Woman is the Word: 

Teaching Memoir-Writing in a Maximum-Security Women’s Prison 

by Courtney Polidori 

When I was a graduate student in The College of New Jersey’s MA program in English,  my mentor Dr. Michele Lise Tarter invited me to co-teach her prison memoir-writing program, Woman is the Word. Although I was not convinced that I possessed the courage to teach in a  prison, when Michele told me how she had helped incarcerated women write their life stories for  the past 15 years, I felt intrigued and accepted the opportunity to co-teach with her and another  student, Samantha Zimbler. Within our prison classroom, women have handwritten memoirs  about trauma and resilience, recited original poetry scarred by images of abuse, constructed art  projects that negotiated with identity, discussed memory and imagination, loss and redemption,  and crafted Christmas cards to send to their children. Since co-teaching Woman is the Word with  her, I have participated in a range of educational programs at the prison,  including developing and teaching my own college-credit course, leading writing workshops,  and participating in college graduation ceremonies inside maximum-security. What have I  learned? Although critics believe that education programs inside prisons should focus on  vocational training, I have come to believe that teaching memoir-writing, literature, and the arts  can help incarcerated women discover what Charlotte Perkins Gilman in The Yellow Wallpaper refers to as “imaginative power,” which leads to healing, empathy, rehabilitation, and  opportunity.  

On the first day of Woman is the Word, we pulled off Freedom Road into the parking lot  of the prison and I glimpsed a palimpsest of pastoral imagery. Originally a farm, the prison  grounds might pass for an underfunded college campus. Faded yellow brick buildings, some  dating back to the 19th century, squatted atop cracked grey sidewalks and grass the color of  overcooked asparagus. High metal fences strung with two strands of barbed wire fenced in  certain buildings, including the maximum security compound where we headed to teach. The sky  had carelessly thrown a blanket of dirty snow over the yellow lawn of the prison and wide hipped geese picked their way awkwardly through the pale patchwork. The sight of the geese  echoed Emily Dickinson’s words: “Hope is the thing with feathers - / That perches in the soul.”  We were not the female personifications of hope, nor did we carry hope in our clear, prison issued bags. Instead, we would teach our students that hope already perches quietly inside them,  and the writing process could set it free. We walked through ten iron gates and two metal  detector checkpoints to get into our classroom. 

To create a strong sense of community, Dr. Tarter named our 13 incarcerated students “wisewomen” on the first day of class. Wisewoman is a term that elevates their status to women  who matter because we, as a society, can learn from their struggles, mistakes, and stories. On  that first day, it became clear that the wisewomen hungered for the tools to make meaning out of  their incarceration. We provided them with literature, writing prompts, pencils, and notebooks. We learned that the wisewomen saw themselves as butterflies imprisoned in chrysalis-like cells.  Echoing their imagery, we suggested that they could also look at themselves as phoenixes, which  are the mythological birds reborn from the ashes of their old lives. From the first class to the last,  images of rebirth and metamorphosis emerged from Woman is the Word in spring 2013.  

By re-claiming the prison classroom in the spirit of Virginia Woolf’s “room of our own”  on the first day of class, we promised the wisewomen that we would give them time during class  to write, and the in-class writing functioned as a starting point for longer memoirs.

 Circumstances make it difficult for women prisoners to write. In her introduction to Wall  Tappings, Judith Scheffler explains, “In the starkest sense the woman prisoner lacksVirginia Woolf’s ‘room of one’s own’ and must contend with a lack of privacy, money, and education  and the demoralizing effects of anonymity” (2002, XXIX). Because of their required jobs, they  are out of their cells for hours while they work. They are constantly shuffling from place to place  during their movements. When they are in their cells, they may share living quarters with up to  nine other women. 

When we walked down the hallway at the end of the day, a woman behind bars called  out, “Professor Tarter?” Her voice overflowed cautiously with hope. I looked at her looking at  Michele, hungrily. “Hi, honey,” Michele replied with her characteristic enthusiasm. The woman  asked, “You don’t remember my name, do you? I took your class years ago, but I couldn’t get in  this time. There were 100 names on the list, and they only chose 13.” Michele smiled and met  her gaze. “Violet,” she said with certainty. Violet smiled and her gaze followed our three brightly  colored raincoats as we left the hall. There was a shift in the atmosphere. I felt certain that Violet  was beginning the game of whisper down the lane and spreading the news: Professor Tarter had  returned; magic was coming. 

