Not Shut Up 27 gender & identity issue

not shut

up Issue 27 Winter 2015

£3.50 Distributed

free of charge to secure establishments and care teams around the UK

maRtina cole in pRisons a.l. Kennedy on pRisons pussy Riot on BooKs in pRisons cReate & inside stoRies lucy edKins’ a piece of hell chRis Wilson’s Ruin

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Sisters and Brothers Behind Bars

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ur Gender and Freedom issue features Lucy Edkins’ regular art roundup page of exhibition reviews, along with an extract from her play A Piece of Hell, illustrated by a vivid and atmospheric set of etchings. We have more art (and writing) by another of our Academy members Chris Wilson, with images from his art book Ruin.

Arts charity Create has run projects in HMP/YOI Winchester for some years.

We hear from CEO Nicky Goulder and participant Ryan, while our gallery shows work from an art group in HMP Send called Sisters in Art. This is part of Watts Gallery’s Big Issues programme, which works with prisoners and other community groups. Sisters in Art was established in 2008 by its first Michael Varah Memorial Fund Artist in Residence Sandy Curry. She writes movingly about her six years at HMP Send, which she says “Have been some of the most formative in my development as an artist… It is only now, with hindsight, that I can stand back and realise how much my own work and, indeed, my perspective on life, has been changed and moulded by this opportunity”.

Her successor Mary Branson has just completed her year-long residency. She talks frankly about the challenges of working in the prison environment, helping group members develop their art: “Each

Bent Bars Project

week, I saw a change in the women. Some were new to the group, others had been involved for several years. They encouraged each other, shared each other’s successes and helped out when someone was stuck.”

Watts Gallery’s residency model should inspire other prison establishments, but one wouldn’t want them to think that such charities provide a substitute for regular art education provision; it is certainly concerning that prison education providers continue to withdraw art from curriculums on the basis that it doesn’t meet ‘employability criteria’.

Work from the Sisters in Art Group will be exhibited as part of the Freeflow Arts programme in March 2015, displayed at Garden Court Chambers, London.

Matthew Meadows, Art Editor

The Bent Bars Project is a letter-writing project for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, gender-variant, intersex, and queer prisoners in Britain. The project was founded in 2009, responding to a clear need to develop stronger connections and build solidarity between LGBTQ communities inside and outside prison walls.

Bent Bars aims to work in solidarity with prisoners by sharing resources, providing mutual support and drawing public attention to the struggles of queer and trans people behind bars. The project also collects and distributes information for LGBTQ prisoners on a range of issues, including harm reduction practices (safer sex, safer druguse), HIV and HepC prevention, homophobia, transphobia, coming out in prison, etc.

If you are a prisoner and would like a penpal through Bent Bars or would like more information about the project, please write to the address below. They will respond with a discrete letter, respecting your privacy and confidentiality. If you are not permitted to write to a PO box, they can provide an alternative address.

Bent Bars Project PO Box 66754 London, WC1A 9BF bent.bars.project@gmail.com

Matthew Meadows Meet our Art Editor

I’ve been working in the criminal justice system for ten years, mostly in prisons. After a stint as their awards judge, the Koestler Trust commissioned me to research and write Insider Art, a book about art in the UK’s criminal justice system, published in 2010.

More recently, I’ve been organising Freeflow Arts exhibitions at Garden Court Chambers as a means of finding wider audiences for the masses of locked-up talent in the UK – and unlocking it. I work as an artist too, doing lots of drawing and printing strange political wallpaper...

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What is inside?

2 Introduction, Matthew Meadows, Art Editor

The gender and identity issue

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3 From the Editor 4 Martina Cole, interview 7 Jeffrey Hawthorne, writing 8 The Escort by Chris Wilson 10 Safe Ground, poems 12 Poetry Workout, Anna Robinson, Poetry Editor 13 Poetry selection

risons are like army camps. Just think – uniforms not clothes, ranks not roles, orders not options.

But army camps were not designed to restore our humanity, they were designed to prepare (mostly men) for times of war.

Psychiatric hospitals. Immigration centres.

Children’s homes. Courts and police stations. All have the stamp of military, masculine, macho culture upon them.

Creativity is the opposite of destruction. By denying inmates access to books, arts courses, computers and internet, are we not condemning them to the kind of darkness they can’t find their ways out of? Why do we not give them pets to look after, farms to manage, real-life problems to solve? Why do we feed them the propaganda of television, while denying access to literature and information technology?

Perhaps it is time a completely different agenda was introduced? Perhaps it is time we stopped discarding the bits of our communities which fail, and instead started fixing that which is broken? Recreating instead of rejecting? Opening and owning instead of shutting up?

This dark, winter issue of Not Shut Up is dedicated to themes of gender and identity. Female perspectives.

Transgender perspectives. LGBT perspectives. We hope you enjoy this alternative take on the world and, inspired, will create a brighter, more colourful spring.

16 S.P. Potter, writing 17 Folklore by Cliff Hughes 18 Tristan Clarke, writing 22 Alou, writing 23 Cliff Hughes, writing 24 Sisters in Arts, feature 27 Sisters in Arts, feature gallery 31 Election Observation Mission, a project 32 Create Arts 36 Miriam Halahmy Illegal, review 37 Shaun Attwood’s Hard Time, competition 38 Anonymous, writing 40 AL Kennedy, interview 42 Sarah Baker, writing 44 Alistair Fruish, writing 45 Writers in Prisons, update 46 Arts Roundup 48 Lucy Edkins, play 51 Safe Ground, poems 52 Art organisations worth knowing about 53 About Not Shut Up 54 RUIN by Chris Wilson, a book feature

Marek Kazmierski / Managing Editor Marek escaped communist Poland as a child and settled in the UK. He is a former English teacher, creative writing tutor and most recently Head of Diversity at HMP Feltham.

Marek is also a writer, translator, publisher and visual artist. When not at his computer typing, he keeps sane riding very old, very loud motorcycles.

Not Shut Up is a registered charity (Charity No. 1090610) and a company limited by guarantee (registered in London No. 4260355). Anyone interested in submitting work, volunteering or working as part of the Not Shut Up Academy, which works with in- and post-custody writers on developing their professional skills, is invited to write in to us or contact us via our website.

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Not Shut Up Interview

Interview

MartIna Cole & DaVID KenDall

of the Six Book Challenge

In the autumn, Not Shut Up joined Martina Cole on her visits to HMP Pentonville and HMP Swaleside, as she travels the country promoting the Six Book Challenge. not shut up: Many people will know crime writer Martina Cole, a good thing. One guy used to put a Stephen King dust jacket over and we’re here with David Kendall, project manager for the Six Book Challenge, working on behalf of The Reading Agency since 2008.

DaviD KenDall: I met Martina a couple of years ago, in Holloway prison in London. Not often you get to say that about people, is it? I asked her to be an ambassador of the Six Book Challenge, because in the 15 years I’ve been working in prisons, she’s always been the most widely read author, doesn’t matter which establishment you go into, people always say, ‘Have you read Martina Cole?’.

nsup: You not only regularly go into prisons with the Six Book

nsup: Martina, how does it feel to be a female writer who is so

MC: Yeah, been doing it for ages, since the early 90s. My main

popular in such a macho environment?

MaRtina Cole: I’m popular in both women’s prisons and male

prisons. Years ago, my readership was mostly female, but it’s more like 60/40 now, even more so in the prison system. A hell of a lot of men behind bars read me, but I’m glad for anyone to pick up a book, for whatever reason, be it my book or someone else’s. If you start with me and then move on to other authors’ works, that can only be

my books, so no one would see he was reading a woman writer. But this same man also used to read Catherine Cookson. And he said to me: ‘I absolutely love reading, but I work on a building site. When I’m taking a break and sitting there with a Catherine Cookson, if caught I’d be slaughtered. But then when I realised what your books were like, and so did the other guys, I was happy to read them with the dust jacket off.’

Challenge, you’ve also been teaching in prisons a while.

function, when I go in is to try and enthuse people to want to read or want to write. I show them it’s possible to do it, that anyone can do it if they want. In all the years I’ve been visiting jails, I’ve seen them change, massively. Not all, but some prisons I go into have a much lighter atmosphere than they once had. It’s a good thing, lots of change, education is improved, better libraries. I’ve found the prison officers’ attitude has shifted, the younger ones

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are all for rehabilitation. The old kind of officer who came from the army or other forces is disappearing. Yeah, you’re always gonna have bullies, I do think, but if it’s less like an army and more like a college that can only be a good thing. The use of first names between staff and inmates makes it less ‘them and us’, but then again that kind of culture depends on which prison you find yourself in. dK: Prisons in this country vary. They are all individual kingdoms. mc: Fiefdoms, actually.

nsup: If you could use your imagination to redesign the modern prison, what would you change? mc: I think more emphasis on the education side. And cooking, cheffing, any kind of active things, music, art. dK: Doing is important, something to occupy yourself, using your time. Any choices offered are good. And bloody good libraries! mc: The papers call prisons ‘holiday camps’, but that’s shit. They’re tough, but the thing for us is we want to send them out better people than when they went in, right? Some people discover

hidden talents. Eddie Richardson with his painting is one good example. But mostly you get revolving doors, and it’s harsh. Too harsh. You treat people like animals, they turn into animals. I’m sorry, but it’s true. dK: It’s a fairness thing, a culture shift. It’s hard to engender a sense of fairness and justice in prisoners, if you aren’t treating them fairly yourself. mc: Certainly, prisoners should have more say in what happens on their own wings, in some prisons this is happening, they’re being given more responsibility. And we are talking about some people who’ve never made a decision in their whole life. When we were in Deerbolt Prison recently, and those kids made all that fantastic food. We got to appreciate the effort they put in, it was something positive. And Barlinnie Prison, I was surprised at the atmosphere, really positive. And HMP Liverpool used to be one of the hardest nicks, went in there recently, a fantastic experience. P.O.s called inmates by their first names, doing a fantastic job, getting people ready for release.

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Not Shut Up Interview

nsup: Martina, your books are bestsellers all over the world,

you travel to all sorts of places, how do readers in different countries respond to you?

MC: Not much different, really. Readers ask the same things, Australia, New Zealand, the world over. They’re all interested in writing and reading, same thing.

go, so that helps. I’ve had my stuff adapted for various formats. I didn’t write the plays of my books, but I did television, and I love live theatre, loved seeing my characters come to life on stage, really good cast, great director, it all worked. In fact, people around you are a secret too. I’m very loyal. Got the same publicist, same agent, same publisher as I started out with. If it ain’t broke...

nsup: Tell us more about the Six Book Challenge.

DK: It doesn’t have to be six books, it can be six songs, or poems,

nsup: How should people start?

MC: Well, how else? Write what you know. Jimmy McGovern came

or articles. Depends on your ability. If you are starting as a less confident reader, you start from where you are and build up. If you already have confidence, we encourage you to challenge yourself, read broader, wider. If you read any six new books and comment on them, they will stay with you.

MC: Hopefully, one will be from a genre you discover for the first time and come to love and be interested in for a long time to come.

DK: I love reading comments people make about the books they’ve read. It’s a great way to engage with literature, gives you a sense of achievement, commenting on the book, especially in prisons, ’cos no one else listens to you sometimes. We also run reading groups, for more able readers.

MC: In HMP Swaleside, we just heard poetry, heartbreaking stuff, and some journalistic pieces, plus another detective novel, ready to go. British crime story, but it had that Nordic drabness to it.

Amazing. I should get my agent onto that guy.

nsup: In terms of the Six Book Challenge, the government has limited the amount of books going into prisons and reduced staff numbers that allow access to libraries, yet new records in reading are being broken in places like Pentonville and Thameside. Why do you think this is?

MC: All down to individuals, backed up by a well-stocked library with an active librarian. Mona in the Ville, she’s a qualified accountant who loves books, she could make any book sound fabulous. She’s a total book fanatic, that’s why she is breaking records.

DK: The average stay in Pentonville is 50 days, and over 300 people completed the Challenge recently, this in a dispersal prison.

All librarians are marvellous, and the secret is to get everyone involved, especially governors and P.O.s taking it up. nsup: Over the years, you must have developed tricks to help you write. Care to share some with our readers?

MC: Depends, I sometimes find my character first, sometimes the

storyline is what comes along and starts me off. One thing I always do say, find your own way of writing. Can’t write from recipes. I know some authors say that they always get up to write at 5 am, or whatever, but I can’t. I’m never up that time – I sometimes get in the house around then! So, you must find your own way of working.

Be true to yourself, your original voice, and chances are people will buy whatever it is you’re trying to tell them. As for writer’s block, everyone battles it. But I usually have two projects on the

from that world, most people who write good, gritty drama come from that world. Mostly, when writing crime, people write from the point of view of the police, but I do criminals, much more exciting. I admire those who write a whole series of the same character, but I vary my stories. Working with a bigger canvas, I find it more interesting.

DK: Most people make detectives mavericks, but real cops are actually boring. Methodical, procedural. They don’t drive round in strange cars, living in big houses.

MC: Like Morse – if real-life coppers drove around in a car like his, people would think he’s on the take! But that’s how you make things interesting. Anti-heroes used to be so good in the old days, Mickey Spillane, that sort of thing. Once, an Old Bill said to me: ‘Fine line, Tina, between us and them. Gotta think like a thief to catch a thief.’ But me, I prefer the criminal point of view, always seems more interesting. Also, my secret is that I write from the point of view of women caught up in that world. Doing a prison workshop once I had published my novel ‘Two Women’, a man said reading it felt like looking into the windows of his mum’s house.

That’s a very brutal book, no wonder he ended up where he did. But I take it as a compliment, take it that I write in a realistic way.

nsup: Martina, David, thank you and keep up the amazing work!

Martina Cole is the number one bestselling author of hard-hitting, uncompromising and haunting novels, sales of which now stand at over 13 million copies. They have also been adapted for television and for the stage, and have been translated into 30 languages.

