MFA Fiction Alumnus TJ Jaffe: Jail Is a Four Letter Word
“…wait a minute TJ, how do you spell caesura?”
That might be a question you’d hear in any writing class, but this question surprised me in a Lyric Writing course I’m teaching at Columbia River Correctional Institution. Participants asked about stressed syllables and iambs too. I didn’t think that men who are incarcerated would want the geekiest version of my teacher-self, but I was wrong.
Whether in or out of prison, artists are curious about sounds, silence, beats, meaning, and music-making. People who are incarcerated seldom have access to the internet or even dictionaries. In prison it’s difficult to get answers to basic questions, let alone artistic ones, and the likelihood of hearing someone say, “caesura” (a fun and paradoxical word to say) is very slim. And it ends up that my most pedantic persona is useful and amusing to my students. When we talked about “places of importance,” boundaries and beats in a line or measure where our brains pay extra attention, one participant was elated to understand that he’d already developed a logical process for editing lyrics to fit the measures and phrases he was composing.
“Oh!” he exclaimed, "That's why!” and he taught us how and why he’d changed a word because it was too heavy for the end of a chorus. Even though he’s already composing, he took pleasure in learning an idea that helped him describe how he was making his art closer to his vision of it.
Calm exhilaration pulses through a room when, in the face of the most restrictive environment, together we hone the inner freedom that makes us creators. Prisons are designed to destroy individuals, not reform them, and to enter a prison with the intention of teaching skills that foster individual and group creativity is subversive.
As a teaching artist inside prisons, it helps to work as part of a collective because obstacles abound and they’re easier to face together. Every negative facet of the human condition is exacerbated in and by the carceral system. We have to know it in order to dismantle it (yes, you’ll meet prison abolitionists like me working in prisons). For me, becoming a teaching artist in prisons is a career path. The organization I work with and for, Open Hearts Open Minds (OHOM), was started by professional actor and writer, Johnny Stallings, with the specific vision of freeing prisoners, on the inside.
As teaching artists in prison we challenge ourselves to find ways to open up creative opportunities for people who are incarcerated. This work is about love that outlives paperwork and permeates walls. Fred Hampton called it “revolutionary love.” I’m looking forward to the performance my students—my teachers—at Columbia River Correctional Institution started planning on the first day of class.