Sacred Space: Why Libraries Are Essential to Incarcerated Writers

Libraries are sacred space within the unending, unrelenting madness, the profane that is Society, places where the predominant ideology is to inform. The Library of Alexandria was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World; the Library of Congress is a wonderfully ( dis )organized repository of all the significant things generations of someones have decided to put there; even the smallest town library, possibly ruled over by a locally-feared, hundred-pound tyrant who has never had a fun day in her life, is a portal to every single piece of undiluted, unadulterated, unpoliticized, knowledge.

Some of my least painful childhood memories are of the half-hour Friday trips to the library in my rural K-12 school—I was always drawn to books that I didn’t yet understand, but would affect me still, Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov; Animal Farm and Slaughterhouse Five; dinosaurs and plate tectonics (both new and hot subjects in the 1970s).

This haven from my dysfunctional formative years was made manifest in my heart through memories of the warm, intoxicating smell of the new World book set; the warm, intoxicating smell of mimeographed copies.

And always, always there was something new, something to discover, and a place to rest. I spent several post-school-day stints of detention in the high school library, my behavior often not matching the expectations of the teachers or administrative staff. I would discover, years later, my sometimes-acerbic wit; my lax attention to class assignments I didn’t immediately grasp; the often-surly attitude that landed me in detention were signs of boredom. The “tough it out” mentality and expectations of a conservative society in the rural Midwest was something I would struggle with my entire life.

But even through this, while other students would gripe and watch the clock intently, I would often simply pick up a book I hadn’t read before and let it carry me to the striking of 3:40 pm, and the return of the world’s intrusion.

The mismatch between my need for room to express myself and the needs of a soon-to-be-entered “Adulthood” gave way to another chapter of my frustration with myself—I ran away to the Marine Corps. I fared little better under the rules-bound, instant-compliance demands of first Basic Training, then the Fleet, although, as was also my wont, I excelled in the Military Occupational specialty (MOS) training.

I loved the learning, foundered in the application.

Again, my prospects, my self, were set adrift in an existence I could not form to.

I last visited a public library in 1987, in Twentynine Palms, California, in search of a Minnesota Tax Schedule. They had two Minnesota and three Iowa booklets—Marines serving there came from everywhere—and the desk attendant smelled of mimeograph fluid. They hadn’t invested in a Xerox yet.

In 1990, after yet another anchorless, contradicting attempt at Life—this time marriage, fatherhood, and a transfer to the East Coast that did nothing for my career—my life went totally off the rails, a train wreck everyone but me saw coming.

I spent a year of pre-trial detainment in a Mayberry-sized civilian jail in North Carolina praying, crying, raging.

And reading.

*

You’d think a library in a small-“t” town Southern jail would be a quite threadbare affair, and for the most part, you’d be right. The bigger jails in the larger communities had slim pickings and much use, but in this whistle-stop of a County Seat, there were twenty four beds and a couple hundred books.

The concrete walls and steel-barred cell faces made no distinction between public and private conversations, and on holiday weekends the population would swell to as many as fifty, sixty people, any over the maximum rated capacity sprawled out on their well-worn shelter mats on whatever floor space they could occupy and not get stepped on.

And we could only have five books in our possession, which we exchanged on Tuesdays, besides one Bible, Koran, or Torah.

So, I read Long Arm, Lone Star, Mack Bolan, Michael Crichton, and King James’ Bible. I read TommyKnockers, It, and The Stand each in one sitting. (Do not try this at home.) Maybe it was because I was barely into my twenties, skinny, pathetic, and facing a long time in prison, but I read many books from private collections, given to me by various staff whose children were in college, with the admonition: “I’ll pick this up tomorrow evening.” Oftentimes these illicit deliveries were on Friday or Saturday, because the Tuesday books were long read by then.

Through these unselfish acts, Ursula LeGuin re-entered my life, as did Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur C. Clarke. Larry Niven and Anne Rice introduced themselves, and I held Margaret Atwood in my heart, although I did not have the emotional language or sophistication to fully embrace A Handmaid’s Tale until many, many years later.

The dystopian world of re-imagined slavery, repressive hierarchies, felt familiar, yet in my own future, my own past, echoes of that type of unbreakable control would be where I dwelt, where I would exist, and I was not prepared for that.

Familiarity does not always equate acceptance.

I was ultimately sentenced to more time than I could do. The stated fact that I would be eligible for parole at some future date meant nothing to me then.

*

You’d think libraries in prison would be pretty dismal places, the sacred overwhelmed by such unrelenting profane that they would shrivel and dissipate to leave only the sticky-slick pages of Black’s Law and State Statutes abstracts, and you’d be mostly right.

