Doing Time (54 page)

Her own battles led her to Arizona State Prison, Perryville, to confront her demons. Instead of a demon, she writes, she found “a little girl cowering under the covers waiting for next blow to fall. All I had to fgure out was how to get her out of prison in one piece and I did that by writing.”

She has won two first prizes in fiction, for “Summer, 1964” (1988) and for “Norton 59900” (1991). The two pieces are part of a larger work,
Slick,
“fctional reflections on how and why I made bad choices.”

Norton has read her work and discussed the experience of women in prison in bookstores and universities in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Michigan, and New York.

Now living outside Snowflake, Arizona, a small farming community, she has almost gotten off the grid using solar energy, well water, and a wood stove. At Northland Pioneer College, she is earning a degree in nursing. She intends to join the Peace Corps or Doctors Without Borders. She grows and cans her own food and spends her spare time reading, gardening, writing, and running with her dogs and her horse. I live the way I do,” she says, “because even after all these years, the stigma of being an ex-felon, and a
female
ex-felon, to boot—still follows me like a noxious cloud.” An ex-felon cannot work on the census or get food stamps, government assisted housing, or school grants. “Life is good, but because I make it so, in spite of being an ex-con.”

The real name of
William Orlando
(1953-1999) was Orlando Askew. A war baby, black and Korean, he was adopted but ran away from a strict home in Los Angeles. “I had a criminal record before a mustache,” he wrote. “At seventeen, I strolled into the army. Saw Germany and next met heroin in Vietnam. Came back a dope-shootin' bank-robbin' fool. I've spent the shank of my life in prison. Those are the bare bones. The rest is apologia.”

“Dog Star Desperado,” an excerpt from a novel, tied for second prize in fiction in 1997. Part of his second novel,
Chino,
was published in the
North American
Review in November/December 1997. “As a square peg kind of kid, I read for transport”—works like
Beowulf
and novels by London, Stevenson, and Twain—”until I learned to smoke and drink and cuss and fight and swagger in leather to a raucous dice game, and street life claimed me from the books.” In prison, he earned a B.A. in sociology, studied Spanish and German, and read omnivorously, finding “gems among the rhinestones” in prison libraries. “Reading made the writer. That, and the crucible of experience. Writing is all I have, a lament and a boast.”

After serving eighteen years, he was released in 1999, with no contacts and no preparation for re-entry. From a half-way house he wrote, “I'm feeling beset—naturally, starting from scratch… . I plan to make myself free and to stay free. I'll always take my chances—but I'm more a writer than an outlaw.” Within a few weeks, he was dead.

Alejo Dao'ud Rodriguez
(b.1962) was raised first in the Bronx, New York, then in East Los Angeles and Pomona, California. He is serving eighteen years to life for murder. While incarcerated he received a B.A. from Syracuse University and a Master's degree in professional studies from New York Theological Seminary. “I daydream a lot so I guess I've always written poetry in my head,” he wrote. “Daydreams are hard to explain to people, sometimes hard to explain to myself. Writing them out is sort of like giving daydreams a life longer than a fleeting thought. Yet writing is a double-edged sword for me. I love to write, but I hate the rules of grammar—too restricting. That's why poetry likes me. She encourages me to take liberties and sometimes they even turn out to be a poem, but most of the time, poem or no poem, writing is my way of sledge hammering these walls.

“Parole Board Blues” tied for first prize in poetry in 2002; his essay, “Paralegal Training for the Formerly Incarcerated” won an honorable mention for essay in 2007. “Sing Sing Sits up the River” was published in
The American Bible of Outlaw Poetry.
He is the Administrative Law Library Clerk and Inmate Coordinator for the Alternative to Violence Project at Arthur Kill Correctional Facility, and with others created the Reality Awareness Work Project, a pre-reentry program of the Lifers and Long-termers Organization, which publishes
The Raw Truth.

