paper-thin walls), it wasn’t long before I forgot the room and the absence of technology. This, I quickly realized, was a different world from what I’d known over the course of 14 years of teaching.
During my first lecture, I told my students, “You don’t need to take notes tonight; just listen.” They took arduous notes anyway. The first written assignment they submitted was supposed to be half a page long. They submitted two to three pages apiece. Nearly all of them wrote in calligraphy, not the sort of textbook cursive that grammar schools used to teach, but unique and personalized fonts they had developed through the years. They were ferocious self-editors from the get-go, visiting with me after class to explain where they thought they’d gone wrong in their analysis of a story we’d read. I showed samples of their work to friends, who immediately said with disbelief, “They did not write that.”
Typically, if I encounter perfectionism in my students, it is pathological, a matter of seeking order for order’s sake. But my students at the prison were determined to grasp the meaning of stories, not for any expedient reason but for the stories’ sake. They were working with both intellect and feeling; they were capable of pointed analysis but could also experience stories viscerally and attend to the responses of their inner voice.
It was the latter that made the art personal and not some academic exercise. Nobody asked me to change a grade after he’d edited his work. In fact, the word points rarely surfaced, which was surprising in and of itself. I am long accustomed to a utilitarian outlook from students, who will ask, “How much is this worth?” and then do quick math to determine whether they ought to bother with the readings. That question is particularly crushing in a literature course. How does one address the worth of a T. S. Eliot poem or Steinbeck novel in terms of points? A course in the humanities ought to be a place of exploration and the savoring of art. Now, it is all too often a kind of convenience store, wherein one’s students will purchase nothing unless it is cheap and aligned with preconceived axiomatic conclusions about what is worth having.
The very aloneness that was their curse as prisoners had also gifted them with capacities I rarely encounter in others. Isolation has a way of orphaning us from our personas. It strips us down just as pain does; it forces us to listen to ourselves and ask the sorts of questions we’d otherwise prefer to lose to the noise of a crowd.
My students at the prison were entirely without access to cell phones, the Internet, or social media. It took time to register the full implications of this. Academically, it meant they could not cheat. No Wikipedia, no SparkNotes, no way to purchase an essay, and no Google to provide them with a lazy assessment of a labyrinthine story. No artificial intelligence spewing out faux papers. Put simply, they had to do their own thinking; they were accountable for every last word they put to paper. As a teacher, I was enthralled by the realization that any assertion they made was truly theirs and theirs alone, be it ingenious or obtuse.
I was struck by how articulate, socially adept, and well-read they were. Free of the senseless addictions of Facebook and Twitter, forced to consult either books or their own minds instead of a phone glued to their palm, they could navigate conversation at a level I hadn’t experienced in years. They made eye contact when they spoke publicly, and their vocabulary levels were high. Some had taught themselves a second language; others had trained themselves in comparative religions. They picked up my phraseology quickly and then used it effectively in essays or homework assignments. It seemed they only needed to hear a word or concept once before they mortared it into a larger castle of ideas.
I found myself humbled by their written work, amazed that they could spot daubs of color and flashes of light I had never noticed, even in texts I knew practically by heart. I also respected their willingness to go all-in, and began reevaluating myself as an artist in reaction to their total submission to the literature. Moreover, they expected me to hold them to the highest standards. It was implicitly understood from the start: They were here to improve themselves, not to be babysat or flattered.
One night, I watched as one of the inmates reorganized the desks in perfect alignment with the floor tiles. I’d gibed him for this before—the chemistry in that room was always one of good-natured nitpicking—but this time when I harangued him, he turned and said, “It’s overcompensation, that’s why I do these things. My life was pure chaos for a long time. I know it looks like I’m going too far the other way, but it’s what I have to do for now until I hit that balance.”
This sort of self-assessment, delivered so casually, was the norm among these men. Put as simply as possible, they knew themselves. This emerged in both their writing and their speech. They located themselves in the dark sides of characters; they empathized with the guilty and the wounded; they evinced real joy in a character’s redemptive arc.
Any persona I’d attempted to project my first few nights, mostly in an effort to win their respect and prevent any abuse, molted off me like an old skin. I realized that not a single one of them wore a costume. Their cards were on the table, the red and the black, and I lost interest in hiding mine.