The Reading Agency’s Six Book Challenge invites people to pick six reads and record them in a diary to get a certificate. There’s more information about the scheme at www.readingagency.org.uk or contact David Kendall at david.kendall@readingagency.org.uk to find out more.

The Reading Agency / Six Book Challenge Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3GA

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UNTITLED, painting by Alou

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Back inside the ‘in’ Jeffrey Hawthorne

Jeffrey is a Big Issue online journalist, part of a group of homeless and marginalised people taking part in online journalism training with The Big Issue and Poached Creative.

alk about a wake up call. Nine armed police – one dressed as a postman to get me to open the front door – charging into my home at 10am on a Saturday morning, was not what I expected after a late night partying.

I’d been selling drugs to pay for a habit that had got out of control, becoming greedy, ignoring my health and blocking out reality as I went from one high to the next. The police knocking down my door was the short sharp shock I needed – a stint in prison could give me time to detox too.

Guilty of possessing class A, B and C drugs with intent to supply and an offensive weapon got me four years, but the thought of going to prison wasn’t the worst of my concerns. I’m a gay man, loud and proud, but where I was going that could mean being treated like a paedophile or rapist.

I feared for my safety and so couldn’t risk telling anyone, even an officer, in case they told the inmates and I was attacked. But that meant denying who and what I was, which was not going to be easy for someone as ‘out’ as me.

And it wasn’t. My only consolation was knowing nods with other gay prisoners that gave me a little reassurance I wasn’t alone.

But the truth was I was alone: frustrated and angry that I couldn’t be myself. There are posters on prison walls about gay

groups you can join, but I didn’t sign up for fear of being outed. Instead, I joined the Buddhist group, which gave me a bit of comfort, as it was a calm environment that promotes tolerance and non-violence.

It included other gay men, who had presumably joined for the same reason, but other than quietly acknowledging each other our sexuality was never discussed.

After Brixton, I spent the majority of my time in Belmarsh and Rochester.

Fortunately, I got a good job in the healthcare department before doing a barbering course, so I kept busy and my sexuality was never mentioned. I’ve been out of prison for 16 months now and on reflection it needed to happen, but I’ve lost everything. I’ve got no job and I’m living in a hostel. I’m trying to get back on my feet, but it’s such an uphill struggle.

Having a criminal record makes it difficult to get work and being on benefits makes it difficult to rent a home.

I’ve done the crime and done the time, so it’s time I was able to move on. I’m currently volunteering at St Giles Trust, doing casework to help those who have recently been released prepare for life on the outside. But it’s not just prisoners on their way out that need support, there needs to be some help when you enter the system too. I was sentenced shortly

after the riots in 2011, when the system was overloaded. On arriving at Brixton, I was given no induction and just treated as one of the rioters. But I had never been to prison before so didn’t know the regime.

I had to learn by making mistakes and getting into trouble.

Apart from my concerns about being a gay man in prison, I had serious health issues and was addicted to drugs, but no one was interested. I need a machine to stop me choking for breath at night when I attempt to sleep, without it I barely get a wink. It was months before I got it. As for my drug habit, I was left to go cold turkey on the drug wing of the prison with no support. It seemed that if you don’t cause any problems you’re forgotten about and left to fend for yourself. So getting help to adapt to life in prison as a gay man seems unlikely, but this is the 21st century not the 20th, so you would think something could be done.

To be honest I don’t know what can be done to tackle the sense of isolation I felt in prison. Who could we trust? Maybe an openly gay officer offering us a space to be ourselves. But you can just imagine the headlines if the tabloids got wind of it: ‘Officer and inmates in gay orgy frenzy’.

But with an estimated 6% of the population being gay, a solution must be found.

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Not Shut Up Academy

The escorT An extract from Glue Ponys by chris Wilson

Chris Wilson was born in 1961 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and grew up in Dar es Salaam, East Africa. After many years of living in the streets and prisons of the USA, he was extradited to the UK in 1998, where he went on to study at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. His artwork has been shown in galleries in London and the South East of England, and featured in the first Not Shut Up book RUIN, featured on the back pages of this issue. He is currently working on Glue Ponys, a collection of short stories from his experiences of life in the US.

s

he couldn’t tell you how come she started tricking, it just seemed to happen, she thought most of the things in her life had been the same way. She felt like she was a tumbleweed being blown across America without any say in the matter.

If you pressed her she would say well, I suppose I was sitting in a doorway on Market and Eight early one morning, I think it was raining and I went to a phone booth to call my mother to tell her I was safe and I saw a card stuck up by the coin slot that said escorts required no experience necessary top dollar paid so I called the number instead of my mother and this girl by the name of Jackie answered and she seemed real nice and she gave me her address and said she’d pay the cab fare if I came right now so I jumped in a taxi and that’s how it started.

Her first job had been at the Hyatt Regency in Burlingame at 12 o’clock that same day, Jackie had given her her own pager and introduced her to Jerry who was going to be her driver and told her how it worked.

When you get in the room, honey, the first thing you do is make sure you feel safe, then get the cash up front and call me to say time’s started and make sure I got the right room number then in 40 minutes I’ll call

you back to say time’s up and if he wants to spend more money, well, go in 30-minute slots at a hundred each from there, got it?

She nodded her head and said I think so.

The first guy had been Japanese, it had been easy, he was small and came fast and smelled clean and when she left the room with 250, two thirds of it hers, she felt the best she’d felt in a long time.

On the fourth day of working, she’d gone to a job in a small motel in North Beach and Jerry had dropped her off and taken Amanda to another call in Chinatown, so she was alone. When she got to the room and a big Mexican guy opened the door and she could see two other guys sitting on the couch drinking vodka, something had told her no, don’t go in there, but she had. That was the first time she’d done heroin and she’d got so sick and could barely remember anything that happened, except that the next day she was sore, but they’d paid her so she guessed it was alright.

After two weeks of staying at Jackie’s, she got her own room at the Hotel Utah on Harrison and Third, it was 120 dollars a week and she had to share the toilet and the kitchen, but there was a bar in the basement where all the bike messengers and motorcycle couriers hung out and on Friday nite, they had bands and an old Vietnamese lady made the best food on a little gas ring stove they had in the back.

Everyone knew her name and she could even run up a tab at the bar and put it on her room bill. She had just turned 18, but nobody carded her and she felt like she was truly grown up.

After a month, she had saved 2,000 dollars so she bought a ticket for her mom to fly out from Dallas, but when her mum got there she hadn’t believed she was just having dinner and going to the theatre with rich businessmen like she told her and when she came home at six o’clock in the morning (on the Sunday they were meant to go to Golden Gate Park), her mom had gotten off the couch and slapped her and called her a whore and pulled her hair, so she’d run out of the hotel and gone to a bar on Bryant and Fourth and cried as she drank shots of tequila with beer backs.

When she got back to the room later that nite, her mother had left. She didn’t see her again for a long time after that.

She met Gary Wayne sitting on the staircase in the hotel, playing an old acoustic guitar. She was on her way up to her room after finishing work and he was singing ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ by The Velvet Underground and she thought that she’d never heard anything so perfect before, she looked at him and smiled, but he just kept singing and when he was done she said do you want to come up?

She stopped taking speed because Jackie

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Mother and child (2011), various media on canvas by chris Wilson

had said she was already too thin and started snorting coke instead. Jerry always had coke because sometimes the clients wanted to buy some, they’d say to her do you want to party? And she’d say, yeah, and they’d say can you get any coke? And she’d say, yeah, and they’d give her the money and she’d page Jerry who was parked up outside and it was as easy as that at first.

After three months, things got strange, she couldn’t say why except that sometimes

Jerry frightened her because he kept a pistol under the driver’s seat and he’d stare in the rearview mirror real hard then reach down for the pistol and when she said what’s wrong? he wouldn’t answer, he just kept staring.

And Jackie started talking about weird clicks on the phone and told her not to use certain words when she called from the guys’ hotel rooms, but she kept forgetting and Jackie got mad and called her stupid

and sometimes Jerry wouldn’t be in the parking lot when she came out like he was supposed to be and she’d be left standing outside and it felt like everyone could tell what she’d been doing. And then one day she just took off instead of waiting for him and she spent the money on coke and didn’t pay Jackie her third and the next day she moved to a hotel in the Tenderloin so they couldn’t find her and that nite she went out on the street for the first time.

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GROUNDation Project

Challenging masculine identity through poetry

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afe Ground is a London-based charity which works to promote relationship skills as tools for empowering people to change, so reducing the risk of reoffending and building stronger communities.

Safe Ground challenges people and communities to do relationships differently. Through drama, dialogue and debate, they enhance empathy and encourage expression, developing selfawareness and promoting social justice.

Their GROUNDation Poetry Project involves a series of poetry workshops led by renowned poets such as John Hegley, Joelle Taylor and Ty. These are

run in HMP Wandsworth’s library and in various locations in the local Wandsworth community. A further two workshops, again inside and outside of the prison, will focus on practical paper crafting skills, alongside design, production and business skills. A limited edition handcrafted book of poetry will be published in the summer of 2015. This will feature the work of participants from the project chosen by a special guest editor, and involve groups of poetry workshop participants coming together to physically make 300 copies of the book. This publication, produced in association with Not Shut Up, will not only extend the life of the project, but

also make the voices of men in prison and Wandsworth local communities accessible to a wider audience.

Most recently, the Brighton-based poet Maria Jastrzebska led a workshop with over 20 Polish prisoners in the library at HMP Wandsworth (huge thanks to their librarian, Javier!), which have now been translated by our editor, Marek Kazmierski.

Maria blogging about the experience: ‘Armed with blank sheets of white paper and Polish sweets, I told the men I had come to infect them with the poetry bug. So there we were – an older woman poet and some 20 mostly younger, tough looking men who said their experience of poetry had stopped after primary school in the main. What did we have in common? Firstly, as Poles, there was the fact that home outside of your homeland has a layered meaning. There is the home we find ourselves in (mine in Brighton) and there is the where-I-come-from home. A different language/culture/cuisine/history. But also, secondly, there is this excitement – and profound humility – when you set out to write anything. It doesn’t matter how experienced or published you are, how many awards you have or haven’t won. Each new blank page is exactly that. Blank and new. None of us knows exactly what will happen once we start writing. That’s what makes

it so thrilling – but also scary – that’s where the magic begins.

Will it be any good? Will anyone be interested in what I say? Do I have anything to say? Is it important? To encourage the magic I asked all the men to chose a Power Animal to help them that day.

They were to introduce themselves and their Power Animal to the rest of the group. Radio Wanno, the prison’s radio station, were recording us and had provided a microphone for us to use. One by one each person got up to speak. Soon the library was full of lions and pumas, rats, pigeons, wolves, dolphins, even a cloud and a giraffe. And once all of them had appeared there was no stopping us. We read poems by Moniza Alvi and Tadeusz Rozewicz (two of my favourite poets), we talked and shared ideas about home, how it can be the best, a safe ground, or a hard and difficult place, and everyone wrote poems.’

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My rat pack Rafal Kruk

I was raised as a rat with five brothers along we’d laze about, and that was that, our youth was full of bad truth, no proof of tomorrow, we rat brothers moved to beg, steal or borrow, on this vicious wheel, sometimes joy, sometimes sorrow, the hell where we were you can tell was no picnic.

My housing estate in a wicked state, missing light, all over shadows fall, time is late, it slows and flows, going nowhere, my youth cut short what hair is still there is grey, I can sort the sewer from the ground, my ratty cohort cannot be found, the sound of my song resounds profound, I am a rat and of my rat pack proud.

Biscuits, Broadmoor Hospital, Loud Bronze Award for Painting

The glass test Robert sawicki

I open my eyes and still I am here Beautiful sights and warmth all around.

A glass of unfinished water next to me, Water which was once fresh and cool now looks strange, murky.

Yet when I look again a new perspective the glass clean, the water refreshing.

In the future there will not be any more doubt – the glass is full, it is gratitude which makes it clean.

Pride of a lion Robert sawicki

I was raised in a wonderful place, by loving, kind and protective beasts.

But at the time I didn’t fully know how lucky I was to belong to such a mighty, valiant breed. Maybe it was because of this ignorance that I came to be kidnapped by a pack of stray dogs, who tried to take all I was and had. Yet in the end, I found the pride I needed was inside me all along, the pride I belong to, which belongs to me, the pride of a lion heart.

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Anna Robinson’s

What Happens When Nothing Happens Often, the best cell poetry focuses on the idea of nothing happening. This suits winter-time, a season when nature is seemingly asleep and we would kind of like to be.

That is one of the things I really liked about the poem ‘The Elements’, which was awarded a Koestler prize this year. There is a lot of drama in the poem and yet, most of what happens could go unnoticed in a busy city. What happens is, it is raining, the rain pours out of the gargoyles on a church drainage system. In the same church, the bells are old and worn out and so when they ring the vibration disturbs some roosting bats and they fly out. Then it starts snowing. That’s it really! It is detail about things that happen when seemingly nothing happens that makes the poem.

The drama is in the detail and the telling of it. We are told about snow falling and how ‘no-one hears it hitting the ground’. And yes, of course we don’t hear snow-flakes hit the ground – but the mentioning of that makes it feel like an important observation.

In 1975, French modernist poet and filmmaker Georges Perec wrote a 60-page piece of observation, sitting in a small square in Paris and writing about what he saw. His intention was to note all the things that people usually ignore. He called this piece ‘An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris’, which was then published in an English translation by Marc Lowenthal in 2010. These lines will give you an idea of some of those observations: The sun is hidden. There’s some wind.

A little girl, flanked by her parents (or by her kidnappers) is weeping.

A car goes by, its hood covered in dead leaves.

Night, winter: unreal appearance of the passersby.

What I would like you to do is to look out of your cell window

each day at the same time for at least 15 minutes and note what you see. I appreciate you won’t see quite the range of things Perec saw in his square in Paris, but let’s start with what you’ve got.

Maybe you see people from other wings on exercise, or not! Or perhaps you see pigeons, perhaps other birds, or members of staff – uniformed or not – or no one at all. Are there trees in your view?

Odd bits of plant life that no one planted? What rubbish has blown into view?

