Down there on a Visit Part III

A park bench mysteriously piled with socks

Bert Stern has taught in the Dorchester Program for nine years. He is a writer, editor, and poet, a retired English professor and retired chief editor of Hilton Publishing. He and his wife, Tam Neville, co-edit Off the Grid Press, which publishes poetry books by writers over 60.

From December 23 – January 20, Changing Lives, Changing Minds will post every two weeks. After that we’ll pick back up with our regular schedule. See you in 2010!

Down there on a Visit Part I
Down there on a Visit Part II

Our days were organized around soup kitchens, breakfast at St. Francis, lunch at the Pine Street Inn, where at night 280 men and 363 women sleep in beds if they sign in on time. We didn’t try for beds in the shelters because, though food is abundant, beds are not.

What were we doing there? The question was never easy for me to answer. The Zen Peacemakers, who sponsor the street retreats, describe them as “a powerful practice of not knowing and bearing witness.” “Not knowing,” on the literal level, came easy. To live on the streets, to place oneself in radically new circumstance, simply to enter conversation with people whose lives and ways are radically different from those of you and your friends – all this is not knowing. It requires that we enter experience without pre-conception, seeing and feeling without reference to our established ideas or value systems, being willing to be naked as a babe again.

Not knowing, in my experience, meant also the luxury of hanging out for hours without thinking about what will come next, let alone what should come next. I sat on a bench for a long time in a park near MIT. People, with and without children or dogs, passed by, fathers and sons shot baskets, children played in shallow sliding pools, sometimes getting wet with their clothes on, sometimes feeling the edge of the water from the walk, glancing back at a parent to see how far they could go. It was a brilliant summer day, touched by a mild breeze. I had nothing to do, no compulsion to interpret anything, let alone the brilliance of the leaves of trees in the sun.

Down there on a Visit Part II

Bert Stern has taught in the Dorchester Program for nine years. He is a writer, editor, and poet, a retired English professor and retired chief editor of Hilton Publishing. He and his wife, Tam Neville, co-edit Off the Grid Press, which publishes poetry books by writers over 60.

This is part 2 of 3 in “Down there for a Visit.” Read part 1

The first night we slept at the top of a staircase on the portico of Boston’s Trinity Church. The young men slept below, under lights, and they were also more exposed than we were – our early warning system. The gray stone where we slept was stained here and there with time or old human secretions, and at our left was a weathered wooden door that belonged to a Gothic castle. The traffic on Clarendon Street just below us stayed loud until long into the night.

I slept well enough that night to wake up rested, yet the night had its dramas. A young man and woman at one point settled into the lower floor at the opposite end from my friends, he to smoke crack, she to skin pop. An old man came up and, with great difficulty, took a shit. Once, a man with a woman started to climb the stair to the place where we elders slept, then saw us, said something about “the fucking bums,” and retreated. I asked Jim the next morning what he’d have done if the man kept coming. “There’s be a point where the toe of my boot would have met the front of his face,” Jim said, suggesting that even for Buddhists self-defense was sometimes necessary.

But the most dangerous thing that happened came early that morning when Jim Ryudo Bastien, our leader, went out to panhandle money for our morning coffee. As he was about to walk the church, a man slumped down in a park bench with a nearly empty fifth of something in one hand looked up and asked Jim to go across the street and get him some cigarettes. He was holding in his other hand a big roll of bills, presumably disability money, and Jim answered, “Sure, but how about giving me five bucks.”

The man was enraged. He’d already told Jim that he’d been at war for most of the past twenty years, and Jim took his anger seriously. He also took seriously the fact that he’d done the wrong thing, driven not by any concern for the man but by his own fixation on buying coffee. Jim walked for a while, but it was still too early to panhandle so he circled back to the church, where he passed the man again. This time he apologized for his selfishness. “Just give me the money for the cigarettes and I’ll be glad to buy the cigarettes.” “How do I know you’ll come back?” the other man said. Jim said he’d take the guy across the street, where he could stand outside the door and wait for Jim to come out. The man seemed to fear buying the cigarettes himself in his bad state.

Down There on a Visit Part I

Bert Stern has taught in the Dorchester CLTL Program for nine years. He is a writer, editor, and poet, a retired English professor and retired chief editor of Hilton Publishing. He and his wife, Tam Neville, co-edit Off the Grid Press, which publishes poetry books by writers over 60.

This is the first in a three part series by Bert Stern.  Check back next week for part two.

