Foreword and Introduction by Jim Reese

Dear readers, it’s been an interesting year. We’ve seen and experienced some unusual and frightening things. I believe if we continue to work together we will get through this worldwide pandemic. Through everyone’s perseverance, 4 P.M. Count will publish its thirteenth consecutive yearly perfect-bound book. I’m not sure there’s another prison publication in the nation that can say the same. If there is, please let us know, we’d like to find out who they are and share ideas.

The staff of FPC Yankton has gone above and beyond to help maintain programming through alternative methods. I have, with the help of Cory Uecker and Michael McCabe, been able to correspond with my students by weekly lectures and writing prompts. It’s not ideal, but it is the world we are living in for the time being. These weekly lectures take an enormous amount of preparation, research and writing time. I’ve often joked with other professors and teachers who are teaching remotely, I feel like we are working twice as hard. And a funnier joke, maybe I’m smarter than I thought. When I have to write down all of my lectures, lesson plans, and ideas and then workshop the men’s writing from afar, I realize how much all of us know and have grown. How much we take human interaction for granted. Education is an amazing thing. Can you imagine a day without learning something new? I think that is what hell must be.

Teaching remotely is an obstacle for us all. The last thing I want for any writer is another obstacle. But as I email thirty to sixty page packets each week to the prison I am reminded of what Ted Kooser tells me often, the number one thing you can do to become a better writer, is read. Read everything. Cereal boxes, books, comics, magazines— lectures from your professor.