When he was sixteen,
Daniel Roseboom
(b.1972) put his rural hometown near Cooperstown, New York, behind him to travel alone. After several arrests for petty crimes (“non-violent and non-drug-related— freedom was my high”), he was sent to a shock incarceration camp at seventeen. Escaping, he fled west, until caught in Missouri and extradited to New York. Months in solitary and keep-lock confinement to his cell as a consequence of his attempted escape introduced him to books and to writing. While in Auburn, he took Syracuse University courses. Compared to the “intense atmosphere” of those classes, his courses in the world seem “a shame.” Since his release, he has become a self-employed building contractor.

His first experiment in writing, “The Night The Owl Interrupted,” based on a real experience, won third prize for fiction in 1993.

An activist in the student anti-war and women's movements in the 1970s, New Yorker
Susan Rosenberg
(b.1955) studied at City College of New York and Montreal Institute of Chinese Medicine, becoming a doctor of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine. Targeted by the FBI for her support of the Black Liberation Army, she went underground in the 1980s. In 1984, she was convicted of possession of weapons and explosives and sentenced to fifty-eight years.

Spending almost eleven years in isolation and semi-isolation, she says, “I write in order to live in the most creative, productive, and challenging way I have available to me. Prison life is life stripped to the bone, and all the good and bad is held up in the sharpest light. I watch and listen and struggle with what I see in order to write about it. This forces me to remain conscious of the suffering around me and to resist getting numb to it. I write to keep my heart open, to keep pumping fresh red blood.”

Winner of first prizes in poetry (1991), short story (1992), and memoir (1994), as well as getting two honorable mentions, Rosenberg's work has been published in many anthologies. She has written about women casualties of the drug war, and earned an M.A. in creative writing from the McGregor School of Antioch University.

After sixteen years in prison Rosenberg was pardoned by President Clinton on his last day in office in 2001. Upon her release, moving to New York City, she became an active member of the PEN Prison Writing Committee. She has worked as an adjunct professor teaching Prison Literature and American Literature at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She has served as director of communications at American Jewish World Service since 2003. She lives with her partner and her daughter. “We who swim to the other side of the river have to write about it,” she said, and after a decade of work, she published her memoir,
An American Radical: A Political Prisoner in My Own Country,
from which she is reading at events across the country.

As a child,
Anthony Ross
(b.1959) wrote “butchered versions of Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel,” but his ambition was to be a cartoonist. Ross says that he dropped out of school mentally in fourth grade, physically in seventh. At twelve his life became entangled with the gangs of his native Los Angeles and “whatever could go wrong, did go wrong.” He was inspired by Stanley “Tookie” Williams, founder of the L.A. Crips, and at fourteen, Ross and others founded the Raymond Avenue branch of the Crips. In 1981, at the age of twenty-two he was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death.

Years later, finding himself the oldest among his gang locked up at San Quentin, he decided he had to provide leadership.“I made some decisions about what I would do and what I would not do,” he said, and he held to his resolve. Ross and his co-defendant, Steve Champion, decided to turn their lives around, to study. Passing books and manuscripts back and forth, each became the other's mentor.

“Walker's Requiem” tied for first prize in fiction (1995). As a child Ross was taken on a school trip to Griffith Park, where he could look down from the heights to the depths of South Central Los Angeles, the ghetto where he lived. As they returned home, he thought about the contrast between the park's beauty and the grime and violence of South Central. “The keys to the observatory” came to him to be a metaphor for access to the world of knowledge and beauty from which people in South Central seemed locked out. When Ross received the PEN award, “Walker's Requiem,” he said that it was like “being given the keys to the observatory.”

Ross is now working on a manuscript with Steve Champion. And he plans to marry a woman in Germany's Green Party, who is a member of Parliament in Frankfurt.

Robert M. Rutan
(b.1944) attended Catholic schools in his native Philadelphia. In prison from the age of twenty-four on, he garnered another sentence for manslaughter and was not released until he was forty-three. He took courses at the University of Iowa, dreaming of its famous Writers' Workshop.The dream was deferred by conviction for unarmed robbery and escape.

In 1978, “The Break” won first prize in fiction; it was published in
Time Capsule.
“Partners” won third prize in fiction in 1982. Then Rutan turned to writing poetry. “Love of language and literature drove my desire to write. I admire the nineteenth-century novel in the hands of Eliot and Hardy, and I like the poetry that came out of Spain during the thirties. But my real passion is Shakespeare.” As to why he writes, “The way out is the way in,” he says. “Writing provides the release that comes with disclosure.”

