Between The Lines, an Interview with Lawrence Hill

Lawrence Hill on teaching memoir writing to incarcerated students

Photo from www.lawrencehill.com

very story is important and everyone deserves the space to share theirs. Through a memoir writing class taught at the Grand Valley Institution for Women (GVI) in Kitchener, Ont., University of Guelph professor of creative writing and celebrated author, Lawrence Hill, gave students that space.

The class was taught through the university-based educational program, Walls to Bridges, which offers the unique opportunity for incarcerated and non-incarcerated students to study side-by-side for a semester and earn a university credit. Courses are offered on a variety of topics and all are steeped in the premise of experiential learning and the idea of building human connections, and this was certainly true Lawerence Hill’s memoir writing course.
This class was not what one might consider traditional.

Prior to being accepted into the course, the third- and fourth-year students who were interested were interviewed. “We wanted people we could really trust,” Lawerence — who asked me to call him Larry — told me when we met on a snowy day in his book-covered office late last December to discuss his course.

“It’s not always a comfortable situation. I mean, you are sniffed by drug dogs coming in, it’s tense. You have to go through security. People are naturally more conscious of their safety than they would be walking down the street.”

Only about half of those who applied for the class were accepted.

The University of Guelph paid for the tuition and books for incarcerated students. Since this was very costly, Larry put together a coursepack of excerpts of works from a selection of memoirs rather than assigning students whole books, as he would usually do in a traditional course. This ensured that they were still able to engage with different writing styles, but in a cost-effective way.
While teaching, Larry did almost no lecturing. He believed the best way to teach students to become better writers was by having them write. Students were given writing assignments, and Larry read each one often and provided written feedback, sometimes three or four pages, on each assignment. Larry reminded me that he is new to this. He does not consider himself an expert on teaching within a prison or on experiential learning.

“The fact that you’re going in to stay three hours a week in a prison to sit in a circle, side-by-side incarcerated people, to learn their experiences, to share yours, there is supposed to be some value and some human growth and intellectual stimulation there, even if it’s not the traditional let-me-lecture-you,” Larry explained.

In class, students were encouraged to speak honestly and share their truth and listen to others. Each class would open with an icebreaker designed to help students relax and get them talking. They would spend up to 40 minutes going around the circle, giving everyone the chance to talk. “It made a big difference,” said Larry.

He had two people helping him to design the icebreakers. One was a non-incarcerated University of Guelph student who was working on their master’s degree, and the other was an incarcerated person who, though not taking the course, was working as an assistant and had helped facilitate many courses at GVI.

“We also had a closing moment in every class,” Larry mentioned. “You don’t normally have a closing moment where people take 10 minutes to talk about what they learned, and what their thoughts are about the class, and where their head is leaving the class. It goes into, I dare say, a more personal realm than you would find in traditional classrooms.”

Every week the students broke off into small groups of three or four. These would change every week or two, with the objective being that eventually everyone would get to read each other’s work. There were a couple rules that students had to follow in order for a class where personal information was being shared to work. Students were reminded that they were there to offer advice on the writing of their classmates but not on the classmates themselves. Likewise, students were allowed to share their own stories outside of the classroom but were not allowed to share those of others.

Memoirs can often be very personal pieces of writing that tend to share information that otherwise would most likely never be talked about in a classroom setting. In a traditional classroom, unless you have a relationship with the students outside of class, it’s not often that you really get to know them. But, in an environment where people were choosing to write so personally about their life and experiences, respecting the privacy of the writers became highly important. Students were not there to judge why someone was behind bars. “The outside students” — meaning non-incarcerated students — “were not there in a quote-unquote helping capacity. They were there to study and learn. And believe me,” Larry told me, “I am quite sure that they learned as much from the prisoners as the prisoners learned from the outside students.”

For some students in the class, it was the first time that they had gone back and revisited incidents from their past. Whether these were events from childhood, destructive relationships, or the processes of their incarceration, they were given the opportunity to reflect on moments and situations that changed their lives. A safe environment was created so that students were given the space to safely share their experiences. “Even though something horrible happened, in terms of their encounter with the law and consequences, we are still dealing with human beings who have human needs,” Larry said. “Those women inside know things that students on the outside have no information about. And they have knowledge, wisdom, and experiences that other people don’t.”

Prior to teaching at the GVI, Larry went through a five day training course. The training was largely taught by prisoners who had taken courses previously offered through Walls to Bridges and were aware of the unique needs of incarcerated students. Working with diverse student populations requires that certain considerations must be made, and it was no different while working with incarcerated students. They might find out they have a parole hearing right before their class is meant to start. They might be moved from one quad to another with little to no notice, or because of disciplinary issues happening outside of class. They might be removed from the course. “You have to be flexible as a professor and understand people are not in control of their lives. They are under pressure,” Larry said, noting there are a number of things that could interfere with an individual’s ability to concentrate on their studies. “Prison is a punitive experience,” said Larry. “On a daily basis there are forms of punishments that recur and recur and recur. It’s a hard place to live. You are cut off to access to people and information.”

Larry believes that there is a difference between sympathy and empathy. It is one thing to be kind to someone and another to pity someone.

“I think we just need to bring our full selves and be kind and be good listeners and gentle with people,” he said.

At the end of the course, a graduation ceremony was held to celebrate the success of the students in the class. Larry told me that this is not something that is normally done when a student finishes a class, but for the students at the Grand Valley Institution for Women, it was a big deal. “I feel that the writers in the class found it to be a very rich experience.”