"Be the Change" - We Pay Tribute to Changemakers
Mesha Maren’s day jobs are novelist and university professor. But she’s just as passionate about her side gig teaching writing to the incarcerated.
Suspenseful, seductive Perpetual West (Algonquin) unearths the secrets in a marriage as Elana searches for her missing husband, Alex, in a Mexico that challenges her fixed notions about love, language, and culture. Via Alana’s odyssey, the novel probes deeper themes, from fluidity of desire to the rigidity of racism to familial bonds.
There’s a tang of rabble-rouser in Maren’s storytelling, something she comes by honestly. The daughter of prison reform activists, she grew up in rural Alderson, West Virginia, home to the first federal prison for women, founded in 1927. Her father operated a nonprofit hospitality house for families and friends of the incarcerated; as a girl, Maren accompanied him to visit inmates cut off by friends and relations.
Now an assistant professor of creative writing at Duke, Maren shares that her first teaching experiences were at homeless and domestic violence shelters and a state prison. Up until the pandemic prevented her from going in person, she taught writing workshops at the Federal Correctional Institution Beckley, an all-male prison in West Virginia. There she often gave her students 40 to 50 minutes of free writing time, which was frequently the sole quiet period in their days. “From television shows, we get the idea that inmates spend a lot of time alone in cells,” she says, “when in fact they follow a super-strict schedule, starting at 5:00 a.m.”
Garrett Jackson, a former student of Maren’s who is six months into a two-year federal prison sentence, had been keeping a journal while incarcerated and began to yearn for a way to help his “words flow in a rhythm that the prison environment seemed to be stunting.” Enter Maren. “Prisoners are not an instructor’s typical student,” Jackson says. “But Ms. Maren saw us as individuals with minds to be shaped and not for the uniform we wore. True, our minds were like rough stone,” Jackson continues, “but she helped us smooth the edges and improve our writing skills in a manner that helped those with writing talent blossom. And that challenge helped us find a creativity and spark of light our minds needed to put down on paper our thoughts, feelings, hopes, and dreams.”
Jackson is now completing his doctorate, and Mesha Maren plans to continue to devote her time and talent to the people her father first advocated for as soon as she can. — Hamilton Cain
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