In two days and two nights on the street I didn’t learn what it was like to be homeless. I did learn to sit among men ripe with loss, some of them stripped down to their last scraps of spirit. A stated aim by the Zen Peacemakers, under whose auspices I made my visit, was to taste the “generosity of the streets.” And we did taste it, not only in soup kitchens, where, in one case, servers actually brought our food to the table in separate trays, but in occasional handouts of food and, more rarely, spare change that we panhandled for morning coffee.

In Changing Lives Through Literature, I’d seen people awaken from despair. I cherish the experience of sharing people’s journeys to their better selves, a journey I too have taken through all its phases. I suppose I expected similar experiences on the retreat.

But my actual experience was that I walked among shadows – shadows of people walking through the space where I slept, shadows of burdened day-lit lives that I could observe but did not enter, my own shadow cast on the top of a stairway outside Trinity Church where I spread out my cardboard bed in preparation for a sleep that did not come easy or remain so.

The core of Buddhism is kindness and generosity to others. This does not mean charity or even generosity in the ordinary sense. It means helping others become fearless by undoing the traps ego has set for them, thus opening them to the dharma, the truth of the teachings. The movement is toward “emptiness,” an unfortunate translation for the Sanskrit “Shunyata,” which, simply put, means an openness of reality unfiltered by our senses, thoughts (even thoughts so basic as form), or feelings, an openness so complete that subjectivity is dissolved. Maybe if I’d remained on retreat for weeks instead of days I might have found way to be an agent of such charity. As it was, I did not.

The kindness I did experience was in the excellent company of my companions – two men in their twenties, two in their early sixties (I myself am going on eighty), company that included much laughter and wisdom. Twice each day we’d meditate in a circle together, often in a park, and then hold a council, initiated by the lighting of a candle and incense, then one or the other of us dedicated the council to, for example, “family,” by one of the young men who at lunch that day experienced among the men around him the raw absence of the family love he himself enjoyed. We’d then go on to share our individual experiences.

Rescue, Redemption, and the Heroic Journey

Lori Bradley is a graduate student working on her the Master’s Degree in Professional Writing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.  She holds graduate degrees in art and art education and teaches in the Art Education Department at UMD.  She maintains a studio in New Bedford (http://www.hatchstreetstudios.com) where she creates art that embodies a sense of place.  She loves dogs.

Michael Mountain, founder of the renowned Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Utah, understands the value of a positive story.  The success of his organization is, in part, due to the positive stories he publishes about rescued animals.  Mountain swears he will never get bogged down in the draining negativity and jaded cynicism often overwhelming to animal rescue volunteers.  People don’t want to hear the horror stories – the dead end tale.  People want and need redemption stories.

A great story about redemption and rescue is Prison Dogs, a program at Lansing Correctional Facility in Lansing, KS in which prisoners train and rehabilitate abused “death row” dogs with behavior problems and adopt them out as pets and service dogs.  Participating in the animal rescue and redemption process can improve the lives of prisoners – relieving guilt and depression, leading to a sense of atonement and hope.

Each rescued animal becomes a hero – embarking on a journey of redemption. Prisoners can connect and identify with the animal as protagonist taking a journey of learning and readjustment.

Reading literature and identifying intensely with a character undertaking a heroic journey can have a similar impact on lives. A great heroic journey story is a gift from writer to reader.  Different stories are more compelling at different stages in life – but the archetypal trip is the same – the resistance to change, the eventual push, finding a mentor or guide through difficult times, the fall into the depths of oblivion and a sudden awareness that signals the way up and out, and finally, the return to a new normal – with new, special knowledge leading to a better life.

A Chance to Change

Nicole Beaudoin is a master’s candidate in the Professional Writing Program at UMass Dartmouth. Currently, she works with the University’s web team and teaches Business Communications as a TA. She has a passion for literature, writing and especially dogs.

Adolescence is a time in life for making mistakes and learning lessons to carry into adulthood. But for the thousands of juvenile offenders in our country’s prison system, adolescence is just part of their life sentence without parole. For many of these youths, one wrong decision has led them to live their entire lives behind bars for committing what officials call “adult crimes,” when in fact they do not even understand these crimes.

 

In the New York Times discussion forum “room for debate,” Mark Mauer, Executive Director of the Sentencing Project and the author of Race to Incarcerate, argues that sentencing children is inherently different than sentencing adults:

 

…children are different than adults. As the Supreme Court noted in its 2005 decision in Roper v. Simmons banning the death penalty for juveniles, children do not have fully matured levels of judgment or impulse control, and are more susceptible to peer pressure than adults.