Establish what kind of period of time you will do this for – everyday for a week perhaps, or even a month, and then settle down and do it. Use the same notebook if possible and put the dates and times you look.

You can also make a note of other things, such as thoughts that cross your mind (although don’t overdo this), smells that waft across, odd sounds. Make sure though that most of the writing is what you see out of the window. This exercise of Perec’s is often referred to as ‘what happens when nothing happens’, so it is completely okay if nothing much happens when you are looking out of the window. That nothingness can say a lot.

Aside from that, there are some gorgeous poems in this issue that came from a workshop that took place in Wandsworth prison with Polish inmates and the poet Maria Jastrzebska and our own Marek Kazmierski. They were written in Polish and Marek has translated them for us. I especially like the poems that use animals as images. We also present a great new find for Not Shut Up, Zehiria Ibrahimi, whose writing explores very challenging issues with imagination and lyricism.

Happy reading – and may that reading lead to, as ever, Happy Writing!

Anna Robinson, Poetry Editor

Photo by brittany aPP

Poetry Pages

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Poetry

The Elements

HMP Long Lartin Anonymous, Koestler Awards

Rain spouting gargoyles listen to distorted chimes of a cracked bell, as the reverberations desert the crooked belfry.

Disturbed by loud thunder, bats flee their roost circling the steeple once, twice, then one by one disappear into the night.

Rain turns to snow and as it silently falls, no one hears it hitting the ground slowly covering everything with thin white ice crystals.

Gargoyles with icy tongues don’t hear any sound from the snow-insulated belfry, just a rusty weather vane struggling to turn in the growing wind.

The Ward is War Secure Unit, unnamed Zehiria Ibrahimi

The ward is tight normality that now hems in my deformed brain; His is a caring ‘tyranny’ hammering me, again, again.

I am disease, indecency; His ‘compassion’ has such disdain.

I cannot resist, cannot flee the force, the poison of his reign.

He – ‘nurse’, dictator overhead.

I – the mere deviant beneath.

I obey the abyss of dread without one comfort, one relief.

I shudder, for my small sad bed is the chasm of this ward’s grief.

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Poetry

An Introduction to Charismatic Molecular Biology Guernsey Prison Service Gordon Chorlton

I would be very surprised to see Philip Larkin, the poet, in the cell next to me so far as I know he very rarely broke the law.

He was a valuable member of the community (though he’s not around anymore).

But if he did land in the cell next to me I would ask his opinion of my attempt at poetry or maybe play a game of pool.

He would think of profound things to say about the £14.40 weekly pay if he could get a job; maybe buffing the upper corridor.

I would say ‘Don’t worry Phil, about being a crim just do some weights with us in the gym’.

He might like the dichotomy between physical and emotional strength.

My Buddhist ex-girlfriend and I saw Phil at a reading in Hull one time however it seemed we were the only people amazed at his awesome rhymes.

I asked Phil about that one fine day while queueing for lunch in the usual way and he said ‘life’s full of disappointments mate, don’t forget to collect your plate.’

One weekend I drew Phil in the prison pool tournament he cheated and won, which led to resentment, the next day he came to church with me, but he left early.

Eventually Phil put in a parole application, after about a year it was polite and amusing, so I hear.

They turned him down; he’d had a warning for swearing in the library.

A Stranger on the Shore HMP Stafford Mark

The waves rush upon the shore. Like a man greeting a long lost friend.

Then, discovering I’m a stranger, they retreat in shame back to the sea.

I was born a million waves ago. In this sea-haunted town.

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Hear Me Thinking?

HMP Dumfries Anonymous, Koestler Award

The sound of slamming metal plays like inhumane rage against the machine out of sync with an old black and white flick.

Shattered glass hangs in the air like a billion tiny diamonds shimmering in the night sky.

My senses slowly fade to numbness as the dark descends over me and the stars plummet to earth.

The soundtrack to my death ends and now I have nothing but the sound of me thinking as slow as a glacier.

The Rural Fox

Complete silence akin to deep space.

Barely visible behind the weather-veined trees, You haunt every country dweller.

Your razor-tipped ears rise above the breeze when you leave the flea-ridden cellar.

Cambian Special Hospital Anonymous, Koestler Awards

You polish your knife-edged claws, wash away the leathery gristle.

You open your saliva-oiled jaws, clean every nail and bristle.

You hide behind the leaf-lined oak, rest behind the thorn-fenced stems.

You sniff the fungus-flavoured smoke, remove hundreds of glacial gems.

Trapped in a wordless world of fear, you shudder beneath a cloud of steam.

A pair of fiery globes appear in a wire-whiskered hare’s dream.

You scowl at a white-collared beast shivering beneath the mist-kissed moon.

You think about another mouth-watering feast closing your lace-lipped eyes far too soon.

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Poems

From a reader’s Letter Dear Anna Robinson,

the first thing I must do is congratulate you on your discernment!

While at HmP Liverpool, I entered a number of poems (and a short story) for this year’s Koestler awards. Imagine my surprise, on being handed a copy of Issue 26 of Not shut Up, at seeing my poem ‘How to write a villanelle’ in print and listed as a Gold award Winner! seriously, my grateful thanks to you and the rest of the judges.

It has really given a boost to my confidence. I am currently doing

a correspondence course with the National extension College in Creative Writing. this has been paid for by the Prisoners’ education trust and it is really very good. I am doing it both for recreational purposes and to instil some self-discipline, before I attempt a course in literature at the open University.

I have finished a second assignment, which is a three-part exercise in autobiographical writing. one part asks for something on an event that ‘deeply affected you’. I chose the first time I fell head over heels, deciding on a piece of ‘light’ verse which owes some debt to the likes of John Berryman. I am also a great lover of ogden Nash – here is my poem for your consideration:

The Ballad of Debbie James s.p. potter

my heart goes drifting back to childhood, dancing to a primal beat. outside privies, coats for blankets, tin bath sundays, terraced streets.

skipping ropes we turned like Zombies. salt! Pepper! oil! and mustard!

Hopscotch, kiss-chase, we played them all. awkward, but alive (and flustered!)

to those street games, ‘British Bulldog’, ‘Kick the Can’ and ‘alley o!’ our gang of comrades, sworn for always, a band of boys where girls don’t go.

Fights broke out between old comrades. rutting stags in short, grey pants. a bloodied nose the price worth paying as debbie led us in her dance.

david Freeman, Peter Craven, Charlie evans and the rest.

We played for hours that twilight summer.

Golden days! then all went west.

Baths were taken, hair combed straight, mums and dads looked on bemused. despite heroics, non-one conquered – all advances were refused.

and none of us could see it coming, that sunday playing footie games. a car drove up our carless street. out stepped a girl called debbie James.

then, one day, her beauty vanished the Hillman took our prize away. still, she changed us all forever. (except Charlie. He was gay.)

she oozed like honey from the Hillman, all auburn hair and drop dead smiles.

Peter Craven tried taking a ‘peno’, then looked up and missed by miles!

Fifty years, I’ve supped and savoured Long lost lovers and old flames. thought they all mean something – still, none comes close to debbie James.

If Only! It’s just an ImpOssIble Dream, Hmp altcourse, bridget Highly Commended award for theme - Dreams

From that day our lives were altered, nothing ever quite the same. that siren brought a brand new rule book, we now played a different game.

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Folklore

The Folklore of Trees, Christmas and Virgins Cliff Hughes

N

Untitled 1, HMP Peterborough, Caro Millington Highly Commended Award for Mixed Media

ow that seasonal celebrations are over, Christmas trees all over the country (at least, the real ones) have been taken outside and burnt or dumped, along with the holly and mistletoe. But what have these evergreens got to do with celebrating the birth of Jesus, the little town of Bethlehem, wise men and shepherds? Well, nothing actually because, apart from the nativity scene, all the rituals of Christmas predate Christianity and its arrival as a fully-fledged religion on these shores, by some considerable time. Yes, even that Dutch or Bohemian bishop Sinta Klaus or Turkish Saint Nicholas (take your pick) was only a church-ratified substitute for Old Father Frost or Odin. And the tradition of setting up and decorating a Christmas tree in your home – although supposedly introduced from Germany in the nineteenth century by Prince Albert – has origins that go back thousands of years.

Evergreens in particular – precisely because they retain their greenery all year and don’t ‘die’ in winter – were believed to have the power to ward off evil spirits, and so their branches were fixed over doorways, woven into wreaths (the ancient circular representation of life), and complete trees were brought into the home. Mistletoe, of course, has fertility associations stretching back beyond the druidic cult of the Iron and Bronze Ages and, surprisingly, many English counties still have by-laws on their books banning the plant from being taken into churches.

Trees have been potent symbols in mythology all over the world since men first came down from them and learned to talk. Our fairy-tales are full of magic trees, trees that grant wishes or tell the future. A universal symbol is the ‘world tree’, its branches reaching up and supporting the heavens and its root system grounded in the underworld. Adam didn’t eat an apple, but the fruit of the magical ‘tree of knowledge’ that enabled him to know the difference between good and evil and thereby claim equality with God. This got him banished from the Garden of Eden and because Eve gave him the fruit, he has been blaming her for his misfortunes ever since.

It might seem odd that so much pagan tree-symbolism is still

attached to the apparently Christian celebrations around the 25th December. But we need to remember that Christianity is a relative newcomer to these islands and that its green shoots have been skilfully grafted on to the stock of existing pagan traditions.

Christmas tree decorations represent offerings to the gods that used to be hung in the branches of important trees to bring good luck, a rich harvest, healthy children or victory over your enemies.

More recently, yellow ribbons were hung in trees to ensure the safe return of husbands and sons who were fighting for the confederate army in the American Civil War. And there are still some wellknown trees in English woodlands that are regularly hung with offerings to ward off illness. The fairy on the top of the Christmas tree is not an angel, nor even Tinkerbell, but a faerie – a spirit from the underworld that could take on human form, steal your children and replace them with ‘changelings’, so valuables were hung on trees to propitiate her (buy her off) and keep the children safe.

We are in awe of trees because they grow huge and have a long life, whereas we are small and have a short life. Trees traditionally also provide wood for fuel and shelter, and a durable yet buoyant material for ship-building, and many such as hazel, elder and apple have a predictable harvest of fruits to feed us. The great age achieved by large trees and the sacred architecture of woodland (echoed in our gothic cathedrals) all add to the magic and are the reason ancient trees are venerated to this day. Have you ever wondered why ancient yew trees so often appear in churchyards?

The reason of course is that the yews were there first and that these were sacred sites long before the first church was founded.

The Celts and other ancient European cultures worshipped a female ‘Earth Mother’ or ‘Great Goddess’, and we still refer to the natural world as Mother Nature. For it was she who gave birth to all the lesser gods, and somehow, mixing in the Egyptian and Babylonian myths of the gods’ virgin births, we have done it again.

We have resurrected the Great Goddess in the person of the Virgin Mary. The old myths are obviously very powerful and just won’t go away.

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Fiction

The EPU A short story by Tristan C.

M

y name is Damian and I have been asked by my ‘carer’, if that is indeed what he is, to write about my experience of the EPU. I refused at first. My argument: if I’m not allowed to see or write to my family, why should I write for him? He is, however, very, how can I put it... persuasive? So here I am. Writing.

The truth is I don’t really have the slightest idea what’s going on any more.

I’ve been kept in this place for 18 years, or at least that’s what the chart I keep on a scrap of paper tells me. They don’t let me go outside and I’m not allowed to watch television or read the newspapers, so I have no way of checking. What freaks me out more than anything else is that nobody in this place, me included, seems to age. I was 32 when this madness began in 2017, which makes me 50 now, but from glimpses of myself I’ve managed to catch in one of the few glass surfaces in here – yes, we’re not permitted mirrors either – I look at most a young 40.

Hair growth has all but stopped it seems: I am shaved monthly and I only seem to need one haircut a year. They only

feed me every few days, but I don’t seem to get hungry on the days that I don’t eat and the water doesn’t taste like water should taste. If all this seems strange to you, spare a thought for me; immersed in this weirdness. I have an overwhelming sense of unease. I am certain, or as close to certain as one can be in this place, that something is amiss.

To be frank, I don’t even know why I find myself in this hellish place any more, if I ever did at all. I am supposed to have done something, something unutterable, but the truth is lost amid the absolute confusion and paranoia that pervades the EPU – dripping from its bare, sanitised, uninspiring walls. What do those letters even stand for? I vaguely recollect being some kind of special case, a pioneer, even.

A choice was made, I think, a choice that would benefit me in the long run. Or so I recollect being told. Short-term pain for long-term gain, but I can’t see anything to be gained from being here.

But all that is just a distant memory; remembering things is near impossible.

Time has a viscous, treacly feel to it in here.

It is a constant effort to wade through it,

yet, paradoxically, there never seems to be enough of it. Days are over before they begin, yet seem to last an eternity. Monthly psychiatric evaluations unexplainably take all day but there is so little to them.

How is anyone supposed to exist in this torturous, heaven-less, soulless ‘other dimension’ warped by an alien version of time? They say that I’ve made my choice, that there’s no going back, but I fear for my sanity. If only I could make sense of it all. If only I could see my loved ones, if only.

Twelve years later, I am told it is all over; it turns out I wasn’t supposed to be here after all. My carer leads me up from the depths of this monolithic nightmare, out of hell. I am handed a newspaper to read and I recognise myself in a picture, a picture from a happier time, on the front page. I start to read: ‘27/07/2020 First Penitol Prisoner Walks Free Damian Forrester, one of the first men to be sentenced under new guidelines allowing the use of the controversial time dilation drug Penitol, will be released

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John Mast, pencil drawing by alou

today, after new evidence proving his innocence was admitted by Court of Appeal judges. His legal team have battled for three years to have his conviction overturned.

During this time Mr. Forrester has been kept in isolation at the Experimental Punishment Unit near Milton Keynes where he has been administered Penitol.

Combined with mental and physical conditioning, it will have made the last three years seem like 30 to him.

