I haven’t
noticed it before, but I am an extremely dominant person. All
my life I have been submissive and let everybody walk all over
me—now it’s my turn. I do this by writing. That
way I can control my dominant nature in a safe way, while getting
paid! I’ve experienced all of the emotions in my poems
first hand, along with thousands of others, but when you mix
that with my creativity to write and my vocabulary, and the
gross amount of books I’ve read, the effect is dazzling.
So, all in all, I have found my calling. You, my wonderful reader,
are taking part in a life-changing moment for me, documented
by an eighteen-year-old felon with a pen. Isn’t that amazing
in itself? Well, I owe it all to you, Beat. Forever gracious,
Dominic. I am a writer .
-
Dominick, thebeatwithin.org
Sometimes,
being proud of what you write is all you need to have a good
day.
-Anna
Bethune, Stanford University
I must confess
that unlike my esteemed colleagues, my relationship with writing
has been a less loving one. In fact, when I filed my dissertation
at Berkeley in 2000, it was with the intention of returning to
a state where reading was a pleasure divorced from writing, particularly
academic writing that, to me, valued obscure, theoretical, politically
unengaged, emotionally barren expression. So rather than “go
on the job market,” I began volunteering at a non-profit,
The
Beat Within, which conducts writing workshops in juvenile
halls around the Bay Area.
Although this
may seem like a completely improbable transition, my dissertation,
Dead Men Talking, examines 18th century execution sermons
and crime narratives composed by-ish and about Africans in colonial
and early America, and analyzes the historical, legal, and literary
connections between blackness, criminality and writing. Sadly,
the conflation of blackness and criminality evident in the 18th
century has not changed significantly in the present day. For
this reason and others, I became determined to understand more
about these seemingly intractable bonds, and to contribute, in
some tiny way, to loosening them in my everyday life, rather than
just writing about them for an audience I believed was just interested
in their academic significance, not their lived consequences.
At The Beat Within, instead of ruminating about the messages sent
by dead black men, I worked with mostly African American, Latino,
and Asian incarcerated youth providing them with a venue in which
to write, and hopefully, better understand, their stories. What
I learned from these young men and women literally changed my
view of the world (and teaching), and shook me out of my comfortable
suburban stupor.
I was the associate director of The Beat Within for five years,
and in this capacity helped run several writing workshops and
produce the weekly publications comprised of writing and art by
and for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youth and adults.
The best part of the job was going into juvenile hall facilities
around the Bay Area and working with individuals who typically
felt unheard and unseen, especially in anything resembling a classroom
setting. In a workshop of 15-20 participants, the writers ranged
from nearly illiterate to linguistically proficient. Some were
non-native English speakers, and most, particularly in urban areas,
spoke nonstandard English, a sort of Ebonics that signifies, I
discovered, class much more than race. So in any one workshop
I would go from acting as an amanuensis to offering suggestions
to an accomplished writer to simply talking with a participant
about his or her case, family, difficulties, loves—whatever
they chose to share. And at the end of each workshop, we encouraged
the writers to read their prose or poetry aloud.
The goal of The Beat Within program is twofold: First, to reveal
to the writers that they have valuable things to say and teach
based on their life experiences; and two, to locate the participants
in a community of writers, who most often share similar, and often
isolating, experiences. Thus, in the weekly workshops, as facilitators
we did all we could to create an inviting, comfortable place to
speak and write. Second, to enhance the sense of community, The
Beat prints the writings produced in the workshops each week in
The Beat Within publication and brings this 80-100-page magazine,
filled with the art and writing produced in each of the six counties
in which it conducts workshops, back to the writers themselves
so they can see their work and the work of their community members
in print.
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