The Furious Spinner

I went to juvenile detention today to talk about writing. I won't tell you the city or anyone's name or even describe anyone I met very carefully so that I don't reveal any thing that might be considered private.

Lucy (not her real name; she invited me to speak to the students in detention) drove us to juvenile detention which was right downtown (not my town). It was a kind of nondescript government building. Not very noticeable. Lucy pressed a buzzer (although I didn't hear it buzz) at the door. I heard a mumble through the speaker—like at a fast food drive-up—and Lucy said her name. Then she pushed the door open. We went down a short hallway past a darkened room. Inside two people in uniform sat at a console, a man and a woman. Lucy said something to me or them, and we kept walking. Got buzzed in through another door. And another. And another. Four doors all together, I think.

Then we walked down a long sloping hallway. I wanted to be very observant, take it all in, but I was listening to Lucy tell me about the place and the children, and I was fascinated. The juveniles within had committed various crimes: theft, assault, drugs, molestation, and murder She told me one or two boys might be in the classroom today. Sometimes it was overflow, sometimes the boys who had molested other boys were put in with the girls for the their own protection. Apparently since they molested other boys, they weren't considered a threat to the girls.

We walk into the "pod," where the girls lived. It reminded me of the cell block area in the cable series Oz, except smaller. Cells around an open area. (On one door, someone had taped that series of photos of a meth addict you see at nearly every police station: first she was beautiful, then ugly, then uglier, then pitted and old and even uglier. It’s the best anti-drug ad I’ve ever seen, although I don’t know if it does any good. Meth is a problem everywhere in the PNW.) An open staircase led up to the second floor of cells. Three picnic tables (of a sort) in the middle of the room on the bottom floor, each with a checker/chess board as part of it on one end.

At the end of the pod, we went through a door into a classroom that looked like any other classroom, only the students were dressed in institutional garb: the girls in dark blue, the boys in gold. Four boys sat in the desks along the farthest wall, across from the door. Girls sat in the other three rows of chairs. The teacher and Lucy talked a bit. I stood at the door looking around, a little nervous. Fourteen students. One Black, one Asian, the rest appeared to be Anglo. Four boys; ten girls. Ages: between 10 and 17? Most of them were probably 15 and 16. One girl was so small and looked so young it almost hurt to look at her, to imagine why she was here.

Lucy introduced me, and I began with, "I'm not as old as I look. I got gray hair when I was a teenager.” They seemed amused by this.

I asked how many of them had read Mercy, Unbound. One girl raised her hand and said she was in the process of reading it. The other girls who had read it were gone for various reasons. So I started talking about writing and why I wrote instead of having a discussion about Mercy, which I had planned. They seemed alert, listening, responsive. One or two looked very tired. I asked if anyone had questions, but no one asked anything except Lucy and the teacher. They wanted to know how much I made on one book and how I actually got a book published. I told them how much I was paid, and I said that actually getting a book published was generally a long hideous process. I should have been more specific, but talking about that part of writing is really boring to me, so I steered the conversation toward other topics. I read a bit of Mercy outloud. (I picked the wrong section, and it didn’t work that well). Then one of the students asked me how to get started writing. She liked to write but she had trouble getting started.

"My husband writes an entire story in one hundred words, each day," I said. "That's a good way to start. Look at other books and see how they start. I started Mercy with ‘Call me Mercy.’ I got that from Herman Melville's book Moby Dick. It starts out "Call me Ishmael.' David Copperfield begins with 'I was born.' My book The Jigsaw Woman begins with ‘I was born.’ But I put a twist on it. 'I was born. In a crossfire of hurricanes. Or something.’ Do you know what part of that is from?" They shook their heads. "Heard of the Rolling Stones?" I began singing, "I was born in a cross fire of hurricanes." They laughed. "In fact, let's do that now. We'll write a hundred word story. Let's start with 'I was born.' What's next?"

This got the students going. I encouraged them to call out lines.

Here are snippets of how it went. At one point I read, "I was born in Brooklyn, New York, the third child of 24 children. My mother was very tired. She had wrinkles and seizures. On the third day after her twenty-fourth child was born, my mother died. I took care of my 23 siblings with my drunken father."

"Only 21 siblings," one boy said.

"Why?" I asked.

Several of them said, "Because she was the third child."

I looked at them blankly (for a split second, this was all happening quickly).

One said, "Why would she take care of her two older brothers and sisters?"

"Good point," I said. I was impressed. They were paying better attention than I was.

I walked along the rows as I wrote out what they said. It was exhilarating to have them talking, participating. I didn't edit what they said. I wrote it and read it.

“Does she have a drug problem or drug problems?” I asked when someone shouted out the sentence.

“Multiple drug problems!” several said.

I read it outloud again—and again, each time we added a sentence, until we got to here:

I was born in Brooklyn, New York, the third child of twenty-four children. My mother was very tired. She had wrinkles and seizures. On the third day after her twenty-fourth child was born, my mother died. I took care of my twenty-one siblings with my drunken father. We got child support, and I had drug problems. CPS came and took away my brothers and sisters. I got away. I lived on the streets and sold dope.

"So now we need to think about this in storytelling terms," I said. "You can do whatever you like as a storyteller, but as of right now, are you rooting for this character?"

"No!" I heard.

"So do you want to do anything about that?"

"We can make it all turn out later," one girl said.

"No, there's no happily ever after in life," another said.

"So how do we end this?" I asked.

"She was killed in a drive-by shooting," a boy said.

"She got a boyfriend and they lived happily together." A girl.

"A boyfriend doesn't solve anything." A girl. "She gets a girlfriend."

"She becomes a dope lord." Girl.

"She electrocutes the boyfriend and goes to prison." A girl.

"She has 21 children and was very tired." A boy.

"Actually, as a storytelling device," I said. "That is very clever. It brings it all around again."

"How could she have 21 children if she was with a girl?" A girl. Same girl.

"They could have a surrogate or something." Another girl.

"She escaped to Canada and lived happily ever after."

"I tell you what," I said. "I want you each to come up with your own ending. If your teacher will do it with you later, I want to see what you come up with."

"Can we change what we already have?" A girl.

"Absolutely,” I said. I thought, "That's what it's all about, sugar."

I gave them copies of Coyote Cowgirl. And then we left. I don't know if they got anything from the visit, but I was glad to be with them, glad to hear their voices.

All photographs and written material copyright © 2003-2008 by Kim Antieau unless otherwise indicated. May not be used without permission.