*
Near the end of that first semester, my students were required to choose a new story out of our anthology and do a presentation on that piece. I took a gamble on one student in particular, following an instinct to suggest a story outside of the text. It was Charles D’Ambrosio’s “The Point,” one of the most phenomenal pieces of short fiction ever composed, in my opinion, and a story I thought I knew down to the letter.
The following week, the student told me it was the story of his own childhood. It had rattled him so deeply that he tried to retell the story to his sister during visitation. In class, he delivered one of the most riveting presentations I’d heard in my entire teaching career. At one point, we locked eyes, both of us tearing up in response to a devastating passage he’d just read aloud, and I thought, This is what art looks like when it is allowed to live. The room was completely silent as he spoke, and I left the prison that night feeling as though I’d met that story for the first time.
I was also moved by their openness to me as both a teacher and a person. I’d anticipated disrespect, contempt, and rebellion; I am a 5-foot-2-inch-tall female, privileged and overeducated by most people’s standards. Yet here I was, strolling into a classroom to take charge of 11 grown men. But to these 11, I represented an opportunity to manifest their humanity.
They became fiercely protective. My first week, I made a joke (in poor taste) about being “disabled” when it came to using modern technology; several of the inmates overheard this in the library and misunderstood. Apparently, there was a debate regarding what my disability might be, until one of them finally approached me and asked. I explained it had only been a joke and asked why it mattered so much. Deadly serious, he said, “We can’t step up and help if we don’t know what’s wrong.”
It wasn’t the first time they’d assumed such a role. Previously, they’d worked with a professor who was suffering from burgeoning dementia. Instead of taking advantage of the situation, they discussed among themselves how to help him and divided up tasks—this one kept track of time, this one kept track of the syllabus, this one gently nudged the professor back on course when he began telling the same story for the third time. They took it upon themselves not just to maintain order but to protect the man’s dignity.
Viktor Frankl is famous for saying, “The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.” There are plenty of people who respond to imprisonment with roaring resentment and a lust for vengeance. But some cease projecting and instead look inward, confronting their dragons instead of pretending away their existence. They do battle with themselves instead of making enemies of the Other. They peer into mirrors and hold their ground, even if what peers back is frightening and fragmented. It is what an artist must do also, and I am certain there are artists among those inmates.
While several of my students had life sentences, most of the others were not due for parole for many years to come. When I tell people this, their usual response is, “Then what’s the point?” In other words: Why invest yourself in something that lacks all expedience? Why self-educate, why explore, why ask taxing questions when there is no career around the corner, no means of monetizing the experience or even advertising it to others?
The answer is that these students were hunting for more than a job or an item on their resumé. They were after much bigger fish—and from what I was able to witness, they were hooking them.
*
As a writer, I rely heavily upon my own vivid, narrative dreaming. I understand dreams not merely as problem-solving mechanisms but as acts of exploration and compensation. They lend a visual life to the dark side of each private moon, unleash all that we try to subjugate during daylight hours—and they do this not to haunt or torment us, even in the case of nightmares, but to revivify us. We wither without access to our shadow side. We also need to confront that savagely creative life force that our careers and family duties often asphyxiate in the name of expedience, material comfort, or “keeping the peace.”
Near the end of my first semester at the correctional facility, I had one of those dreams the shamans of old would have called a “big dream,” a message incarnate that belonged not just to me but to every person in my life.
In my dream, I was on the prison campus for some kind of open visitation day. The atmosphere was that of a large family reunion—people milling about everywhere, picnic tables laid out, a pickup baseball game somewhere in the background. I wandered through the crowd and passed many of my inmates engaged with family or friends, and each encounter was deeply revealing.
One of them was asked to carve a ham, but when he removed a knife from his pocket, his family collectively backed away, then accused him of “refusing to change.” They seemed almost gleeful at having this excuse to demonize him. The knife drooped in his hand; he said, “This is how I got here in the first place—I did what you asked. I was ten f—ing years old.”
A few yards away I spotted another, in military garb, sitting under a tree with two or three other men also in uniform. “Only with you guys, and here,” my student was saying, “only with you, and here, was it okay to admit we might die.”
The most poignant encounter involved the same man who had done that presentation on “The Point” story. He passed me and was carrying a beautiful little boy on his shoulders, giving me the distinct impression that he’d been carrying the child for miles and miles. I stopped him and asked, “Is this your son?” He turned haunted eyes on me and responded, “He’s me,” before continuing his lonely trek through the crowd.