The closed-in spaces of jail became open dorms and endless corridors of “real” prison, where men with long sentences and little hope vied daily for their own sense of “sacred,” their own solace, almost exclusively at the expense of another’s. Most times what is portrayed on TV only touches the surface, cuts a glimpse, of the lengths some inmates will go to achieve the ever-elusive “status.”

I would peruse the library—small, as it was an afterthought—in those first years and feel the new tensions of my life bleed away, if only for that moment. Very few books were complete, even fewer had ever been “new,” and some old-timers had collections of their own books as impressive as any in that prison’s library. But still, just that minuscule sense of my own solace was enough.

Yet on one stint in segregation I found the only complete copy of All Quiet on the Western Front I’ve ever seen in a prison library, tucked carefully in the corner of the segregation janitor’s cleaning supplies cart.

He didn’t even charge me for borrowing it.

Transfers happen regularly in the N. Carolina system, and the novelty of an unfamiliar camp soon becomes all there is to experience. My second prison’s library doubled as the “Multi-Media Room” where we watched movies once a week, but when the lights went down and the supervising officer fell asleep, certain sounds, scents, and occasional sights soon sank the illusion of anyone actually watching the movie. Illicit sex—another prison commodity—was also an all-too-often intrusion through the delicate membrane that separated the profane from the sacred, prison from ephemeral sanctuary, the respite used as cover.

The segregation library in this camp was a single cart, a “Tiny Library” long before the concept took off in neighborhoods from Minneapolis to Los Angeles to Atlanta. Yet here I discovered a certain Mr. Jordan—Robert, not Michael—and an entirely new, expansive take on the world of Fantasy Fiction.

My last transfer in North Carolina landed me in another Mayberry—this one a 500-bed working camp that was mostly open dorms, bunkbeds with just under thirty two inches between them, one airport-locker “secure space” per inmate, and a cast of characters who came and went at least as fast as they did when I was in jail, but were profitable for the State as low-cost road-maintenance crews, so at least the food was better.

I never went on a road crew, but because of this prison’s significance as a working camp I had access to not only a dentist, but a thousand-volume library that supplied free copies of crosswords that dated from the 1960s to the 1980s.

My Scrabble® scores jumped by multiples.

I applied for and was eventually granted transfer to my home state of Minnesota in 1997 to serve the rest of my sentence. If I could not outlive my sentence, I could at least be closer to home while serving it.

*

You’d think there would be a notable difference in the way books, libraries—education in general—are treated, funded, between the “Old South” and the arguably more progressive Free State of Minnesota, and you’d be right.

Stillwater State Penitentiary, as a 1930s Art Deco project, has concrete walls and travertine floors; steel-bar cell fronts stacked four and five stories high; conversations were never purely public or private; echoes were at times vertigo-inducing; and each cellhall rarely housed fewer than two hundred fifty men from the heavy front doors to the open showers at the rear of each cellhall.

The prison library at MCF-Stillwater is an iconic place founded—and partially funded—by Messrs. James and Younger long before the “New” prison complex was built in the village of Bayport, MN in the 1930s. The theater /chapel building had been renovated as the Education Complex just before I arrived, and the library was, literally, the first room you passed as you exited the Security sally-port, and contained over eleven thousand books, as many—or more—as my school library.

So surrounded by the nearly-deafening silence of carpeted floors, walls of books and not echoes, I would look up from what I was reading and almost, almost, see my High School librarian checking out books, tending the periodicals shelves, pointing patrons to where requested books waited.

This juxtaposition would bring a tiny smile to my aching heart.

I treated my weekly fifty two minute visit as a respite from the endemic stress of life in a predictably-unpredictable Government holding cage, reading periodicals I couldn’t afford to buy like Science News, Smithsonian, The New Yorker; discovering Jim Butcher, Piers Anthony; and finding an odd little book with big friendly letters on the cover that spelled “DON’T PANIC.”

I again visited with Tolkien, McCaffrey, Weiss, Heinlein; heard the call of The Odyssey, the Foundation, The Silmarillion; explored Pern, Two Rivers; and found a quiet place—irrespective of the range of tyranny or kindness of the various librarians—where worlds overlapped, a scent of the sacred in the dank, unwashed profane of prison life. Even though the overall stress levels I endured compared with my time in North Carolina were greatly reduced, I would still feel my shoulders settle, my whole being relax ever so slightly in the sanctuary that was in, not necessarily of, a State prison anywhere.