Mauer says that children are “uniquely capable of change…No matter how serious a crime committed by a 13-year-old, there is no means of predicting what type of adult he or she will become in 10 or 20 years.”

While the crimes some juveniles have committed are very serious  – murder, rape, home invasion – many offenders twice their age commit the same crimes and serve minimal sentences and receive parole. Why don’t youths receive the same chance for change?

Thank You, Jack Kerouac

Eric Marshall is a graduate student of Professional Writing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He writes poetry and is currently working on his first novel, tentatively titled The Sleep Season.

When I turned nineteen in July of 2003, my mother gave me a copy of On the Road by Jack Kerouac. It was a paperback, the cover illustration was of a slick nineteen forties Cadillac limousine surging down a dark blue midnight highway. Having just completed an honors colloquium on the artists of the Beat movement, my interest in the work of writers like Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac was piqued. I had no way of knowing, however, the dramatic affect that the famous novel would have on my young life.

My first reading of On the Road didn’t begin as the eye-opening, spellbinding experience it would come to be. I struggled with the early chapters, the litany of names, my own ignorance as to which characters aligned with which key figures of the Beat movement. But by the time that Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty made their fateful passage over the border to Mexico, I was enrapt.

What I had discovered was an affirmation of life, a defense against darkness, a resonant cry of rebel freedom that pulsates through American life. You could drop everything and hitchhike to San Francisco if you wanted; you could find God in the beady, sweating eyes of a tortured blues tenor; you could live life at the speed of light, and it could all blow up in your face, but that could also be okay.

Most importantly, though, I learned that I could write wild, untamed things that would set the world on fire for my readers the way that Jack Kerouac did for me.

I made a pact with myself that I would read On the Road once a year, every July, for the rest of my life. My earliest re-reads were attempts to rekindle the burning fire of my first reading, to rediscover the overwhelming sense of possibility opened up to me by reading Kerouac’s work at age nineteen. At first, I was disappointed, discouraged, even. Just like anything else in life, the book just wasn’t the same the second time around.

The World of Learning, Imagination, and Entertainment

Bob Schilling is a defense lawyer and former assistant district attorney who lives in New Bedford.  His practice is now in the New Bedford District Court and in the Juvenile Court handling delinquencies and ‘youthful offender’ cases.  He has a daughter in New York City and a son at UMass Amherst.

A former colleague (an assistant district attorney) recently asked me if I was still involved with Judge Kane’s “bleeding heart book club.”  We both laughed. In a more serious vein, he went on to ask whether I thought he might enjoy it, because he is approaching retirement and may have some time to – and it sounds like a cliché but really isn’t – “give back to the community.”

 

I first heard of Changing Lives Through Literature from Judge Robert Kane, a brilliant, experienced, tough judge in the Superior Court; I heard him gently query convicted felons about whether they had ever taken any interest in the written world of learning, imagination and entertainment.

 

He spoke to these hard men of the life of the mind and encouraged exploration of the world of letters. He offered them the possibility of this program. Some, who think toughness and compassion are mutually exclusive, would roll their eyes.

 

Three years ago, when I retired from service to the Commonwealth, I had the occasion to do a good deal of work in the New Bedford Juvenile Court as a defense attorney. Lo and behold, I heard again of CLTL through Stella Ribeiro, a dedicated probation officer who I worked with in the “Second Chance Drug Court.” I told her that I would love to participate, finally, in the program.

Continuing Conversations: One Year of Changing Lives, Changing Minds

Jenni Baker is the communications specialist for Goodwill Industries International in Rockville, MD.  Beth  Ayer is a second-year graduate student in the Professional Writing program at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and the current marketing and media advisor for  Changing Lives Through Literature.

November 5^th marks the one-year anniversary of Changing Lives, Changing Minds. In honor of this landmark, founding editor Jenni Baker and current editor Beth Ayer came together to talk about the blog’s progress and where it’s headed.

Jenni: We’ve come a long way from one year ago and the blog is picking up speed. Readership and interest in CLTL has really taken off in the past few months.

 

Beth: Absolutely – it has been great to hear from a lot of new people. Picking up where you left off was almost deceptively simple. The blog was founded on an endlessly positive and intriguing idea: the conversation from the CLTL classroom can carry over to the Internet to spread positive change. Still, I say “deceptively simple” because we still need to maintain a concerted effort to reach out to readers.

