The Importance of Volunteers
It is soggy up here in Maryland, you guys. It’s been raining two days straight with no break. Coming from a girl raised in a virtual desert, it’s pretty magical when it rains. I do have an inordinate urge to nap, though, so after this cup of coffee and our conversation, I may just get right back to snoozing! Who knows?
I had a busy week. How about you? As I reflect on my week this morning, I realize I did more volunteer work than usual. Guest speaking, teaching a class for my women’s business organization on how to record and edit video, attending volunteer training at a detention facility with my nonprofit partners, and my favorite (although all of these were so fun) was teaching a writing class to students in a Mississippi prison.
My friend, the fabulous reporter Charlotte West, reposted JoyBelle Phelan (cofounder of Authors Unbound) on LinkedIn:
I am quite sure that there are writers who see my feed. This message is for you!
I'm reaching out to see if any of you lovely people would be interested in facilitating a one-off writing workshop with a group of writers incarcerated at Parchman State Penitentiary in Mississippi. This is a weekly writing group hosted on WebEx (similar to Zoom) that takes place every Friday from 3 pm-4:30 pm Central Time. The writers attend this group out of pure interest (i.e. this is not a credit-based course), and they are eager to learn anything and everything about writing. They are some of the most engaged writers I have ever worked with, and I think you'd love the experience. Would you like to facilitate one of these workshops?
Currently, this writing group is co-facilitated by myself and two extraordinary colleagues, Libby and Alison. We're hoping to introduce these writers to as many techniques, prompts, and writing strategies as possible, hence the call for guest facilitators. You could lead a workshop on any genre, any prompt, any writing experiment. You could assign homework and offer feedback, or not. You could include art, yoga, meditation, astrology, graphic narrative...seriously, anything goes!
Please let me know asap if you might be interested. We actually have a slot open this coming Friday if you're into jumping right into things. But we're also hoping to build out a schedule of guest facilitators for months to come.
I'd be happy to tell you more about this if you have questions before deciding. And if this isn't for you but you know someone else who might be interested, feel free to extend the invite -- we'd love to talk to them.
I hope everyone's having a great weekend and many, many thanks!
And I thought to myself…why not? So I shared my insight on writing blogs. What are they (because if you’ve been incarcerated for 30 years, you don’t know), why people write them, how some folks make money from blogging, the basic form of the genre, and then of course we wrote together. When asked what kind of music they wanted to write to, they took a vote and came up with Aerosmith. They asked great questions. We looked at popular blogs and read some of them together. We talked about writer’s voice, and thematic writing, and getting to the heart of the subject in under 1500 words, and how writing sets you free and takes you outside the walls. If all works out, we’ll be posting their work on our Hand2HeartDC website.
It was so fun. Incarcerated students are curious, eager, non-complaining students. They’re respectful, and they want to know, to learn, and to engage. I rarely run into reluctant learners, because if they’re in your class, they really wanted to be there. I know there are exceptions, but I can’t think of too many. Teaching high school classes to incarcerated juveniles who have to attend by law is a good exception, but then it just looked like a normal high school. lol! But adult learners are usually there by choice, so resistance to learning isn’t so common.
Jails and prisons depend on volunteers. It’s an important component of their ecosystem. I encourage you to find ways to hop on the bandwagon when you can. If you’re a writer, contact JoyBelle and sign up for a slot. It’s 90 minutes of your life that may mean the world to a student in Parchman.
Tally ho ya’ll. Stay dry. Caffeinate. Be joyful.