I wandered further. I began spotting people I knew from outside the prison—family members, old friends, colleagues. A dear friend from my hometown was at the perimeter fence, trailed by a crowd of people I recognized from our old high school. They were all clawing at him, pulling him back from the fence, though he’d found a breach and could have easily escaped had they let go of him. I suddenly understood: In real life, he was still living in our hometown where high school football games and house parties had been the pinnacle of everyone’s existence. They couldn’t let him go, nor could he shake himself free.
Elsewhere, I spotted a line of my traditional students all holding iPhones over a huge open vat of boiling coffee. They were weeping, desperate to let the phones drop to their own deaths but unable to open their fingers. I glimpsed two of my closest friends hunched over on the grass, unable to rise because they were so weighted down with rosaries and icons; they were clad in white damask as though they’d stripped an altar and stepped into its clothing. For them, religious practice had been turned inside-out, becoming a refuge from self-analysis; their loyalty to doctrine had prevented them from determining their true vocations or sorting out their deepest needs.
As I wandered on, I saw people hauling Radio Flyer wagons full of family members or material goods, people turning in literal circles as they read the same book again and again, people trying to set up offices at picnic tables with such urgency that you’d think an hour away from their jobs might put them in mortal danger. One person went about frantically with a magnifying glass, studying everything on hand but oblivious to the fact that a stunning exotic bird sat on his own head, radiant as a lighthouse beam. Another walked around with a big pack of nametag stickers and kept replacing the label on his shirt with a new name. I approached this man and asked what his original name was. “Don’t ask me,” he fairly screamed. “Can’t you see I don’t want to remember?”
We were all there—each personality type and demographic. We were all in a prison of our own making, appearing to resist the tyranny of our own minds but secretly in love with our captors. For no one tried very hard to leave, despite the fact that fences sagged everywhere and guards were few and far between. We loved our provisional identities, loved our meaningless responsibilities, loved the people and the practices that filled the silence so as to cancel out the inner voice.
We loved our phones and televisions; we loved housework and errands and pointless committee meetings and empty chatter in hallways stalling us from the long solo drive home; we loved video games, news of bad weather, political dramas, tabloids. We loved the stories we had made up about ourselves and we loved our own refusal to revise them. We loved denying our own mortality. In real life, some of us had broken obvious laws, but serious moral questions pick up where the penal code leaves off, and who among us could say, “I am living in truth”? If the answer to that question determined whether one was incarcerated or not, the vast majority of us would be behind bars.
Upon waking from this dream, my first thought was that of all the people in that crowd, only the literal prisoners seemed to comprehend their own hell. Everyone else was engaged in an elaborate deception, smiling brightly, keeping busy with activities of no consequence. I recall someone cutting the same cake on repeat, another woman pouring sugar from one container into another and then back again.
My visceral response each time I passed one of the inmates was relief, akin to the way I felt on a backcountry hike when I became briefly lost and then spotted a rock cairn. Here was something solid and real that marked a trail out of the thickets. These men had looked into the abyss. They were struggling, but this struggle was honest. While they were shuttered from what we all call “real life,” they knew the city within down to the darkest alley. The rest of us lacked the basic orientation skills necessary should life suddenly shove us off that familiar strip of carpet we’d elected to call home.
There is no story without a shadow. The man who casts no darkness has no hero’s arc. And yet despite the fairy tales and movies that stirred us as children, too many of us grow up unconsciously hoping never to have a story—to be without shadow until the very end. Our cultural climate affirms that avoidance strategy, emphasizing via every possible medium that comfort is the ultimate end, that all forms of stress or suffering are intolerable and should either be banished via medication or else projected onto some enemy whose destruction will magically reinstate our peace.
It was not just as an educator or even as a writer that I found myself so drawn to my work at the prison. Something in my spirit yearned for the personal quest embodied in these men. Their presence in my life continually begs the question: Where would we be, had we made early inmates of our shadow sides, lived in close quarters with them, listened to them, and integrated them into our larger understanding of ourselves and others?
Do we want a flatline existence like an EKG gone dead, or do we want to rise and fall, rise and fall, crawling through tunnels like Gilgamesh or Tolkien’s heroes in hopes of emerging worthy of starlight and new harbors?
Elizabeth Genovise
Poet & Author
Elizabeth is a poet, literature instructor & author of Third Class Relics.
Painting by John Martin