 

Jenni: In the beginning, the task was to get CLTL’s core supporters on board with the blog, both by contributing essays and coming back to comment on what others had to say. These individuals formed a strong foundation to build our external readership. Now, the task is to continue to reach out to new audiences. The potential to spread information about CLTL is exponential — new readers interested in the blog may share program information to their friends, who may continue to pass the word along.

 

Beth: One of the major challenges has been continuing to build on the great progress we’ve already made by maintaining reader interest with new content, and by attracting new readers through the strength of the CLTL concept. But, as you say, the existing foundation has positioned the blog very well for continued growth. I think it helps to keep focused on the blog’s role and purpose within CLTL.

 

Jenni: Certainly. And it’s important to recognize the important role the blog does play in raising awareness about the organization. In the past, CLTL relied mostly on grassroots, word-of-mouth efforts to raise awareness about the program.  Blogs and social media have made it possible to take this grassroots movement online and get the word out to many more people. We’re seeing that more than ever recently.

Voices from the Table: Veronica

Allan McDougall is a graduate student from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Allan is a staunch believer in language as social action, with a focus on reading and writing. Allan is currently writing his MA thesis on Changing Lives Through Literature, and writes about professional and academic issues on his blog: allanmcdougall.wordpress.com.

This essay is the final in a series of three posts written by Allan McDougall based on interviews he conducted with CLTL program participants.

The West Roxbury courthouse women’s CLTL program is specialized for women suffering from mental illness, drug addiction or both. Veronica, a single mother, was more reserved than my previous interview subjects, Ken and Sheila. Yet Veronica’s shyness is nothing compared to her crippling inability to communicate before taking CLTL. Veronica told me, “I would never talk to nobody before; I never got along with nobody.” She continued:

 

In front of the class everyone would get a chance to talk about their problems. I have never opened up to people like I did with Adita, the people in my class, and Leigh, the teacher. I got to learn a lot and become closer with people. Now I’m very open.

The opportunity to share her thoughts and feelings in a reading/writing group environment changed Veronica’s ability to communicate with others. But she also told me about some other positive benefits of CLTL, specifically benefits for her daughter:

 

I never used to read before, now I read, I have a library card for the first time ever. I write more, read more, talk more. Reading keeps you out of trouble. I even read more to my daughter now. She loves animal books!

Volunteers like Adita Velasquez, Veronica’s probation officer, and Leigh, the Boston English professor who facilitates Veronica’s course, used a structured program of reading and writing to effect the positive changes for students in the West Roxbury program. But, as Veronica puts it, “we’re finished but we’re still not finished.” Each year, Leigh collects and publishes the best writings from the CLTL group. As in the men’s Dorchester programs, this is the first time Veronica has ever seen her writing in print.

How does CLTL Change Lives? An Interview with Dr. Robert P. Waxler

Brooke Joseph is a graduate student in education at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. She has a bachelor’s degree in Humanities and Social Sciences with a concentration in Sociology and Elementary Education.

In a recent interview with Professor Robert P. Waxler, co-founder of the Changing Lives through Literature (CLTL) program, I focused on finding out how CLTL changes lives.  Three themes emerged from this interview: Putting Yourself in the Story, Becoming Friends with Characters, and Breaking Down Stereotypes.

Putting Yourself in the Story

Reading and writing can change people’s lives by helping individuals to focus and increase their awareness through self-reflection.  Waxler explained that when you are reading a good piece of literature, you often put yourself in the story and empathize with characters.  Even though during the CLTL sessions everyone is reading the same story, each individual will read the story in a different manner.  Therefore, when the story is discussed, the characters are seen from opposing angles and people “begin to understand that stories, like our lives, are richly textured possibilities.”

Although stories do not offer definitive solutions to people, they do “raise profound questions about our lives.  And as long as we continue to ask important questions, we are doing something worthwhile with our lives.” Waxler says reading the right stories helps us to “pursue our identity as if we are on a journey through life;” by “expanding our perceptions, offering new experiences and deepening our thinking, stories move us and they make us self-reflective. They offer us questions, and then the stories give us the opportunity to pursue answers to those questions.”

Becoming Friends with Characters

Dr. Waxler also gave an example of how a particular character can change people’s lives. When people are reading they allow the characters to become a part of their lives; characters in the stories “become our friends.  Their voices are embedded in our hearts.”  For example, take Santiago from Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea novel. Even though Santiago does not catch a fish for weeks, he continues to wake up every morning to “fight the good fight; his endurance is admirable.”