We encouraged these wisewomen, who had suffered from abuse or trauma before and  during their incarceration, to write to heal. Michele believes that writing is a healing process and  she modeled Woman is the Word on the work of feminist theorists Audre Lorde and bell hooks.  In The Cancer Journals, Lorde argues that women should write to break their silence,  confessing, “I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the  knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective  gave me great strength” (1980, 18). Similarly, Woman is the Word teaches incarcerated women  to find their own sources of power through writing. Despite living within a prison system  designed to silence them, the women can depend upon their imaginations, memories, and life  experiences to narrate their own stories. “I speak my freedom into existence constantly,” says Wisewoman L., who graduated from the college program inside the prison in November 2015.  For women like Wisewoman L., pages of writing represent fragments of power.  

In Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, bell hooks declares that women must not  be afraid to tell their truths, even if they are afraid of shame or retribution. She observes, “Faced  with the radical possibility of self-transformation that confessional writing can evoke, many  females cease to write” (1999, 5). Woman is the Word students recognize that writing can heal  and actively seek the self-transformation that hooks describes. Many women compare this self transformation to giving birth to their new selves. Wisewoman J.’s memoir illustrates the power  of writing: “As I reload and explode my ink onto paper./ It is thru my writings that I experience  lyrics bliss/ In a world which I birthed into existence.” In her writing, this student uses gun  imagery to acknowledge and subvert the expectation that a woman prisoner is defined by a life of  violence. Instead, her writing is her weapon. This is a sophisticated writing strategy for a prison made poet, who used her time served to recognize and develop her talent for creative writing; she  plans to continue writing now after her release.  

To prepare the wisewomen to write their memoirs, students study a diverse selection of  writing by women, including early American women’s diaries, slave narratives, incarcerated  women’s memoirs, and contemporary poetry. They draw strength from stories of women’s  survival and empowerment. Professor Tarter is a gifted story-teller and the wisewomen loved  hearing her tell stories, especially about the freed slave narrator in Harriet Ann Jacobs’ Incidents  in the Live of a Slave Girl. The storytelling helped create a sacred circle as we all became spellbound by Michele’s magical retelling of these texts. After reading Haitian writer Edwidge  Danticat’s short story “Nineteen Thirty-seven,” we brought in poetry with wing imagery, and in  response the wisewomen revealed secret butterflies they had sewed onto their khaki scarves. We  galvanized around these symbols, and made meaning from them together.  

Throughout the semester, the wisewomen painstakingly wrote their own memoirs, several  pages at a time. The common thread connecting each story was a narrative of growing up in  poverty, witnessing violence, suffering abuse, and getting entangled in the insidious spiderweb  of the criminal justice system. By the end of the course, some memoirs would exceed 100 pages  in length. One wisewoman would stay up throughout the nights writing by the hallway light to  finish her book and another would confess that her memoir was the first project she had ever  completed. Through the process of writing their memoirs, the wisewomen recovered their  silenced voices.  

Momentum built over the weeks, and finally, the turning point when the women  discovered their “imaginative power” arrived halfway through our semester, when we began  studying Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. This memoir presented a distinct  teaching challenge because most of the prison buildings were yellow, so a captivity narrative  about a woman imprisoned within a yellow room felt unsettling to many wisewomen, and others had trouble negotiating the breakdown of Gilman’s language as it mimics madness. Of course,  we had no computers, internet, smart boards, or libraries to help us. 

To work within these constraints, we designed a visual memoir assignment, which required the wisewomen to make a collage that depicted a woman breaking out of wallpaper using materials we could bring into the prison, such as paper and magazines. We asked, “Who is  the woman trapped beneath your wallpaper and how will you rescue her?” Picture six tables  smothered in scraps of colorful paper. Paper poured onto the floor and was tossed into the air like  confetti; it was a riot of imagination. Wisewomen helped each other find images that resembled  themselves: anime warriors, raven-haired queens, divas, fresh-faced mothers.  

