Well into their fifth year, Herstory’s three team-taught weekly workshops at Riverhead and Yaphank Correctional Facilities remain full to capacity, with 15 to 25 women at any given time waiting from one- to three-months for a place. Some 150 women write with HERSTORY INSIDE each year, under the guidance of facilitators Linda Coleman and Lonnie Mathis. They face the same dare as Herstory writers on the outside: to write so that a stranger might walk in their shoes. Only in their case, the dare is all the more poignant, as they reach others in a way that before might have been unimaginable. The assistance to write not a single poem or scene, but to begin to put the pieces together into chapters that make up a life, has enabled many women who could never have imagined themselves as writers to fill notebook after notebook, providing not only a project to pursue but a chance to look back at the pieces of the past that cannot be rewritten, but that can steer the memoirists into unexpected new directions.
Our Bridges workshops provide opportunities for women who started writing with us in prison to write alongside women in the larger community following their release, participating in Herstory’s readings and public events. For those facing longer sentences upstate, books started in HERSTORY INSIDE become a lifeline. Excerpts from the deeply wrenching and expressive writings of members of our prison workshops appear in our magazine, VOICES: Memoirs from Herstory Inside Suffolk County Correctional Facilities, published in 2007. A second issue is in the planning stages. To read more about this publication, click here.
One unusually gratifying outcome of this program is witnessing the community that forms between the women. When they come together to bear witness to the deeper truths of their experiences through the writing, barriers of race, ethnicity and class begin to dissolve, and an entirely other depth of relationship is formed in the space of the Herstory circle. Through their writing and sharing of their stories, we recognize that the women of HERSTORY INSIDE are a microcosm of the larger society of women, separated only by the green scrubs they must wear. We can find women who were members of rival gangs on the street, writing side by side.
As the presence of Herstory within the prison system has grown, more women are coming to our workshops with the expressed desire to look at the issues that have led to their incarceration through the writing process – those deeply entrenched, often generational cycles of violence, sexual abuse and other family traumas that have darkened the lives of so many of our HERSTORY INSIDE members, often driving them to drug and substance abuse as a means of burying the pain of their childhoods. Our work is particularly effective when family members write together. Mothers and daughters who are incarcerated on different floors of the same facility, for instance – barred by prison rules from even touching when they pass each other in the halls – find in the writing circle a chance to hear one another for perhaps the first time. As they weave their individual stories, patterns emerge, and healing can begin. We are convinced that breaking these powerful generational cycles – which starts by breaking the silence, a central part of the Herstory mission –has the greatest potential for changing hearts and minds in families struggling to find hope and healing despite the wounds and the seemingly intractable circumstances of the past.
As formerly incarcerated women join our workshops on the outside, in the intimate setting of working side by side, the politician learns about the “once upon a time” prison inmate. In the interdependent web of all, as each woman in the group helps the “stranger” beside her to craft her story, we can’t help but have empathy. She is no longer the stranger, the lawbreaker, and the woman from prison. She is one of us! Each new revelation in the writing leads to growing acceptance of the other. This in turn leads to spiritual growth and an activist interest in creating solutions.
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