Justice Notes: Prison and Justice Writing
A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption
Each week, through Justice Notes, I try to spotlight work that reminds us why creative expression matters in the justice system. One of the most powerful engines for that work today is the PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program, which supports incarcerated writers across the country and helps bring their voices into the public conversation.
This week’s piece comes from Curtis Dawkins, a writer who discovered—almost accidentally—that storytelling could survive even in the most restrictive conditions. While serving a life sentence in Michigan, Dawkins began writing stories by hand in prison, eventually publishing the acclaimed collection The Graybar Hotel with Scribner. His journey through panic attacks, handwritten manuscripts, prison mail, editors, and unexpected literary success illustrates exactly why programs like PEN America’s matter.
The Prison and Justice Writing Program exists to ensure that people inside prisons have access to the tools, mentorship, and platforms that make writing possible. Without that support, many of these voices would remain unheard.
In the essay below, Dawkins reflects on how writing became both survival and vocation while incarcerated—and how the act of putting words on paper can persist even in places designed to silence it.
I tried writing in the county jail, but it was too intense. The events that had landed me there, the ones I was trying to write about, were much too fresh. Plus, we only went outdoors twice during the eleven months I spent awaiting trial and sentencing—the latter a foregone conclusion, as the state of Michigan has mandatory sentences and mine was Life Without the Possibility of Parole, basically a death sentence for states without the chutzpah to actually inject that lethal cocktail of drugs.
I tried to write, but couldn’t. Instead I had debilitating panic attacks where my heart would beat wildly and I would hyperventilate, spending all day, every day in a 10×10 cube with three, sometimes four, others. I was finally put on my own cocktail of drugs: Trazodone, Depakote, Seroquel, and Paxil. Thankfully, the panic vanished, but a side effect was shaky hands–the writing looked like a toddler’s. I read constantly, though, keeping the books stationary, splayed open on my knees, the ones I’d said I would read if only I had the time: War and Peace, Ulysses, Infinite Jest, the oeuvres of Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner.
I must have been writing in my mind because the first day in quarantine—a 4 to 6 week period where the new inmate is tested physically and mentally to see where he might fit in and what programs might benefit him—a sentence kept repeating itself, and not the one I’d heard the judge proclaim: “Sicilian Joe was a saucier until a Cadillac hit him doing sixty and knocked the recipes out of his head.”
I still wonder where this came from. Sicilian Joe, an apparent amalgam of those I’d known over the past several months, showed up fully-formed in a twelve page story called “County.” Six weeks later, when I was no longer so heavily medicated, the story was written in longhand. I read it aloud to my first bunky, a twenty-five-year-old kid named Ryan who had shaken his infant son to death. Ryan didn’t like the ending. He said he wanted something more concrete, exact, less “shady.” I knew that I’d nailed it. It was a good story, one I could never get published, in even the smallest literary journal. I probably sent it to twenty.
I used to save my rejection slips. At one point I counted 100. If writing is mysterious, publishing is its freakish, maddening, passive-aggressive, cousin. Those rejection slips (I still get hard copies) seem to come only on the days already full of maudlin ennui.
A man I’m still friends with today, Jarrett Haley, read a couple of my flash fictions in Hobart and asked if I had other writings. I had, and over the next couple of years I published several short stories and wrote over a hundred book reviews for Jarrett’s literary journal, BULL. He was the first editor of The Graybar Hotel, back before it had a title. We worked on one story at a time, run through an Apple program (not this prisoner’s area of expertise, so take all computing talk with a grain of salt) that allows the user to highlight questions in what look to be thought-bubbles. I would send back revisions via snail mail. From my end, it worked seamlessly and easily.
If you’d like to read the whole article about his journey, here is a link to PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing site..
Curtis Dawkins authored the critically-acclaimed short story collection, The Graybar Hotel (Scribner, 2017), and has been published in Vice, The Hudson Review, Hobart, and Beloit Fiction Journal while incarcerated in Michigan’s semi-Arctic Upper Peninsula.
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