Within the familiar embrace of a library that was just a library, I rediscovered the curious, interested child I had once been, saw this space as a more permanent fixture in my future. I started college; I earned an Adult Basic Education (ABE) tutor certification; worked with and through the Education Department and its selfless Director tutoring part-time during the years I held an Industry job; then tutored pre-GED classes full-time in the mid-2000s.

I tried to practice what I preached about the utility and uncommon-in-prison accessibility of the Stillwater library, and I often asked my students to pick out books they wouldn’t normally read and summarize them for me.

Occasionally, I would get an essay to grade.

I began to write—intermittently, and badly. The library, across the hallway from the Computer and Testing Lab, was a pleasant haunt for me, even as I was discovering the vast, empty parking lot that was my creative mind, a place where I would stumble across new and interesting things I sought but did not as yet understand.

Eighteen years after I arrived at MCF-Stillwater, twenty five years into my possibly-forever sentence, I found myself, by happenstance, working as a library clerk.

*

You’d think working in a library where about a quarter of the clientele were serving prison sentences they would not outlive would be challenging, and, for the most part you’d be right.

There was a general selection of classic Literary works, a few “Best Of’ anthologies, an abundance of Westerns, Jackie Collins Romances, Paranormal Romance, Forgotten Realms, Star Wars, True Crime, and a section of FreeBird Publishing Urban Fiction.

The only complete copy of Gone With the Wind I’ve ever seen in a prison library was on one of the Book Karts we refreshed and rotated from cellhall to cellhall on a monthly basis.

It visited all six cellhalls and, as far as I could tell, was never read.

The Education Department sponsored an annual Reading is Fundamental (RIF) Fair, where eligible inmates could pick out books for their children, and I usually manned the “0-3” age range display tables – bright colors, sturdy cardboard pages and such. We averaged over three hundred books mailed out every November/December.

One important lesson learned: Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus!

The week before the 2017 RIF Fair, someone stole our Salma Hayak RIF poster.

Some of the goings-on in the Stillwater library would have been familiar to anyone who’s ever worked in any library any where, some were—humorous and otherwise—peculiar to a prison setting, even one as well-managed as this one. Some examples:

The librarian I worked for purchased the same photo-anthology of the Grunge rock group Slip Knot three times—twice for some of the more explicit depictions coming up missing, once for a “lost” claim—and fielded dozens of angry complaints when he refused to purchase a fourth.

This particular “lost” claim was the incident that convinced him to reinstitute a Replacement Fee for “lost/damaged” books.

I did notice a bunch of really cool new tattoos that looked remarkably like the “missing” depictions.

Some patrons would pick up a book, peruse it while wandering around, totally forget where they got it, and put it down on the nearest empty shelf space. I gave great credit—and some grateful praise—to the patrons who would actually ask me, “Where did I get this?”

One patron insisted on rearranging every shelf by the heights of the books thereupon. I did make some headway with him, but he would still wait until I was somewhere else during his time and have at a shelf or three.

I helped unload over six hundred books donated to the library by an estate whose benefactor had spent time in Stillwater in the 1980s—this was not the largest single donation, but it was from a single donor, a penance not necessary, but appreciated.

Space, especially in prison, is finite, and keeping the inventory arranged, current, and in good shape took up our time as clerks on Wednesday mornings and when one or another unit was locked down for whatever reason.

The top corner of certain pages of certain books were torn off, prison slang for “sex on this page.” Most Long Arm and Lone Star books were pretty ratty, but, strangely, the Romance novels were mostly untouched.

Travelogues also took a beating for the maps. People serving time anywhere come from everywhere. A young patron from Kenya asked for a copy of a map of the Home Country that showed- unbelievably- his village. He was heartbroken when, after his next paycheck (we charged $0.25/page for copies, he made $0.50/hour as a GED student), this page was torn out by a Nigerian who disliked him.

That travelogue had been out of print since 1993.

We checked out every single Isaac Asimov book we had three times over because he was a featured author in a college Writing in the Disciplines class.

We lost over a hundred books to a patron who removed the last dozen or so pages for reasons he would not, even under threat of sanctions, reveal. He was eventually charged some $200, but was released on probation before he could put a dent in the fees he owed. He was still out when I transferred two years later, but the bill will be waiting for him if he ever comes back.

I inadvertently spoke with a librarian in Stillwater (the town) when she overheard me asking my librarian in Stillwater (the prison) about a book he’d ordered for me through the Inter-Library Loan (ILL) Program a week earlier. “You guys order the most interesting books,” she said, “and I’ll sometimes order copies for display here because of that.”

Even the verbiage on certain signs and posters was, at times, a mildly-hilarious distraction—when our two Research computers forgot they were on a network, my librarian and I made two different informative signs.