Robert Rutan was released in May 2010.

Of Irish and Lithuanian stock,
Jackie Ruzas
(b.1943) grew up in Queens. At parochial school, he wrote, “I achieved both an education and bruises from the Grey Nuns.” Turning sixteen at Aviation Trades High School, he was invited to quit or be expelled. He joined the ranks of construction workers. “When the sixties brought protest, alienation, and drugs, I joined those ranks as well. It all led to a final curtain on a sunny autumn day in October 1974, when a confrontation between a state trooper and myself resulted in his tragic death.”

Though charged with a capital crime, a jury spared him a death sentence; he is serving “an exile of thirty-seven years to life.” He earned a G.E.D., but says he is mostly self-taught, “with a thirty-six-year addiction to the
New York Times.
”

“I realized many years ago that writing provided me with a sense of flight to anywhere I chose to travel. I could leave my cell without sirens in my ears and dogs at my heels. Over years I have tutored in classrooms in every maximum security prison in this state, and nothing gives me greater satisfaction than being part of an inmate's journey from illiterate to literate.”

“The Day They Lost Their Keeper” won first prize in fiction (1982), and “Ryan's Ruse” an honorable mention (1994). In 1995 Ruzas took an honorable mention in poetry. His poems have appeared in
Candles Burn in Memory Town
and
Prison Writing in Twentieth Century America.
His story, “Reentry According to Bond,” appeared in
The Hard Journey Home: Real-Life Stories about Reentering Society after Incarceration.

While incarcerated, Ruzas married his childhood girlfriend, with whome he now has three children fathered from prison. He is about to meet his ninth parole board. He is active in championing parole restitution.

Paul St. John
(b.1956) grew up in Long Island and holds an M.A. in sociology. “I went down in the war on drugs,” he says, “but decided that my life wasn't over. I started writing fiction as a means of experiencing what I could not otherwise.” He won third prizes for fiction in 1992 for “Peeks by Gnome of the Slums on the Bad Hardened to the Absolute” and in 1994 for “Behind the Mirror's Face.” He has received other honorable mentions in PEN contests. He has published fiction in
Midnight Zoo
and wrote a few novels. He plays jazz piano and trumpet and writes music as well.

St. John was released in 1999.

The son of a card player,
Michael E. Saucier
(b.1948) hails from a small Cajun town in Louisiana. He graduated from Mamou High in 1966, hitchhiked to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco with his guitar, and protested the war instead of going to Vietnam. “I drifted across the USA and Mexico living a vagabond's life until I finally and mercifully got busted for drug-dealing in 1990.” His prison job as a literacy tutor gave him access to a decent library and a grammar book that he devoured, testing himself until he could write clearly. With time and money enough for writing supplies, “I had no more excuses. I told myself that if I wasn't willing
and
enthusiastic about writing a novel than I had to shut up and never talk about writing again. That scared the hell out of me.” He wrote his first novel twelve times, then another,
Saga of an American Hippie,
and a screenplay.

Saucier won an honorable mention in drama for
Thinking Twice
(1991), third prize in poetry for “Cut Partner” (1992), and first prize in poetry for “Black Flag to the Rescue.”

Later unhoused first by Hurricane Katrina and then by Hurricane Rita, Saucier lived briefly in a trailer provided by FEMA. He now lives in his deceased father's house just outside Lake Charles' city limits with a woman he first knew in the movement against the Vietnam war. In 2008, the Southwest Louisiana Historical Association awarded the prize for historical writing to Saucier for his narrative poem, “My Sweet Secret.” He is writing about his great-great cousin, the Confederate soldier who lived to be 105 years old. He continues to write songs, mostly with Acadiana themes, and performs them with his guitar.

“A child of the oil fields,”
Barbara Saunders
was born (b.1944) in Lub-bock, Texas. Her father was an independent driller. The family followed the “boomtowns” of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Louisiana. At five years of age, Saunders began writing to entertain herself. She became a U.S. Navy nurse. In the late sixties, she earned master's degrees in art education and in counseling psychology.