email contactus@herstorywriters.org Phone: 631-676-7395, FAX: 631-676-7396

Haunting words from troubled prisoners at the Suffolk Correctional Facility
draw encouragement from Herstory Writing Workshop Facilitators
Lonnie Mathis (fourth from left) and Linda Coleman (front).
Photo by Robert Weinberger Sr., Suffolk County Sheriff's Office.

Workshop Description:
"If I let you into my story, will you promise not to judge?" So begins one woman's journey into Herstory Inside. Now in it's fourth year, working twice weekly (with two groups) in the Riverhead Correctional Facility and once weekly in the Yahpank DWI facility, we have had the privilege of sitting among women whose strong hugs, big smiles, and support for one another defies all reason given their stories and circumstance. In small groups of six to ten, we sit knee to knee in our designated circle creating a reverent space amidst the surrounding noise and chaos. When one woman reads her work aloud, all others lean forward to hear, demand that she speak up if they can't. No one ever wants to miss a word. They work hard, cry easily, hold the silence when tears must be shed and often shared, and then move on, back to work..
"Don't worry," old-timers comfort beginners, "...we all cry here. Take a breath. It's okay." And for some reason, as often as not, our tears give way to peals of laughter.

Memoir is about the past and nowhere is the shadow of the past more present than in prisons, where one pays for what cannot be re-written. The wall of shame that many of us live behind is rarely higher than for women in prison. Not only are they coping with the stigma of incarceration, most are women who have been abused, both physically and sexually, carrying the all-too-common and ironic shame of responsibility that accompanies those memories. As well, they are single mothers who live with the ever-present, never forgotten pain of separation and sense of failure as mothers. But, when each writer succeeds in crafting a compelling narrative of her truth, and then reads it aloud to others, she finds it received with deep recognition instead of judgment, and suddenly there is room for a different relationship to the self that has for so long been steeped in self-hate, a relationship that is lighter and entirely more loving both towards herself and the rest of the world.

Our special and on-going thanks to Lieutenant Darlene McKlurkin, Captain Helen Jeslak, Jon Shirer, and all the Rehab Staff at RCF whose cooperation and support have made this program possible.

Particular thanks to the Long Island Unitarian Universalist Fund for taking over major funding of this program as of March, 2007 and for the special 2007 fundraiser organized by Long Island Opportunities Network, as well as to our many ongoing funders (see list at) without whose ongoing support this program would not have been possible.

Facilitator Description:

Linda Coleman has been writing memoir for the past ten years and currently facilitates an on-going workshop in Southampton, as well as those with Herstory Inside. Her own memoir, Radical Descent (as yet unpublished) tells of her transit through idealism and dogma amidst the violent revolutionary underground of the early 1970’s. Other memoir pieces will be published in the Fall,2007 issues of North Atlantic Review, and Memoir and… She is the mother of two sons, Daniel and Evan, and lives in Springs with her partner, Geoff.

Lonnie Mathis, Linda Coleman

Lonnie L. Mathis has been writing with Herstory for seven years. Her first book, Childhood is a Relative Experience, (unpublished) opens with a walk and a peek in a window that changed her life…the moment her lost childhood memories began to resurface and takes the reader back into the world…the heart, the body, mind and soul of the little girl living in trauma. Her second book, From the Shores of the River DeNial (in progress), opens only days later, locked away in a psychiatric ward and locked inside her own silence…’My journey into, through and up out of crazy…” offering the reader an intimate look into the break down and rebuilding of a life.
Lonnie has been a workshop facilitator with Herstory for four years. In addition to community workshops and co-facilitating the prison workshops, she also has Herstory Workshops in local high schools.