At the time of his conviction in 2017, Mr. Forrester protested his innocence, but agreed to the revolutionary new sentence where, in his mind, he would serve 100 years but, in reality, he would be incarcerated for only 10, as opposed to the mandatory 30-year life sentence. At the time, expert psychiatrists voiced concerns

over the safety of the drug, claiming that the one-month trial was inadequate for the assessment of its psychological impact, with it being intended for longer-term use.

Continued on page 6.’

Slowly, but surely, it begins to sink in. I have to read back over certain sentences again and again to truly comprehend the meaning of the words. Maybe the fog of this drug they have been giving me – that I foolishly agreed to let them give me – has yet to clear. Things finally begin to make sense but, at the same time, I can feel something in my mind begin to unravel.

There is an electronic buzzing sensation in my head.

Some possessions are handed to me and I am led outside into the blinding sunlight.

I look down and see my feet being placed, left before right, right before left, but it feels as though they are no longer mine.

The buzzing in my head grows louder.

Eyes that also no longer feel like they are mine begin to adjust to the light. They see a crowd of people, they see cameras and microphones, then they see her; an angel, a ghost from my past. She smiles a smile that, I seem to remember, once made everything alright, but the buzzing is too much now.

The unravelling is complete. Thirty years’ worth of madness without has become madness within. As I reach out to take her in my arms, I feel my perception of reality snap.

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Books for Prisoners

Books are your Mind’s Best Friend Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot

Leading international writers and some of the world’s most famous prisoners of conscience have protested against the restrictions on sending books to prisoners in the UK. English PEN and The Howard League For Penal Reform have successfully campaigned to challenge Prison Service policy on prisoners having books sent in and kept in their possession. Here, Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a co-founder of prisoners’ rights group Zona Prava (Zone of Rights), writes on what books meant to her as a prisoner in the Russian penal colony system a few years back.

B

ooks make up your entire world when you are a prisoner. Because you have books you know that every day you spend behind bars is not a day spent in vain. You wake up with a book and you fall asleep with a book, reading after lights out by the dim glow of a torch. Prison is probably one of the most text-centric places in this, our contemporary reality.

Reveille is at six in the morning. You do your exercises and then sit down with a book. You know that the total sum of your resistance to the state machine – will you defeat it, or will it defeat you? – all depends on how much you can take in, how much your mind can process on that and every day.

Your interrogators try to convince you that over the next few years you will become no more than a rotting vegetable in a musty cell. They tell you that prison will eat up years of your life and give you nothing back in return. But you spend each and every day of your prison life working on yourself, and this work, in my experience, is more intense, more productive than it would be if you were free. Why? From a need to resist, plain wilfulness: ‘Well, if you’re going to be like that with me, then just to spite you I’ll come out of here even better and stronger than when I went in!’

And you run during your exercise hour in the yard, you do squats and press-ups – and

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books are your mind’s best friend.

I know what it is not to have enough literature in prison. For my first five months in prison I had only a few books at my disposal – the Bible and the library catalogue, handed out once a month, containing not more than a hundred titles of mostly cheap literature. From time to time, I received magazines, and I carefully perused and learnt by heart other publications which I would never even have picked up in my life outside prison. Texts, after all, were all that remained to me from that world denied to me in prison which was so very dear to me.

I needed texts about freedom, with

strong philosophical and literary qualities, and I chose them from the scraps of Solzhenitsyn, George Sand, Dostoyevsky which I had clawed back. But the text with the greatest importance during these five months was without doubt the New Testament. In it I found freedom by the ton, as it was put together by extremely brave people, strong in their faith and their conviction. And as a result it was even stranger to observe that ridiculous court case against us, carried out, by some terrible irony, in the name of Christianity.

Once, in a temporary transfer prison, a prisoner-librarian looked into my cell.

‘Need any books?’

‘Yes, I do!’

‘Here,’ he handed me some romantic fiction.

‘No thanks, not this.’

The librarian left and after a couple of hours he returned and brought me Herzen (a 19th-century Russian writer and thinker) and Savinkov (a late 19th- and early 20th-century revolutionary and terrorist, also Russian).

How I wanted to stay in that transit prison!

Translated by Sasha Dugdale

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Life writing

Some Shackles

by Alou, guest artist

D

o you remember MY SHACKLE?! What was I being told by this shackle: my father still had me by the short and curlies (not much left of me pubic hairs, these days, just when I’d got to like them!!)

And this shackling of this nanna/artist/ activist genius was the end of that story. It’s the final chapter. Surely THE END. Eartha Kitt (remember her?) told an interviewer: she had been abused and that was why she took to the stage: it was where she could feel safe – be herself – in front of hundreds of people, not alone. I was the same. I learnt that singing or drawing or carving horses in sand drew an audience.

Then I felt safe. My family were too in denial and scared/angry with me to make childhood easy. I ran away as a young kid, into the woods or down the river. Stayed out as long as I could. Black-listed by family, I gained something. Learnt a lot about wild things, birds, insects... Stayed with friends’ parents when I got the chance.

I knew my parents needed help, almost the moment I was born. Did any of you get that feeling? Even as a baby? A wise head but no means of communicating.

He just wanted my power, my light – so he took it, took me. That was ‘acceptable’ in those days. Now we are starting to investigate... paedophilia, anyway. Not so much incest. It’s almost built-in and so hard to open up to the light. We need a safe place, and understanding, to be HEARD, all of us, abusers too. BLAME, SHAME & PUNISHMENT/ PRISON do not work.

Can any of you work with me, so that the cycle of abuse/trauma is broken, and a circle of support and warmth begins to

restore our families to sanity?

Anyway, none of that stopped me exploring, I took off solo, at 55 when mum died: travelling about the world, for the first time. Wicked! So much to share with you, my big adventure. Would you like to hear when I met an elephant, who explored every bit of me??! Or when I got really lost in the Chapada and saw a panther paw print, right next to mine, on river bank... when no-one knew I was there? I have been painting, inventing, creating a loving family myself... Though I have to work on it all, daily.

‘FOLLOW YOUR JOY’ – that’s my motto. Learn from loving what you do.

Put love into small actions... the rest will follow. No matter where you are. Take that drawing of the young girl, caught by the police. I was in on a charge then. So I turned the fear to use, listening to her. She needed that... Those you meet always have a story for you. You may not want to know, but mostly it helps to listen.

Then notice how we can choose to fall into holes (as I had just done) or walk around them; eventually, there are fewer and fewer holes. And life becomes sweeter.

With challenges becoming gifts to learn by, strengthening us... making us more compassionate. Our thoughts create our reality. So think lovingly and gently on this planet, starting with yourself. We can change our being one minute to the next, with acceptance and positivity. This is our lives’ work. Along with inspiring children to explore (beyond laptops, gadgets) their world, wider and wonderingly. My children’s books need to be reprinted and more need to come out. Give children

positive feedback on every little act. Give them permission to take risks, climb a tree, go learn to swim, row, build... a bender in the woods, a careful campfire, to make up their own song. Self-song, self-stories, you know these can change how you see yourself, your life.

Hey you!! Create a new story now, with me. I do this, fairly often: on a large sheet of paper, I make a huge circle. Inside it, I write all I want and love to keep around me, or wish to have in my life: art, music, good health, adventure... a loving family and friendly, funky people... creative work, proper payment for work done, travel, an eco-friendly place to live... some real good loving sex, with someone I really enjoy who loves being with moi! (I’ll let you know!!)

Etc. Then, outside that circle, I put all that stuff I no longer want, that does no good: bullying, nervousness, greed, sugary sweets, fear of rejection, tight people... whatever. I change the sheet, every so often, and notice the difference in my life, each day. I see more and more blue sky...

Being thankful really helps. Even when sat before a crap meal: just say thanks!!

It’s the little things we do that people love us for: not the big stuff, the labels we hang around our necks. TRUE? TRUE. When I remember to, I say a quiet thanks for all the ‘good’ things in life: my kids, friends, the birds, trees, leaves turning, wind, rain, a roof. The people who love me, friends who sit with me when I am crying, or hug me when I am really bad-tempered. I embrace the Good Stuff: kids and friends working to save Nature from our imprint.

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Not Shut Up Academy

ALOU AKA TRIBE, pen drawing by Alou

The

Beauty of Black Cliff Hughes

i

first began to notice the beauty of black women when I was seven years old. A new boy had just arrived at my primary school and created a sensation. He was called Oscar and was taller than all the other boys in my year. And he was black.

This was 1963, in a small Sussex town, where none of us had ever seen a black person before, so naturally we all wanted to be his friend. We touched his hair and rubbed his skin and asked all the questions that our teachers and adults in general were afraid to ask. When we lined up to choose our teams for football, Oscar was always picked first. When his mum and sisters came to collect him at home-time, we rushed up and crowded round like a noisy, excited swarm of bees, temporarily forgetting our own parents. Oscar’s mum always looked regal in a brightly coloured dress and towering headscarf and his sisters, who were identical twins a few years older than us and who never seemed to be at school themselves, were friendly and very pretty. I used to elbow my way to the front just so I could bask in their attention, see their gleaming white teeth and hear their laughter.

Around this time, I watched a documentary about an African village on the small black and white TV we were allowed to have on,

after dinner and homework were finished. I was fascinated by the exotic beings I saw on the screen, mesmerised by their bodies and their dark skin. I stared as one would at an exquisite work of art or a wonder of nature, which is what they were to me at the time.

Long, black limbs, bare shoulders, unashamedly bare buttocks and glistening black breasts. Nudity would have been shocking had the women been white, but nude black women were apparently acceptable to the all-white TV audience of the early 60s. The presenter seemed to encourage us to look at them as quaint, subhuman curiosities, as one would with chimpanzees or meerkats.

Although at the time I couldn’t say why, his playful, condescending attitude made me angry and indignant.

I was too young to understand sexual attraction, but I felt a thrill. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. And though I identified with the muscular, athletic men who were able to climb the most unpromising trees in a flash and smoke out vicious African bees for the sweet prize of honey, it was not them, nor the worldly-wise, saggy-breasted old grannies that held my attention; it was the young women and girls, working up a sweat pounding cassava or maize-meal and singing as they laboured, some with babies on their backs. I was excited by their physicality and the strangeness of it all.

I wondered about their lives, with no cars or shops or electricity.

What was going on in their heads? What did their strange words mean? What did they want out of life? They were obviously ‘poor’, with almost no personal possessions, yet they seemed perfectly happy. To me they were goddesses.

That same night, I dreamed of being with African girls, a group of us all huddled together with their wonderful skin against mine.

For some reason in the dream we were pouring water over our heads and laughing. I remember I had returned from hunting with the men-folk in the forest. My thin, white body had to be darkened with mud and dust so as not to startle our quarry. I suppose the girls were washing it off me and it amused them to see my pale complexion emerging. The men had presented the women of the village with the carcasses of a monkey and a wild pig which they skinned, butchered and roasted. We ate our fill, then the girls danced and sang about my skill as a hunter, without which they would surely starve.

When I awoke next morning, I determined that one day I would marry a black African woman and live with her in a hut in her village.

Well, 40 years on, I finally married my African princess and yes she’s certainly very beautiful. She’s not from a village, but a capital city in ruins after 14 years of civil war. I brought her to England and we lived together for three years until the unspeakable things she had witnessed and her resultant psychological problems finally drove us apart.

But that’s another story...

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Art

Sisters in Art at HMP Send

Since 2008, Watts Gallery, The Michael Varah Memorial Fund and HMP Send have been working collaboratively to provide an Artist in Residence programme at HMP Send alongside the Prison’s Art Education programme. This has been made possible with the enlightened and visionary support of the Michael Varah Memorial Fund.

Sandy Curry, HMP Send Artist in Residence 2008-13 writes about her Residency and the retrospective exhibition ‘Free Spirit’, being shown with work by the Send ‘Sisters in Art’ at Watts Gallery ‘Big Issues’ show.

I

was awarded an Artist in Residence prize at HMP Send in 2008 by Watts Gallery. What was planned as a six-week programme at this Surrey women’s prison transformed into a six-year role when the Michael Varah Memorial Fund agreed to finance the programme. Those six years have been some of the most formative in my development as an artist.

At times, the experience was intense and all encompassing. But to be surrounded by the aura of untapped creative energy, within a unique environment that sparked unusual dialogue and feedback, led to this being a profound experience. It is only now, with hindsight, that I can stand back and realise how much my own work and, indeed, my perspective on life, has been changed and moulded by this opportunity.

‘Artist in Residence’ is a huge title to live up to in any environment. Within the prison setting, it came with its own complications.

Here, a title did not automatically transfer respect and I had to learn not just to work with the prison managers and officers but, so importantly, to earn the trust and gain the respect of the women offenders who

chose to enrol on the programme. Whilst simultaneously nurturing and mentoring those women, I had to recognise and work through my own prejudices, too.

In terms of my own art, I had to figure out how to create in a very structured environment, where rules are enforced rigorously. It is a cliché to say that we must look for the beauty in all things – but within the Send prison context, this was put to the ultimate test. I had to develop my imagination, to let my art become a visual representation of storytelling. This is what art is, in such an environment: a way to connect and make sense of life experiences, to escape the physical and mental boundaries of the immediate environment, and to imagine how the elements around me could be interpreted in other ways.

Ultimately, prison honed my skills in exploring my own creativity.

Developing the Residency

This was a start-up initiative – I had a clean canvas. For the programme to be sustainable, I had constantly to recruit new women, encouraging and mentoring them to develop their artistic talent, motivating them to commit to the programme and to work to deadlines. I did not set criteria or develop a syllabus. It was not a prerequisite that those who enrolled should have had any experience or indeed prior interest in art. Instead, the programme

needed to adapt organically to the personalities and the abilities presented to me, yet still be greater than the sum of the participants at any moment in time.

I knew I carried a responsibility not only to these women but to those that followed me in the role. I had to ensure that I was laying groundwork for the next Artist in Residence.

