Prison. Pool. School.

Living and learning in America.

Monday, 6 PM.  At the state prison, I am teaching creative writing to a classroom of incarcerated women pursuing college degrees while serving their sentences.

To warm up, we write lists—objects, people, flavors, actions. For inspiration, we read aloud from Ink Knows No Borders: Poems from the Immigrant and Refugee Experience. Finally, students share the poems they wrote for homework—hymns to the past, odes to the future. After each one, we discuss what resonated and why. Each poem has its own subject, style, and strengths; they all crackle with candor.

At my new day job, teaching high school Spanish, students write on laptops and teachers project lessons from classroom computers onto wall screens. In prison, students write with pen and paper and professors write in chalk on a chalkboard or in dry-erase markers on a whiteboard. Both environments are immersive. The Spanish students are forbidden to speak English. The incarcerated students are forbidden to leave.

I’ve taught in prisons for three years. Here’s what I’ve learned—and re-learned.

The first thing is so obvious it should go without saying. But it still needs to be said.

People in prison are people. Not “prisoners.”  Not “inmates.”  Not “incarcerated individuals.” Not numbers or statistics. People. Humans who want to be seen and heard, acknowledged and respected.

Everyone has a story to tell. Everyone’s voice deserves to be heard. Especially those whose voices are often ignored, dismissed—or silenced.

Writing can set you free. Not literally. Obviously. But figuratively.

Writing is not therapy. But writing can be therapeutic—and transformative.

Writing can help you process, reflect, and grow. Telling stories can help you connect with yourself, others, and the world.

In 20 years, I’ve taught thousands of students, most at elite institutions.  The students in prison are among the most serious, curious, and committed.

Maybe that’s a fluke. But I doubt it. I suspect students in prison have more at stake than “traditional” students.

It’s a cliché to say that teachers learn from students. But in this case, the cliché is true.

Week after week, the incarcerated students remind me that writing requires curiosity and courage, vulnerability and strength, sensitivity and resilience.

Sometimes their words make their classmates cry. Other times their words make people laugh.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is the laughter. Prison is no joke.  Yet in class, we often joke and laugh,  not at each other, but with each other, together.  

Tuesday, 5 PM

I am the only swimmer in the pool. My index finger throbs. Is it broken?

While I swim laps, my mental monologue vacillates between English and Spanish, my native language and my adopted language. On deck, a middle-aged woman gives instructions to half a dozen teenagers in hoodies. New season, new lifeguards. After the swim, I share the hot tub with an elderly woman while a young lifeguard monitors us from a plastic deck chair. Somehow, I doubt we will drown.

Tuesday 8 PM

I sit in a tiny chair in a room filled with tiny chairs. Tonight is Back to School night and I sit at my son’s elementary school desk; his classmates’ parents sit at their kids desks. The teacher wears a face mask because she recently had COVID. Even masked, she exudes energy and warmth. After class, I introduce myself to the new kid’s dad and learn that we literally lived on the same street in San Francisco—20 years apart. Small world.  

Thursday 8 PM

A woman bursts into the classroom and greets me in a flurry of Spanish.

It’s Back to School Night, but now I’m the teacher welcoming students’ parents. She sounds like a native speaker. I am not. When the rest of the parents arrive, I speak in Spanish, but project the English equivalent of my remarks on the wall—a subtitled simulacrum of the immersive mode in which their sons and daughters learn. As an introduction, I show a photo of my recent immersive trip to Colombia, and a family photo including our new dog, a rescue from Puerto Rico, who is definitely bilingual. In the photo, our son holds the dog’s diploma, awarded for successfully completing a six weeks of pet school. For his final exam, he successfully obeyed six commands. After each task, we gave him a treat.

Friday 6 PM

In the dark room, I lie on my back, legs against the wall. The teacher says: Cross right leg over your left thigh, then grab ankles. My hips scream. I wince, grunt, moan. Candlelight restorative yoga may sound easy, but for me it’s a humbling referendum on my (in)flexibility. We’re ostensibly relaxing, but my mind is looping: new job, new client, new dog. Try counting backward from 29, the teacher says. If you finish, start again. If you lose count, start again. Eventually, you’ll Drop In.  

It takes a while. But eventually I Drop In.

Saturday 10 AM

I place my hand on the x-ray table, while the machine shoots a red-laser crosshair on my right index finger, swollen, throbbing, and visibly disjointed. I return to the exam room and wait, hoping the bone is not broken. Two summers ago, I broke my toe. The injury sidelined me from running and playing tennis, but ultimately led me to start swimming seriously.

Can I swim with a broken finger? Can I write? Can I type? Twenty minutes later, the nurse returns. “Good news,” she says. “It’s not broken.” She hands me a silver splint with blue foam padding. “Wear this for a couple of days,” she says. “If it still hurts, call a hand specialist.”

Sunday 12 PM

At the public park, the adults eat pizza at picnic tables in the pavilion, taking shelter from the storm. Meanwhile, our kids run around in the rain, oblivious. We’re gathered here to celebrate a friend who recently became an American citizen. To mark the occasion, he wears a navy blue oxford shirt pattered with white stars with red borders.

I ask how he feels to be officially American. The same, he says and adds that the process was quite easy. I frown; millions of undocumented immigrants might balk at how easily a British national—an English professor, no less—can become an American citizen.

“Right,” he says sheepishly. “I mean, if you already have a green card.”  

I have three British friends with green cards. They are all married to American women, have fathered American kids, and have lived and worked in the States for decades.

One is a newly minted U.S. Citizen, eager to vote in November’s presidential election.

Another friend—who swam with me across the Hudson River in July—remains resolutely a British citizen.

A third obtained Irish citizenship, in part to honor his heritage but also because he wanted to remain part of the European Union after Brexit. The day he changed nationalities, he sends me a selfie from a pub in Dublin, passport propped against a pint of Guinness.

I’d like to think I am a global citizen, a multicultural cosmopolitan world traveler. The truth is more banal. I was born and raised and educated in America, like my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. I live and work in America. I am American.