His read, “Due to a Network malfunction, this station is out of service.”

Mine read, “Broke—Do Not Use.”

A dozen and more patrons tapped on his station’s keyboard while seated at mine.

*

There would still be times when I would look out from behind my desk at the several patrons busily perusing the shelves or noses buried in periodicals too expensive for them to purchase themselves—as I had done for so many years—and I would watch their shoulders settle ever so slightly from their usual protective hunch, I would let the quiet, the respect, the sacred, remind me that there are human beings here, seeking the same haven I have cherished.

I would catch the scent of the aging World Book set on the other side of the shelf chest next to my desk, and I would feel my own shoulders settle, just that little bit, again.

*

I now hold Associate’s and Bachelor’s Degrees, Microsoft Office Specialist certification, Toolroom Machinist Diploma, American Welding Society certification, over two dozen related vocational certificates, all earned in prison. I attribute those achievements to the patience, persistence, and open-mindedness it took for a quiet, awkward child to expand his world far beyond the small school library he first fell in love with.

That library no longer exists, its contents emptied into the community when the school closed, its bit of sacred space, the launchpad for so many hundreds of kids like me, rent asunder by the consolidation of resources referred to as Progress. I shed tears when I found out the school had been shuttered, the heartbeat of another small community lost, another sacred space I’ll never be able to rest in, to take shelter in, again.

One less gossamer thread to bind my soul to what is Real.

*

When someone asks me to rate the various libraries that I have experienced over my fifty-some years in this life, they will look at me funny when I simply say, “Sacred.”

I fear for a world that cannot—or feels it is beyond the need to—ground itself in such nondenominational, nonjudgmental, nonpartisan space as a Public Library where the only thing that counts is the simple question: “What’s News these days?”

A very intelligent, sophisticated friend of mine argues that the online revolution (evolution?) is an unalloyed positive, allowing for instant access to every piece of information available with only a few keystrokes, a few keywords.

I vehemently disagree.

I recently read that, even before COVID, Public Library patronage was declining by large-single-digit percentages year over year. Is this, as my friend asserts, because more people are searching for and finding the myriad minutiae of intellectual pursuit on-line, lessening the need for the hard copies that are, by their very nature, obsolete even as their metaphorical ink is drying?

Or, and I fear this is closer to the truth, is the population writ large forgoing the tangible, the reliable, the peer-review that is the essence of the sacred that such public storehouses of knowledge contain for the saccharine of “click bait,” the too-agreeable drug that enflames partisanship over such fundamental tenets as Public Service, Private Decisions….

Over what is Real.

I have rather unfettered access to what passes for Knowledge, Information, Reality (sic) that exists on the three or four major Cable News networks—the sacred is now so nearly overwhelmed by the profane of populist “Ideology” that I sit in awe of what we have lost in the Digital Age.

I have missed the vast majority of the IT progress that has saturated the DNA of most of Society, so I have both an inside and outside view of how this easy access to unfiltered, unverified information has affected the world – people are much more prone to jump to conclusions; to decide “our side” is right and any “other” side is wrong; to vilify any opposing opinions, even if those opinions only differ in nuance, in scale, in personal experience.

What used to take hours to research, the need to wade through many differing stances to find, is now instantly at hand, distilled to a fault.

It’s the exploration, the rubbing elbows with those who are fellow seekers of a different stripe, a different destination, that, in my life’s experience, define a library as sacred.

*

You’d think that each library, like the prison—or civilian—community it calls home or the varied librarians it employs, would be its own entity, alive and evolving to its own tune, its own contents, its own space, yet with the same promise of respite, of sacred.

You’d be right.

My hope is now, that the world is opening up and so many societies around the world are finding the stress, the comfort, the necessity of being around others, maybe even talking to one another face to face (what a concept!), that we would find the small, quiet space where other fellow seekers meet, discuss, debate, and learn; that there would be a small, quiet space for another young, awkward child to find something to be interested in, maybe a passion to explore.

To treat that experience not as an escape, as I had so many years ago, but as a starting point, somewhere that will always be there, waiting for that child to return, now as an adult, with that same curiosity, that same…

Tranquility.

Yeah, that’s the circumstance I’ve been chasing all these years.

There would still be times when I would look out from behind my desk at the several patrons busily perusing the shelves or noses buried in periodicals too expensive for them to purchase themselves—as I had done for so many years—and I would watch their shoulders settle ever so slightly from their usual protective hunch, I would let the quiet, the respect, the sacred, remind me that there are human beings here, seeking the same haven I have cherished.

______________________________

American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion is available via Coffee House Press.