A chance to build a new future

For this community of women, this was not ‘free time spent with a paintbrush’, but a chance to build a new future, to see and connect to their own life experience through a new channel, and occasionally to reach parts of themselves that had been locked away. It was my responsibility to use art to motivate, inspire and influence them to think in ways that many of them had never known existed, or that others had thought belonged to another time in their lives.

Managing group dynamics

The group was varied, from diverse backgrounds – academically and culturally.

It was not my place to know the individuals’ life stories, or their sentences, and this meant that we could start with a blank slate, without reference to stereotypes or hierarchy. Yet, I discovered quickly that if this programme was to flourish I needed to be adept at managing group dynamics.

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much like looking for shapes in the clouds, breaking old habits of how we see things is important to widen our outlook and perception.

While some of the women had committed well planned, premeditated crimes, others had had the worst possible life experiences that we would all prefer didn’t happen anywhere, to anyone, ever – and their sentence may have been a result of those experiences, or the life choices they made when they tried to change them.

Many had been stereotyped and labelled since their childhoods, with accompanying low self-esteem and little confidence. Some had been victims of abuse, or been told they would never be ‘good at anything’. Some had no real skills in communicating in a respectful way. There were women who had lost their voices and would not speak, keeping themselves to themselves. Others had an abundance of over-confidence.

A force for creativity

Learning life skills through art

As the Artist in Residence, I was there to facilitate each individual as she created a body of work of which she could be proud.

In many cases, this was an individual’s first experience of that; others were rediscovering latent talents. We learnt life skills together, skills that didn’t matter whether you were the Resident Artist or a participating artist. We learnt to work to deadlines, to remain motivated and committed, to be respectful of each other’s opinion and work. We learned that a creative environment is supportive, and is often a safe place within a world that often doesn’t feel safe or kind. Here we discovered the ultimate human experience: that there is no right or wrong way to create – each of these pieces was as individual as the person who created it. Together, these elements led to the women prisoners who attended the programme in 2010 creating a name for our group: ‘Sisters in Art’. The women on the programme came to appreciate that art builds awareness; it develops the input and distance required to see connections, to translate time and other abstract ideas into a physical product on canvas. It forces us to see the familiar as something different. The razor wire surrounding the walls of the prison grounds is an ever present deterrent. But

HOW LONG, by Charlie (2012)

For my part, I learned not to be so afraid of taking creative risks. Risk might be uncomfortable, but turned on its head it is a positive force for creativity. Creativity fuels activity: to imagine ‘something’, to want to see it interpreted in life – whether as a piece of art, an outcome or a life choice – turns that ‘something’ into reality. Whichever side of the prison fence you are, there is an inherent force that resides in all of us which can imagine, and therefore create.

Art is a leveller, it is a communication tool, it is a method to foster hope. I knew this as theory, but working with the prisoner artists I experienced it first hand. And so their canvases speak loudly that all of us are more than we could have imagined, as we set out on our collaborative journey at HMP Send. They are testimony to the fact that we need hope, a sense of a future not yet set in stone, one which we can create as our circumstances allow. We need freedom – or whatever that illusion of freedom is – to rise above our immediate surroundings. Ultimately, the work in this exhibition – my own and that of the women artists’ – shows the finer elements of humanity and the human condition: that the human spirit will endure.

But as much as ‘Free Spirit’ is about my perceptions and the influence of this Residency on my work, I realise that the greatest life lesson has been the privilege of being a part of others’ journeys. One of the women I worked with told me: ‘Art has saved my life. I am redefined as an Artist.’

This is a living example of the humanity and the power of art.

I hold dear George Frederick Watts’ ethos that ‘Art is for All.’ Through my work and this great opportunity, I have been able to live the philosophy that he believed: ‘Hope is physical energy’. I shall be forever thankful to the Michael Varah Memorial Fund and to Watts Gallery for this.

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CONTAINMENT, installation by Mary Branson

M

ary Branson is the second Artist in Residence and was appointed in 2014. She continues the work of Sandy Curry, Artist in Residence 2008-2013. Sandy played a key role in establishing the programme at HMP Send. The women’s work is shown in an annual exhibition at Watts Gallery and is submitted to Koestler. In 2013, the women’s achievements for having the most work selected and exhibited from any prison were recognised at a presentation at HMP Send from Koestler. In addition, in 2014, one of the women artists in the group was selected by a well-known British art collector to exhibit at the ING Discerning Eye Awards exhibition at the Mall Galleries in London. The women also take part in enterprise projects, for example, designing Christmas cards. The work is part of The Big Issues project led by Watts Gallery that reaches out to prisons and community groups, continuing the Art for All ethos of G F and Mary Watts, Watts Gallery’s founders. Here is Mary Branson, describing her experiences of working on the project: “I have just finished a year’s residency at HMP Send, the women’s prison in Surrey. I am the second artist to have been awarded the Watts Gallery Michael Varah Memorial Fund Residency at the prison, which combines the opportunity to lead regular workshops and facilitate a studio for some of the women, with time to create my own work

from a studio within the prison.

I must admit that I embarked upon the Residency with some trepidation. Prison was an alien environment to me, an unknown environment which, until this point, I never expected to find myself in. Yet, over the year, I came to realise that many of the women I was now working with had similarly never imagined they would find themselves ‘inside’.

Our weekly sessions began with conversation about how artists – including Watts Gallery’s founders, the great Victorian artist George Frederic Watts (1817-1904) and his wife, the artist and designer Mary Seton Watts (1849-1938) – find in art a channel to explore and express their innermost feelings and responses to life. Together, we considered a diverse body of work, and talked about what we felt the artist might be communicating and how their output made us feel.

The next step was for the women to start creating their own art. For many of those who joined the Watts Gallery Art Group since 2008, this is the very first opportunity they have been given to experiment in expressing their feelings through art. Each week, I saw a change in the women. Some were new to the group, others had been involved for several years. They encouraged each other, shared each other’s successes and helped out when someone was stuck.

Visiting printmakers from Ochre Studio and a painter called Cindy Lass also introduced the women to new media, techniques and approaches to making art. They have been successful in external art competitions and created more and more work as their

self-confidence grew. Several members did extremely well in forging arts pathways for themselves. Through art, the women discovered new talents and rightly increased their self-esteem. I see them all as very talented.

As for my own work, I created a large-scale installation at Watts Gallery that spoke directly about my experience of working with the Watts group at HMP Send. I talked through and shared my ideas with the women along the way and listened carefully to their comments and suggestions, which helped me to conceive the piece and evolve it. Like other women in the group, I found it tough to reflect my feelings. The work has a truth within it that I feel I couldn’t have been able to communicate unless I had witnessed the reality of prison life close-up for a brief moment each week. These women have given me a window into their world, and so the piece that I created felt like one of my most powerful works to date – quite different in tone from my previous installations.

Although the original plan was for me to work inside the prison in a small studio, I found that I needed to work in response to the Residency from my own studio outside the prison. There are understandably strict regulations on what can be brought into the prison, and not all of the artistic materials I would normally use were permitted.

I hope that the women will continue to find a vehicle for self-expression through art and that, thanks to the vision and generosity of organisations such as Watts Gallery and the Michael Varah Memorial Fund, there will be an opportunity for the project at HMP Send to continue, develop and make a positive impact on the lives of many more.”

Mary Branson, 2014 Watts Gallery Michael Varah Memorial Fund Artist in Residence at HMP Send.

“It’s a lifesaver being in the group, and I love the diversity and contrast of the girls. I think it educates us and inspires us – because if everyone painted like me I wouldn’t learn as much. The group opens my mind to different possibilities. I love coming in and seeing a new piece of work go up.” Susan, HMP Send

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Basque Fisherman, susan, acrylic on Canvas 59 x 94cm I have attempted to portray in the faces of these men, the harsh life of making a living from the Mar Cantabrico.

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not

shut

up

My Gideon, Gloria, 59x41cm. Graphite Pencil on Paper

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04/01/2015 21:40

Election Observation Mission Call for entries: Observing the General Election – a joint project with Free Word Centre, London

A

t present, prisoners in the UK are not allowed to vote. But does that mean you should remain ‘shut up’ about your opinions about your country and what happens in it?

Politicians run prisons, but without a vote, you have no influence over what they do with you – the safety, services, education or even the arts they provide... what access your families have to you, and what happens before or after your release.

Not Shut Up is teaming up with Free Word Centre in London for a new project about next year’s General Election – just because you can’t take part in the voting, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a say, right? Free Word is an international Centre for free speech, literacy and literature, which explores key issues of our time through the transformative power of words. Elections are vital to a free society, but most people find them alienating, confusing, even boring. But is that accidental, or are we being manipulated? A lot of that is down to how politicians and the media use language: words are chosen carefully to persuade, to blame, to charm, to confuse.

“Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” George Orwell We want to get people thinking about the way language shapes our democracy – so we’re conducting an Election Observation Mission, and we’d like you to be a part of it. Election Observation Missions are often held by the EU and UN, who send ‘observers’ to countries holding elections, to watch what happens and write reports on whether the election was carried out in a free and fair manner. No country, however, observes the UK’s elections.

Not unless we do it ourselves. Our Observation Mission will be concentrating on next year’s General Election. One part of this journey is to collect ‘reports’ from UK citizens who can’t vote – and prisoners make up a huge percentage of these people.

‘Reports’ can be anything responding to political language, from commentary and journalistic pieces, to art pieces, to poetry or prose, responding to themes we’ll set out for you. Over the next few months, we’ll be accepting submissions through Not Shut Up for these pieces that respond to the progress of our election. Whatever you can think of, we want to hear it. You can write under your own name, a pseudonym, or anonymously – it’s entirely up to you.

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The Winter Edition Challenge Create a response to one of these prompts:

1. What does someone have to say to make you trust them?

2. Create a piece of art or writing about ‘having all the power’.

3. Say something about the impact of small, everyday lies.

You can interpret these prompts however you like. We’re accepting poems, journalistic commentary, short prose and artwork, with the following guidelines: • Poems should be no more than 30 lines.

• Prose, fiction and commentary should be no more than 750 words.

• Artwork can be anything you can make and send to us that can appear in print.

Or, if you get inspired, and want to create something else or respond to an idea of your own, please do – as long as it fits into the general theme of ‘politics, elections, and language.’

Deadline: 28th February 2015 c/o Programme Producer, Free Word BCM NOT SHUT UP PO Box 12 London WC1N 3XX

Good luck, and get creative!

04/01/2015 20:01

Special feature

Create / Inside stories

When we think of incarceration, we of course think prisons or detention centres – razor wire, CCTV, uniforms, locks and chains – yet when Not Shut Up met Nicky Goulder, Co-Founder & Chief Executive of Create, a charity which uses the power of the arts to transform lives, she helped us see freedom from a new perspective. She described a project involving full-time carers, and mentioned one woman who was committed to looking after a partner 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, indefinitely. This woman had signed up for a Create photography course, which gave her a couple of precious hours which didn’t revolve around the person she was looking after.

T

here are almost seven million carers in the UK – that is one in ten people – and rising. The number of people over 85 in the UK, the age group most likely to need care, is expected to increase by over 50% to 1.9 million over the next decade.

Out of the UK’s carers, 42% of carers are men and 58% are women. Following a survey in 2010, the BBC estimated that there are 700,000 young carers in the UK. 13,000 of the UK’s young carers care for over 50 hours a week. Up to 1.5 million people in the UK care for someone with a mental health problem. Another million care for people with learning disabilities, including autistic-spectrum conditions.

Nicky and her team are motivated by a longing for a fair, caring, inclusive society in which every individual can fulfil their potential. Their projects are run in collaboration with community partners, which have specialist knowledge of local priorities and the participants that they exist to serve. Create work in a variety of settings with seven key priority groups: Young Patients, Disabled Children and Adults, Young and Adult Carers, Schoolchildren In Areas Of Deprivation, Vulnerable Older People, Young and Adult Offenders, plus Marginalised Children And Adults.

Nicky Goulder tells us more about their work in prisons and with carers:

What was the inspiration behind Inside Stories? How did you come up with picture books as a way to connect incarcerated parents with their children?

We were delivering a creative music programme in a young offenders institute for male offenders aged 18-25 and developed an excellent relationship with the education department. A tutor and a prison officer were together running another programme called Fathers Inside, which aims to up-skill fathers with parenting skills. The prison asked me whether Create could develop a new project that would dovetail with Father’s Inside, enabling the young fathers to put into practice some of the skills that they had learnt. Inside Stories was the result.

Inside Stories is a creative programme that enables offenders to write, record and illustrate original stories for their children, which they then set to music. Each element of the project is delivered by our professional artists (writer, visual artist, musicians). Working in pairs on their stories and in a group of up to eight on the music-making, the offenders develop a range of creative (storytelling, writing, collage and music) and social (teamwork and communication) skills, confidence and self-esteem that they can use within the prison setting, to develop stronger relationships with their children and other family members, and upon release. The project culminates in a family performance

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in the prison; and the production of a professionally-printed storybook/CD, which each offender receives two copies of, one to keep and the other to give to his/her child(ren).

What perceptions do you feel the participants have of Inside Stories before they take part in the project?

The thing that unites the participants for Inside Stories is their children, and the majority of participants take part because of their desire to do something positive for their families while in prison. The project is powerful because it enables young parents who are separated from their children to create a unique gift for their little ones – a storybook and CD with the story read by the offender for his/her children - that has lasting value. As one father told us, “My daughter always talks about the book when she sees me”, or as one of our artists commented “Encouraging good relationships with their families helps to instil good values, the importance of their role and the influence on their children.”

What other benefits do you feel this project has, aside from strengthening family ties? Are there any specific benefits to the participants?

The project enables participants to develop their creativity and creative thinking; social skills including teamwork and communication; performance skills; confidence and self-esteem.

It enables offenders to work collaboratively to create work that is of a higher quality because it was created with others. As a member of prison staff told us, “Participants developed respect for themselves and others by not making fun of each other, being supportive, helping and advising each other”. It enables them to develop their writing, art and music skills, working alongside exceptional professional artists, which can provide a valuable creative outlet beyond the project. Offenders often tell us how much they value being listened to and having their opinions sought and valued, as an essential part of the creative process. This is a new experience for many. The project also enables them to develop relationships with others in the prison with whom they can share experiences.