As the women made their collages, we discussed the themes in the story, including  whether writing should be used as a weapon, instances when women were forbidden from  writing, and whether the woman behind the wallpaper was a mirror of the narrator. The women  opened up while we made art together. Wisewoman K. read some of her writing aloud: “Losing  someone to incarceration is almost worse than losing them to death because families never fully  get over them being gone and there’s no grieving process for someone that is not dead. Every  day is spent with a ghost of the missing.” The writing of Wisewoman K., a young mother with  two little children, reflects the experiences of so many families who struggle to live their lives  while a loved one is incarcerated for years for non-violent crimes related to drug addiction  because of Draconian sentencing laws.  

The experience of seeing the women immersed in this art project was a teaching moment  I will never forget. As we collaborated to make these humble little art projects together, the  crumbling prison buildings outside faded into the distance and ice-covered prison grounds  melted into pastel watercolors. From our classroom, we sent out energy deep into the earth like  tree roots. As the yellowed fields turned verdant green again, the ground warmed up the feet of  the geese outside our window and they extended their wings and alighted as one strong skein of  sisters into the dusky radiance.  

Toward the end of the class, I asked Wisewoman S. what she thought of The Yellow  Wallpaper. She stared into my eyes intensely and I saw how the story had gripped her. She  asked, “Was she tearing off her skin? That yellow wallpaper was really her skin, wasn’t it?” My heart stopped for a moment as I realized that her life experiences gave her insights into literature  that remain hidden for traditional readers.  

“So, you are suggesting that she was cutting? That is a brilliant interpretation,” I  responded. “The yellow wallpaper is a symbol, and it could stand for whatever you think— patriarchy, domesticity, social pressure, conformity. But the idea of the yellow wallpaper as skin  is brilliant. Please, please, write about that.” Wisewoman S. interpreted the story as a 19th century representation of cutting, which is the act of slicing open your skin to elicit blood and  feel pain. Many women today— inside and outside of prisons—struggle with cutting, but were women in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s time cutting? If so, looking for evidence of cutting could  be a powerful way to reexamine American women’s captivity narratives.  

As class ended, the projects remained unfinished, so we instructed the students to take  their materials with them to finish for homework. There was an outpouring of gratitude from  them to us. “You ladies make us feel again,” they said. “Thank you for being here.” 

However, as we rushed out of the classroom, the prison went into lockdown and the  women were forced to stay behind. In the back of my mind, I wondered if it was because I snuck  plastic toy eyes into the prison. Would corrections officers consider plastic toy eyes an “item  deemed to be a threat to the orderly running of the institution?” I had reduced Michel Foucault’s  “panopticon” to toy eyes. I wanted to help the wisewomen escape temporarily through art;  certainly the idea of freeing an imprisoned woman could be subversive, so were we responsible  for the lockdown? Fortunately, we found out as we were leaving that the lockdown was unrelated  to our class. 

At our next class meeting, their projects surpassed: just as the memoirs of women  prisoners reveal the power of the human spirit, the collages depicted that human spirit visually. I  considered these visual memoir collages to be the “acts of creative resistance” that scholar  Marianne Hirsch had referred to in a 2012 lecture I attended at The College of New Jersey. I was  floored by their “imaginative power,” to borrow a term from Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The  following collages are examples of how the wisewomen used The Yellow Wallpaper as  inspiration to create their own visual memoirs.

Woman Breaking Free from Wallpaper, 2013a, Women’s Prison. Credit: Wisewoman M. 

Natural Black Free Woman, 2013b, Women’s Prison. Credit: Wisewoman J. 

Woman Tearing off Her Skin, 2013c, Women’s Prison. Credit: Wisewoman S. 

Speaking Freedom into Existence, 2013d, Women’s Prison. Credit: Wisewoman L. 

Stuck in the Jar, 2013e, Women’s Prison. Credit: Wisewoman K. 

Blooming beneath Wallpaper, 2013f, Women’s Prison. Credit: Wisewoman D.