Some of the prisons provide accreditation alongside the project, such as a City & Guilds qualification, enabling the offenders to achieve a certificate in teamwork or creative writing, for example as part of the programme. This means they also come away with a recognised qualification to put on their CV, which can help with job hunting on release. Whether they receive an official qualification or not, many participants gain life skills that are beneficial once they leave prison. An example of this sticks in my mind, from a young offender who told us “when I get released, I want to get into youth work. I already know of a local youth club I can volunteer for and have taken a peer mentoring course. I want to help other kids avoid the path I have taken, and so from this project the teamwork and communication skills, as well as the writing and art ideas, will help me with that.”

Can you talk about other ways people have restrictions on their freedom?

Create uses the power of the creative arts to transform the lives of society’s most disadvantaged and vulnerable people, many of whom have their freedom suppressed in ways that are perhaps less overt than that of offenders: their illness, frailty or disability prevents them from physically accessing activities; poverty puts opportunities out of their financial reach; lack of confidence stops them from attending programmes or events because these seem too challenging/scary/outside their comfort zone; caring responsibilities give them little time for themselves; the need just to survive means that their whole focus is on that... survival.

There are over 11 million people with a limiting long-term illness, impairment or disability, yet they still remain significantly less likely to participate in cultural, leisure or sporting activities.

Most commonly, disabled people report a lack of accessibility to be the main restraint on their freedoms. There are currently just 66 ‘step free’ stations (less than 25%) on the London Tube Network.

As a result, disabled people travel a third less often than the general public.

Disabled people’s day-to-day living costs are on average 25% higher than those of non-disabled people so, unsurprisingly, they are roughly twice as likely to live in poverty. With these physical and financial barriers already in place, there are still prejudices for disabled people to overcome. In 2012 – the year of the Paralympics in London – one hundred and eighty disability hate crimes were committed every day in the UK, which often restricts disabled people to the place where they feel safest – their homes.

Photographs taken by young carers working with Create, exploring the theme of ‘Identity’

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04/01/2015 20:16

Special feature

InsIde storIes case study

Ryan*, 19, was born a heroin addict and has been in and out of care from an early age.

This was his first time taking part in Inside Stories. He has served three years of a sixand-a-half year sentence, but has a parole date coming up soon. He has had a parole date every year, however, and has been unsuccessful so far.

‘I’ve done a lot of creative projects before, firstly through Community Service, where I helped out at a children’s hospital, and also on other courses here in prison.

I’m not actually good at art, but was more confident in the writing and music elements of the project! When I think back to that first day, everyone was really getting stuck into it for their kids.

My story is about a village called Musicville that has lost all of its music. One of the artists who led Inside Stories was talking about a dog that had lost its bark and I thought that would be pretty sad – a world without sound or music would be pretty dull. I love music.

I’m not sure whether my children will understand that the book was written for

them, with characters based around them in it, but as long as it makes them smile then I don’t mind. I used to make up stories for them all the time, I just never wrote them down.

There are a lot of people in jail whose kids mean everything to them. You’ll hear a lot of the boys saying their kids are their rocks. You can only make two phone calls a week in here and it’s hard to talk to them because, well, there’s not a lot you can say to children while you’re in prison. Having this book that you can give to them, and a CD where they can hear your voice makes you feel good. They can say “That’s my daddy!” It makes me feel good knowing they can hear my voice whenever they

want, just by pressing ‘play’ on a CD player.

This is one of the only connections guys in here can have with their children.

Prison is a volatile place in an enclosed environment and you’re separated from your loved ones. You only get two hours a month to see your family. It’s hard … it’s hard. A lot of us smile and joke but it’s really difficult.

I have so much respect for Create for coming in here. It takes a lot of courage to do so – everyone’s a lifer in here and not to have people judge you and instead offer to help means a lot. Charities like Create don’t treat me like a criminal, it really touches me. Projects like these are so important because you forget you’re in prison for a

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while… well, you always remember, but it takes you away for an hour or so. What I’ve produced is going to people outside these walls and it is a useful thing to spend your time doing.

The project has given me so many skills, a lot of which I won’t utilise until I’m in certain situations. But it’s made me think I’d quite like to go into drama or something creative like that. Maybe some people would turn their noses up at this type of work thinking “Why would you want to sit with a bunch of criminals?” But Create hasn’t given up on us and realises that we’re still people, not defined buy our crimes.’ *Name changed to protect anonymity

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04/01/2015 20:18

Book review

Illegal

by Miriam Halahmy A BOOK REvIEW Book Series: ‘Hayling Island Cycle’, book two Genre: contemporary fiction, coming of age, thriller Reading level: average Pages: 288 Contains: violence, self-harming, drug growing, swearing

Miriam Halahmy is a published author and poet, and a member of English PEN’s Readers & Writers Programme, which promotes creative reading and writing projects in prisons. Hidden and Illegal are the first two novels in a cycle of three, all set on Hayling Island off the south coast of England. A minor character in the previous book will be the main character in the next; otherwise they are stand-alone novels.

The third book Stuffed was published earlier this year (by Albury Books). Hidden is about two teens who pull an asylum seeker out of the sea and hide him to save him from being deported. Illegal is about a girl who has been trapped into pushing drugs for her criminal cousin and she is absolutely terrified.

If Jemma had lived, none of this would have happened. I’d have been too busy to get dragged into this filthy, illegal business…

Since her baby sister died, Lindy’s family have been caught in a downward spiral. Her brothers are in prison and her parents have given up. Soon Lindy is out of her depth, too, caught in the centre of an international drugs ring, with no way out. Then Lindy finds help from an unexpected ally: weird, mute Karl from school. Together they plan a daring and desperate escape, but when you’re in this deep, can you ever be free?

Lindy is a real-life person – the way she

is portrayed in the book makes you believe in her existence without trouble. She is angry, she is flawed, she is in no way heroic.

Yet Lindy has a true heart – trying to help her siblings, she gets herself into very hot water when it turns out her cousin wants to use her to help him grow cannabis in an abandoned house on Hayling Island.

Sure, Lindy starts making money, but this doesn’t ease the pain of living in a home where anger and violence dominate, going to a school where she is constantly tormented by posh bullies, and chasing off a stalker in the form of the mute Karl.

Nothing in this book is simple, like in real life. Lindy is in love, but with the wrong guy, a Traveller who has moved on and abandoned her.

Liam ran the dodgem cars on the Island funfair over the winter. He’d asked her out one cold night in February and they’d gone to the pier in Southsea. After that, she’d hung round the fair every night waiting for Liam to finish work.

She loved watching him lean backwards

as he stood on the rubber runners, one hand gripping the pole, cruising round the battered metal floor, releasing screaming teenagers from pileups. Sparks flew from the electrical connections above, lighting up the gloomy winter nights, and the smell of chips floated on the coastal wind.

Liam had long greasy hair and spots on his face, but he’d said he loved her.

Oh, if we all had a pound for all the times we’d heard the words ‘I love you’ from people we should never have trusted, we’d be very rich and very happy, right?

Still, it’s good to read all that happening to someone in a book, and not real life. In fact, in some ways Lindy is a bit of a mess. She wanders into relationships and situations with almost crazy abandon, and it is both entertaining and frustrating to see her get drawn deeper and deeper into the world of hustling, blackmail and ultimately violence – which happens in all communities, even those in tiny, out of the way places such as Hayling Island. The environment is described beautifully, and it is clear the author loves her setting. Overall, the book comes highly recommended – it teaches without preaching, shows without telling, surprises without shocking. A cracking middle-book in a wonderful trilogy!

To win a free copy of Illegal, write us a review of a book you have read – the one we publish next issue will receive the book as a prize!

BCM NOT SHUT UP, PO Box 12, London WC1N 3XX Freepost RRXA-AHGR-ZCZL

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Shaun Attwood’s

New Hard Time

We recently caught up with the amazing Shaun Attwood, but you will have to wait until the spring edition of Not Shut Up for the full interview with this writer, activist and now publisher!

Shaun Attwood is a former stock-market millionaire and ecstasy distributor turned public speaker, who is banned from America for life. His story was featured worldwide on National Geographic Channel as an episode of Banged Up Abroad called ‘Raving Arizona’. Not only does Shaun spend his days travelling round schools and colleges, telling the youths of England about the dangers of drugs and crime, he also keeps in constant touch with those he met during his time in prisons in the US, working on publishing their stories, online and in books to come. As well as dealing with the ever-present threat of rape, Prison Time is the first book to describe the varied sex lives of prisoners.

His blog regularly features writing from T-Bone, a massively-built spiritual ex-Marine, who uses fighting skills to stop prison rape. For those of you who are doing hard time yourselves, and don’t have access to the internet, here is one of T-Bone’s letters: ‘The shower rapist that I smashed sent a guy into the pod to deal with me. The guy came to me and said that I shouldn’t have interfered. I told him to think about the act itself and to ask himself whether he would want someone to do it to him. In

front of the security cameras, he said no and tried to kick me in the balls. I blocked it by turning my hip to the right. He tried to hit me with a wild right-hand. I just leaned back. He missed.

I walked away and people told him he had better go take care of the issue he had with me. He came into my cell, running with his head down. I put my right forearm under his chin and grabbed my left arm with my right hand. I turned him to my left and sat him on the toilet. I put him to sleep in about 15 to 25 seconds.

The guy I put to sleep rolled up that evening, but now I still need to get my stuff back. I also need to go to the doctor as I was kicked pretty good. I’m going to try and do a lot more talking than fighting. These youngsters are pretty damn strong. They just don’t know too much. It’s just one day at a time in here. I put my trust in Jesus Christ. I know everything is going to be all right.

Just the other day, another guy was found dead in this place because of the awful food and the conditions. That’s two dead in three and a half weeks. It’s unreal at times. There’s so much hate and emptiness because a lot of the guards assume everyone is guilty, but no one should be

treated like this in the United States of America, which I fought for as a Marine.

I’m starting to think that Arizona is no longer in the United States.

One of the ways they manage the prisoners is they have hundreds of men locked up on psychiatric medication. It’s all a moneymaking operation for Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the drug companies at the tax payer’s expense.

Most of the guys who are not on psychiatric medication are on heroin and crystal meth. A guy had some dope, heroin and speed hid up his butt, which the guards had brought in for him. You should have seen how the guys who are addicted to it acted. They were like a bunch of hungry dogs who hadn’t eaten in days. The guards know when this place is flooded with dope.

They sit back and watch as people try to kill themselves.’

If you would like to win a copy of Shaun’s Hard Time, signed by the author himself, send us a story, poem or article on the subject of ‘The hardest day of my life...’

Shaun has generously donated 10 copies of the book to us, so get writing!

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Life writing

It’s my own Personal Hell, not Heaven Anonymous, H.M.P. Shotts

O

n the bus heading to my new home, second-guessing what lay ahead, I was completely unprepared. I was blissfully unaware, and I was young and naive – aggravated by the fact that the newspapers recklessly announced my sexuality to the nation. It didn’t help that, while being transferred to said new home, I was the topic of discussion. I tried to drown out the other passengers’ remarks and stay focused, but my fears began to take shape with each word slung in my direction.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to survive in prison.

I remember one night being particularly stressed, so I decided to go out for a cigarette like I would usually do – desiring the cold, crisp night against my skin and to feel the glow of the cigarette against the darkness – only to discover after putting on my shoes that the door was locked and then it hit me: I was in prison. Several weeks had passed since my arrival so it was hard to understand how I could have forgotten about being locked away from society.

However, I now believe it was an easy mistake to make, especially faced with the fact that I’d had my freedom taken away from me as well as any control: the lack of communication, being told what and when to eat, being told when to sleep, being told ‘No!’ without explanation, and knowing I could only see my family so many times a month. I was lost in a moment, desiring my old routine, and I fell back into it hoping that the four walls around me were just a figment of my imagination.

I still remember my first night in a cell and it was awful.

Deemed a risk to myself, I was stripped of my clothes, forced to wear oversized Velcroed padding and put into a barren room. The only concept of time was the door clanging with each drop of the hatch, as the officers carried out their checks every 15 minutes.

The sound of Window Warriors erupted, penetrating my solitude, and continued into the early hours. Occasionally, I heard my name reverberate from window to window, but I dismissed it, hoping it was simply paranoia playing games. Everything was foreign and I was scared. I was alone. Separated from family, friends and my ex, all I could do was suffocate my sadness into the pillow and cry.

Personally, I’ve always found it difficult to talk to my male counterparts – I’ve never had similar interests and most

interactions lead to a stifled awkwardness. I’ve never considered myself as ‘one of the boys’, and now I was surrounded by men. I knew I was out of place, and so did they. So, unsurprisingly, the obvious thing I expected was bullying. Naturally, I kept to myself and ignored the like-I’ve-never-heard-that-one-before insults that travelled through the door. Remanded and waiting to be sentenced, I was eventually faced with an option: go to Mainstream or go to Protection. I was an anomaly, potentially a big problem and so they tried to convince me to go to Protection. The reality was that they didn’t know what to do with an openly gay person, expected a backlash from other prisoners and thus thought they could sweep me under the carpet – out of sight, out of mind. They were presumptuous, just like I’d been, so Mainstream was the obvious choice.

On arrival at my new residence, having graduated from remand to Mainstream, I quickly learned that my neighbours were all words, no action. Like a flock of pigeons expecting crumbs of stale bread, my new neighbours bombarded me with questions; I was interrogated on a level I never imagined. One of the first questions I was asked was if I’d ever had sex with a woman (the shock on their faces when I confirmed I hadn’t). This was followed by, ‘Then how do you know if you’re gay?’ It was a valid point, so I presented them with the other side of the coin: ‘How do you know you are straight, if you’ve never had sex with a guy?’ Faces crumbled in a heavy mix of confusion and rage at the suggestion. I was both surprised and disgusted by what I was being asked and further surprised at their disgust at my answers. I couldn’t fathom their reactions: they were asking the questions, and I was being honest, so how could they be disgusted? By being honest I was playing into their hands, from then on I knew I had to choose my words carefully otherwise it would be thrown back in my face. In this day and age, I thought everyone knew what a homosexual was, but it turns out that a lot of people genuinely thought I wanted to be a woman. Stereotypical or not, and to my disbelief, some of these people had never met an openly gay person before. Luckily, they now know the difference and will hopefully be more open minded in future.

I expected my sexuality to be used against me and cause me a lot of problems, but somehow I’ve managed to use it in my favour.

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FLYING FISH, artwork by Alou

I was forced into a battle and in order to survive, I had to use whatever was at my disposal, even if that meant me. I may be a spectacle for some and a source of entertainment for others, but I can stand tall knowing that I’ve deconstructed some myths and stereotypes surrounding homosexuality.

My fellow neighbours always state that prison is my version of heaven, because I’m surrounded by men. The thought always makes me laugh at how wrong they are. Coming out of a long-term relationship and into prison I thought I wouldn’t have strong feelings for anyone else, but I did, whatever those feelings actually meant. I remember setting my eyes on one particular prisoner for the first time and thought I would never give him a second glance but eventually I did. That was my mistake and as well as feeling giddy, I was confused – but, more seriously, I felt guilty. I felt as if I’d betrayed my ex and tarnished the feelings I had for him.

What was most problematic was that the men I could fall for were potentially straight. I realise that not all men in prison are straight; there are a handful of open people, plenty hiding in the proverbial closet and a good few in denial – however, to suggest as much is a dangerous game to play. Falling for a straight man is a terrible situation to be in. I began to think of the butterflies in my stomach as a bad omen, realising that the feelings I experienced were ultimately meaningless. To know that no one will reciprocate my feelings and that they will amount to nothing is frustrating.

At the beginning I couldn’t cope, I couldn’t fathom these

feelings and, in despair and guilt, found myself self-harming in the hope that I could teach myself not to have these feelings. I quickly learned that it’s an impossible fact to overcome, that the feelings I was having were not wrong, just natural, albeit unwelcome.

You can’t help who you like as much as you might try. I’ve since accepted my feelings, despite those frustrations. ‘It’s okay to look, not touch’, my neighbours constantly remind me. I still hate it when I end up liking someone, but it’s just another reminder that I’m human. It’s my own personal hell, not heaven.

Nevertheless, I’ve also met some unforgettable characters that have been there for me and made me laugh. That’s the thing about prison; I expected to meet the worst of the worst, but ended up meeting genuine people. People make mistakes and as much as I might try, I now realise I can’t make everyone like me. I’ve gained respect for speaking my mind, and equally it has gotten me into trouble, but I will continue to do it because it’s important not to lose yourself, no matter your circumstance. Ultimately, I’ve taken several things away from this harrowing experience, that perhaps if I’d realised sooner I wouldn’t be in this situation: family always comes first, never be afraid to ask for help and never, ever get lost in love.

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Books for Prisoners Campaign

A.L. Kennedy interview A.L. Kennedy is a writer whose work includes novels, short stories, drama, non-fiction and journalism for a variety of UK and overseas publications.

Many of her books have been translated into a number of languages, and she is a staunch supporter of the campaign to get more books into prisons. Not Shut Up caught up with her at the annual Howard League For Penal Reform AGM to talk about her experience of teaching in prison, fighting writer’s block and making a go of it as a woman of letters.

MaRek kazMieRski: Can you tell us about your experience of working in prisons?

Was there anything that surprised you, and that perhaps still does even now, about the experience of entering them as a writer? aL kennedy: It did seem odd that if you entered a prison in the early 90s as someone working in education, the security measures in place were pretty much absent. It was just me and the guys in a Portakabin. The guys were very much like people I was working with outside the prison – sharp, interested, interesting working class men. Some of them had taken a wrong turn, or been manipulated by their family, some of them were very organised and professional about making a living out of crime – one guy would probably have been in a psychiatric unit if anyone had been interested in rehabilitating him. I was surprised that the social worker who arranged my visits hated everyone on principle – quite loudly expressed hate – and told me as many people’s histories as he could. The huge lack of privacy was an issue, as was the confidentiality of work, or the lack of that. The prison I went into was, at that time, for pre-release lifers, so clearly everyone had done something serious. The smell was depressing. The

fairly negative attitude of the HMP staff was depressing. The one guy who was middle-aged and had been in since he was a teenager and screwed up... that seemed a waste of life twice over. The lid the guys kept on themselves, during even a very mild discussion, was a surprise – they were completely institutionalised. At a certain point, every conversation would end and no one would wind anyone up. It went beyond calmness, or being polite.

When Desert Storm started up, I was in the prison the following morning and it shocked me that one of the guys in my writing group simply assumed that prisoners would now be shot. That they felt worthless and would be got rid of.

The levels of paranoia and the complete powerlessness of men who have to ask permission for everything, who might get wiped out by a bad phone call from home, or a sad visit, or have any kind of activity withdrawn at no notice, the impact of activities and their withdrawal – that was all pretty chilling. The setup was plainly military: the signs on the gate notified you of threat levels at a time when awareness of the authorities’ threat monitoring was lower. This seemed quite a strange thing – it was as if you were able to see how society really worked, that behind the gate there

was military preparedness and the power to change anyone’s life in bad ways. The links between communities under pressure and crime, that cycle between prisons and places that were virtually prisons – that all got depressingly clear. And it seemed that being clever and working class was something that wouldn’t necessarily be rewarded – it might mean you ended up being locked away.

Mk: You perform live comedy, you write

for TV and film, you are a busy journalist – does anyone ever tell you you’re doing too many things at once and do you ever dream of just settling down to write in one form? aLk: Everyone tells me I’m working too hard – and they’re right. But being able to work at all these days is a privilege. I like doing lots of different things and I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t – it’s all writing or working with words, all telling stories about people for other people. If I earned more, I would be able to only write one or two things at once, rather than five or six.

That would be nice. But it’s unlikely.

Mk: What would you say is your personal definition of freedom? Do you think we as a modern society understand the true

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interest if you gain them. Prisons need to be genuinely drug-free and drug and alcohol rehab needs to be meaningful. Full libraries that you can get to and real access to books from outside would help hugely.

And when you get out, you have to be going to a place where you can live and some kind of initial employment and support.

mK: You are extremely prolific, but do you

nature of liberty?

alK: I think we have no idea how fast

freedom can be removed and how much of it is simply someone else’s indulgence – we’re allowed to play, but if we express unpopular opinions, or we’re the wrong kind of person, or unlucky, or cross an invisible line, then it’s easy to lose everything. We get so many messages that aren’t true and that aren’t in our interests at all – if we’re surrounded by people who believe them, we can get swept along, whether that’s about hating ourselves, or hating others, or often both. Freedom to say what we want? We have more freedom of speech than citizens of other countries, but you can hit the limit of what’s permitted pretty fast. The people in charge of us have money, power, the right to harm and confine us, the right to wage war and access to the media – we’re not meant to have those things.

mK: If you had the power to redesign

prisons, what would you change about them? Would the changes be gradual or radical? alK: Pretty much everything would need to be changed. People need individual cells and the final end of slopping out. The food needs to be improved, as it affects behaviour in all kinds of ways. There need to be enough well-enough trained staff to keep everyone safe. You need to take profit out of the equation – it’s impossible for justice to exist in a country where companies make money out of locking citizens up, and it always means the prison population rises. There need to be more varied activities. If you go inside unable to read and write, or not confident with the words that control your life, that go in your CV and get you a job... it can’t be in anyone’s interest if you don’t leave better equipped. If you don’t have any skills that don’t harm society, then it’s in everyone’s

ever battle writer’s block? Do you think everyone should write, and if so, are there any secret tips to overcoming the challenge of facing an empty page armed with nothing but a pen? alK: Writer’s block just means you’re tired, or you’re trying to do something the wrong way, or you’re giving yourself a hard time. Everyone has ideas, a huge part of writing involves learning how to work with your ideas, link them together and make them into something that someone else can enjoy and understand. Many people seem to assume that the whole plot of a story arrives in one and is perfect, and if that isn’t happening they’re no use, or they have writer’s block. Ideas very often arrive in pieces and you have to work on them – that’s part of the process. And try to enjoy it. If you’re not having fun, the reader won’t either. Say what you care about in the best way you can, a way that respects the reader, then you’ll do your best work and get better as you go along. You do need a grip on basic grammar and the rules that are generally used to work language, but that’s just about common sense and a bit of practice. You’d look at the Highway Code before you set off driving if you wanted to do it well... same deal. None of the rules are weird or impossible to understand unless you’ve done a course or been to uni. ‘Enjoy yourself’ is the secret tip, really. Own it, keep making it yours, get it out to other people in a condition that means you can be proud of it and that readers can enjoy it too.

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Trans-life writing

Life Imprisonment: The Mad, The Bad And The Dangerous To Know Sarah Baker

Sarah Baker is a transgender inmate in a male prison. She was formerly known as Alan Baker, before her transition in 2011, and has spent over 25 years in prison (despite a tariff of just nine years), having received a discretionary life sentence for the attempted murder of another prisoner. Although this award-wining author’s second book highlights her perilous journey through an abusive home life, the care system, youth custody and the prison system, it is clearly her way of revealing to the reader the choices she made and the reasons why she felt compelled to make them in the first place. Any transgendered person, whose bad decisions have trapped them in prison for life, will always face a difficult time keeping their true identity hidden from their fellow prisoners.

In memory of all those who believed that death by their own hand was preferable to a life sentence behind bars.

Latchmere House Remand Centre, Richmond, Surrey I was 15 and five feet tall. My cellmate was 19 years of age, six feet tall, racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic. I had never had to share a room with anyone before, apart from my brother, and I was terrified.

None of my family knew that I had been locked up, and I didn’t know if anyone gave a shit about me. In-cell sanitation had not been introduced in British prisons at this

time, and we had to share a piss pot and a washing bowl. We were locked in our cell for 23 hours a day and often had to take a shit on a newspaper on the cell floor, before throwing it out of the cell window for the seagulls to fight over. My cellmate would often brag about all the ‘birds’ he had fucked over the years and I would pretend to laugh along with him, whilst feeling sick in my stomach. I could identify with these ‘birds’ that he was making obscene comments about, and I felt that I was betraying them by laughing. I knew that while inside I had better suppress any feminine feelings that I had, the way

I walked, talked and presented myself, if I wanted to survive.

My cellmate soon turned on me, after he began to suspect that I was a ‘poof’. He punched me to the floor, then kicked me in the head, saying that I was a weirdo, because I knew nothing about sport, had never played football, didn’t like motorbikes and was obsessed about cleanliness and tidiness! When the staff opened the cell door, I pretended to be ‘hard’, shouting obscenities at the screws until they dragged me down to the remand centre’s segregation unit and put me in a strip cell. My clothes were ripped from my body and a mattress was thrown on top of me. The screws then started kicking the mattress, their purpose being to inflict internal injuries without leaving external bruising. After a painfully frantic two minutes, the screws left me crying on the cell floor, feeling lonely and sorry for myself. After a couple of hours the pain subsided and I started to feel happy that I was on my own.

It was at about this time in my life that I became aware that my hands were the

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size of a girl’s, and that I was not becoming hairy like other boys of my age; and I was frightened when I started to develop breasts. I felt in my heart that I was a girl, but knew that in the eyes of the world my penis made me a boy. I wished that I was brave or daft enough to cut it off, but I was scared of the fact that I could die alone in jail from blood loss. For the next 28 years, I purposely wore clothes that were too big for me, just to disguise my breasts, which, although only small, were big enough to be noticed by other prisoners, who seemed preoccupied by comparing the size of their chests with those of other men.

Under my baggy clothes, I would wear tight T-shirts to bind myself, but would be ‘discovered’ when forced to share communal showers with other teenagers.

They would often point at me, calling me a poof, faggot and rent boy. When I tried to explain that this is how God made me, my explanations fell on deaf ears. Every cruel jibe and comment was like a knife being stabbed into my heart. I would often cry when asked to go into a communal shower and sometimes shouted abuse at prison

staff, preferring a period in the segregation unit to enduring the humiliation inflicted by the other boys. I have always loved being in the company of women, away from the aggressive, macho posturing of my peers. I could sit and discuss my feelings all day and always seemed to find the perfect presents for female friends. I have never considered myself to be a gay man. I am a female and have always felt that I was trapped in the wrong body. I often felt that God was playing some trick on me, by making me an outsider to both sexes. I never knew what it was to be a boy, and I do not know how to be a man. I only knew how to act like a man, or as I thought a man should act.

Unfortunately, my main role model was my father, a man so full of hate, anger and spite that any son who modelled himself on him was doomed to be an outcast, feared and detested, throughout his life.

I had once spent a Christmas sleeping rough, mainly under the Embankment with other runaway children. The area where we used to sleep was divided by a small road. One side was full of old alcoholics, with paper stuffed inside their

clothing for insulation, who slept in cardboard boxes to keep out the wind that howled constantly.

Approximately 50 of us children slept on a pavement on the other side of the road, huddled together under sleeping bags that had been donated by the Salvation Army. Every night, about midnight, a soup van would arrive with middle-class Christians handing out bread rolls and soup. A large green van would draw up soon after and take away the bodies of the old people who had died in the night. We would hound any passerby, begging money or cigarettes, and abuse the perverts who would try to pick up the youngest of us, offering a bed for the night.

Alone, we were vulnerable, but as a pack, no one could hurt us.

After getting no help from my probation officer, I took the bus to the West End of London and got a bed for the Christmas period in the Centrepoint homeless shelter on Shaftesbury Avenue.

It was warm, the food was good, and I could get my clothes washed. The boys and girls slept in two dormitories, and if you had anything of value, you would have to sleep with it tucked inside your underwear, or it would surely vanish in the night.

One evening, we were told that someone famous would be visiting and that we should be on our best behaviour. An hour later, Lady Diana was shown into the hostel and one of the girls gave her the 10-minute tour. The rest of us were made to stand in a line as Diana handed each of us a bottle of shower gel. I asked her what I should do with it. She looked me straight in the eyes, asking if I was homeless. I said, ‘Duh! What do you think? I’m in a homeless hostel at Christmas, and when I leave, once Christmas is over, at least I’ll have a bottle of shower gel to keep the cold out!’ My sarcasm was lost on her, and she just smiled and moved on to the next waif in the line. I must confess that she did have the most beautiful teeth and shoes that I had ever seen!

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Writers in Prisons

Last writers standing Alistair Fruish

Alistair Fruish’s first published novel, called Kiss My ASBO – recently seen in the hands of Russell Brand at the Reading Agency’s annual lecture – is among a select group of books that have been banned from Guantanamo Bay. Alistair’s book to some extent has been influenced by his work in prisons, where he began working in 2001 as a writer-in-residence at HMP Wellingborough.

Since that time he has worked in 35 prisons as a writer and producer, in the male and female estate, in both the public and private sector, and in every category and type of prison and YOI – excluding prison hospitals and Secure Training Centres.

Along with HMP Full Sutton’s writer-in-residence, Gerry Ryan, he initiated the first writer-in-residence led project in the military prison in Colchester.

Over the last 14 years, he has organised numerous arts projects with prisoners and partnered many organisations and other writers to make a huge number of activities happen in prisons. He is currently writer-in-residence at HMP Leicester, where for a year his work was supported by the Joyce Carr Doughty Trust, when his residency with the Writers in Prison Foundation was shortened by cuts. He continues to raise his own funds to make activities happen in prisons, working very closely with HMP Leicester prison library and the Senior Community Librarian Louise Dowell.

As one of the last few writers-in-residence who continue to fight for funding and access to prisons across the UK, Alistair tells us about his journey, his dyslexia and his vision of arts in prisons.

I’ve always had problems learning to read.

And I still can’t really spell very well. I spelt my own name wrong the other day! They finally figured out that I was dyslexic in the week that I left school. That was helpful!

But actually it was. Once I realised my brain worked differently, I began to find that interesting. And when you find situations and behaviours interesting, well

then that can be a key to changing them.

And as I had finished with school it was up to me to do something about it.

With that perspective came insight – that I did things for a reason, and that some of those reasons were socially constructed.

And that gave me a lot of confidence.

Before that, I was obviously a reasonably clever guy, but I was failing in an academic

context. When I should not have been. And that made me angry.

So I did my own thing culturally – got really into punk and started publishing a magazine and putting on gigs (this was before the Criminal Justice Act – I wouldn’t have gotten away with it after that). So I did not feel part of system. I had just been written off. So I decided to write ‘them’ off. When I realised that this failure was the school’s fault and not mine – that changed everything. I had been right all along. And fortunately discovering I was dyslexic coincided with the wonderful development of personal computers. Which are very helpful when it comes to checking spelling.

So I can see that if I had had more bad luck, and not such a good family life, this experience of being undiagnosed as a dyslexic for my whole school career – then that could have deeply alienated me, and could have meant that I ended up imprisoned.

‘If you have dyslexia and come from a good home, you end up in art college. If you have dyslexia and come from a bad home, you end up in prison.’

Dean Stalham, Not Shut Up Academy

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Koestler SILVER AWARD - “Author” Koestler, HMP Peterborough, Lady Jennifer Sieff Platinum Award for Recycling or Papier Mache

I have lost count of the amount of undiagnosed dyslexics I have found in prisons: along with the prisoners with other literacy problems, thousands of school-damaged people who have partly been made into prisoners by not getting appropriate interventions when they really needed them as kids. I have also found overcoming the restrictions of the prison environment produces creativity. And it is of course rewarding to help people be creative. Wherever they are.

It’s not dyslexia itself that is a problem.

It’s the undermining of confidence. It can do this intensely to people, but fortunately I found a way of approaching it that overcame that, and I try to pass this on to prisoners.

What dyslexia has given me is tenacity. I know with the first go at getting the words out, it won’t be right. I know I’ll have to rewrite and think about it some more.

Play with the words. For me, writing quite literarily is rewriting, so I am prepared to spend whole days making sure one sentence sounds, feels and looks good. That it conveys the ideas I want to get across in a way that is exactly right! I don’t think I would be like that if I wasn’t dyslexic.

So ultimately, dyslexia hasn’t held me back. Later, as a mature student, I got a degree in English, was even an English teacher for a while. I worked in publishing,

edited a couple of magazines, helped to put out some comic-books, started a film development company and a couple of other organisations. And recently I have edited a number of books (not proofread them though!). I have discovered that I really like editing books. And I’ve written a reasonable amount of published material over the years, too.

So the whole prison interest is down to being dyslexic. I was a voluntary reading assistant in the primary school where I first had reading difficulties (helping kids with the same kinds of problems I’d had), when it

first occurred to me that there were adults in prison who still could not read. When I saw the stats, I was shocked. And I thought that perhaps I should go and meet some of these people.

Sending writers and artists into prisons can have a very positive impact on the environment. Despite the cuts, there are still at least 10 writers who do work in prison. We have managed to cling on in there, by one means or another. Though unless something is done fast, this will dwindle and many skills will be lost.

Writers working in prison have been responsible for many great things. They have also supported other schemes such as Storybook Dads, Prison Radio and Not Shut Up – and helped them to get going. The next year or two are probably crucial. If the staff are still around who remember what has been achieved and if the skills that are out there with experienced writers can be maintained and shared, then I think there is some hope that what has been severely cut back may re-emerge. I feel that the idea of sending writers into prisons was something our country could be rightly proud of. I consider it a privilege to have been able to do this work and do not want to be the last person doing it. And I will do my best to make sure that I am not.

Not Shut Up Call Out We are now working on mapping the existing creative writing provision in prisons, secure hospitals, detention centres and other places of incarceration across the country. Various funding cuts have really depleted this provision, but hey, things come and then they go, and then they come back again – we now want our creative writing provision in custody back!

Being able to read for pleasure, write creatively and talk about stories in an engaged and engaging way is not some useless, arty skill – it is essential to us all, in our homes, with our children, in workplaces... The word ‘folklore’ means exactly that – folk lore – people’s stories – and for us reading and writing are about reclaiming our own ability to listen, speak and comprehend our own lives.

If you teach creative writing, or know someone who does, or have the ambition to start running creative reading and/or writing projects in your establishment, get in touch. In 2015, with support from English PEN and various universities around the country, we hope to organise a resurgence of creative literacy projects around the country – help us do this!

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04/01/2015 20:42

Lucy Edkins’ Arts Round Up

Artist Provocateurs let Loose Even if I can’t find anything to draw, I wait there at my desk.

It doesn’t matter whether I see something or not.

As if I were twisting my head into a crack in time, I push my pencil across the paper...

Extract from Yoshitomo Nara’s diaries, 2008

‘Nara’s studio is his playground, full of toys, music and objects,’ says Nicolai Frahm, co-founder of the Dairy Arts Centre where, in his exhibition Greetings from a Place in My Heart, Yoshitomo Nara explores the world through largeeyed alien-like children who stare out at us from patchwork paintings with pastel backgrounds and large bulky bronzes, challenging and mischievous. In the ‘Fridge’ room, a continuous anti-clockwise timeline fills the walls, and charts, through Nara’s sketches, his travel and changing perception.

In the last quarter in which we’ve seen the launch of this year’s slickly presented Koestler show Catching Dreams at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank, a common theme has been space and the urgent need to create: to break down and reconstruct the world around you according to your means; and to challenge beholders to look more closely at themselves.

The Koestler exhibition was curated and hosted by people who have themselves been incarcerated. It included, at a glance: a large portrait of Martin Luther King

created from a mesh of painted blobs; the weight of regret eloquently painted in ‘If Only’, showing a man heaving back the hands of a giant clock; intriguing grotesquery in a miniature sculpture depicting men at work with their genitals repositioned on alternative parts of their body; poetry entries in black Letraset on white walls in a brightly lit inner room – or, if you stayed a minute, or walked in a minute later, the poems glowed greenly from a darkened cave-like space. Outside the room, headphones relayed the spoken word and lyrics set to music.

At Garden Court Chambers, Made Corrections: Art As Opportunity was an exhibition of photographs from a project at The Kaunas Youth Correctional and Interrogation Facility in Lithuania, which investigated whether art could help to rehabilitate. At the launch, artist Dean Stalham, who initiated the project, talked about his own criminal record; how it emerged and how he was determined it would not affect the rest of his life. We then watched an amazing film about the Made Corrections project, showing the making and pasting up of giant photographs on the

walls of the correction centre.

Chris Wilson’s book Ruin, the first to be published by the Not Shut Up Academy, was launched at Garden Court Chambers, at the same time as an exhibition of Chris Wilson’s raw and graphic paintings that show the world of his demons thrown up dark and large. The book has been beautifully bound in canvas pieces cut from his discarded paintings, and gives us an intimate insight into his work. At the launch, Chris read an excerpt from his book Horse Latitudes and three of his short films were screened (see the back pages of this issue for images).

Also revealing the hidden demons of lust and violence lurking behind domestic relations, Paula Rego’s pastels, paintings and watercolour and ink illustrations were shown in October at the Marlborough Gallery, in an exhibition called The Last King of Portugal and Other Stories. Her pieces seem to tell of a Portugal of bygone times.

In her exhibition The Last Great Adventure is You at White Cube Bermondsey, Tracey Emin considered the world reflected through the changing shape of her body as it matures. Her artworks ranged from a series of little ink sketches and small-scale, simple and direct bronze figures, to an exhilarating room full of large canvases, in which large embroidered black stitches simulated jagged ink outlines on the plain linen. Tracey Emin thinks of her work as a journey of self-discovery, and she explains how she likes to imagine herself on the ledge below a mountain summit,

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Visual Art

Photos by Nick Blatchley

trying to catch the moment when her work is still fresh but not ‘finished’.

As part of The London Design Festival, London Print Studio hosted an exhibition of artist-designed wallpaper, called Artists’ Interior Worlds. It included: artists Jake and Dinos Chapman sneaking a few dangerous urban scenes into tranquil Victorian patterns; Glaswegian artists Timorous Beasties heaping generous helpings of luscious velvet on patterned scenes of urban subversion; and an artists’ book of samples, including an intriguing piece with an intimate message embossed on cream paper. Co-curator, artist and Not Shut Up arts editor Matthew Meadows’ work recalled street art and an era of punk and uprising, for example a screen-printed pattern of scenes of revolt with police in riot gear clashing with youths throwing petrol bombs.

Anselm Kiefer’s paintings and sculptures explore the beauty present in devastation and decay, the alchemy of chemical reaction in giant spaces.

He describes how as a child of post-war Germany his playground, which he loved, was the bricks and rubble of destroyed houses; in his French self-created studio complex in Barjac are planes crashed inside greenhouses with decaying sunflowers poking out of every orifice, crooked cement structures lining the paths. Here in his major retrospective at the Royal Academy are large lead-sheeted books piled one on top of another, inset with diamonds sparkling out of burnt-out landscapes; the scale is gigantic and this is a playground most artists can only dream of. Even so, walking around his exhibition at the Royal Academy feels like a privilege, a window into the world of his frenetic exploration.

Southall Black Sisters and Giants Theatre Company: ‘Unspoken’ Outside Southall Town Hall, to launch a sixteen-day pledge to end gender-based violence, women who are supported by Southall Black Sisters and Giants Theatre performed ‘Unspoken’, a collaborative, bilingual piece of street theatre. They gathered an audience around them and challenged passersby to ask themselves whether they knew women who were subjugated and beaten in their homes. The women sang and danced and spoke the words woven from their own personal accounts of oppressive and violent relationships into a story based on the Thousand and One Nights. As a representative of Not Shut Up, I created a set for their piece, which I describe in my next paragraph. The women performed their play three times in a mixture of English and Punjabi and received a very positive reaction from the community. Many young women approached the staff of Southall Black Sisters afterwards to talk about their own experiences of abuse and to ask for support.

Making the sculptures for ‘Unspoken’ First, Eve McDougall, Dean Stalham and I met with Jenny and Tania of Giants Theatre to see how Not Shut Up could collaborate on Jenny’s rewriting of the story of the Thousand and One Nights with a group of women at Southall Black Sisters who are survivors of domestic violence and enslavement. Next, they invited me to make a piece of art to support the women’s street theatre performance in Southall.

I came up with some ideas for a sculpture of a family in the throes of a violent relationship, using recycled materials, and attended one of their workshops to share these ideas.

This was translated into Punjabi and the women came back with a lot of positive feedback and ideas of their own for the sculptures, which I went away with and incorporated. They were initally a little nervous when they saw the results, which they felt were a little close to their own stories. However, the adrenalin of the performance took over and the day was a great success.

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04/01/2015 20:55

Playwriting

A Piece of Hell

An Extract from a play by Lucy Edkins

A guided tour through the women’s prison system and a loose rendition of Dante’s Inferno in eight transgressions.

allow my lover to be incriminated for a crime of which he was innocent, or pitch my wits against my captors, with the law in their palms.

pRoLoGuE. The Argument:

[The Guard reaches an iron gate, where Rapper Gil holds up the red band on her wrist, displaying her identity photograph. The Guard unlocks the gate, allowing Gil to enter.]

That Dani, after a minor deviation, has been imprisoned but is not convicted, thus her journey becomes that of an observer. She is guided through the prison system by Rapper Gil, a trusty inmate.

PART 1: The PRison house RecePTion

[Dani sits at a reception table, an uneaten plate of food pushed away, her head in her arms.]

DAnI: In the middle of my life I find myself in a dark room. How first I got here I can’t remember. Dreams unfulfilled, my senses numbed with despondency. But should I try to retrace my steps, and with my arms encircle once more that fiery youthful passion which once so long sustained me? I would come up against murkier forces than those which brought me here.

[A Guard crosses upstage.]

I had three choices to avoid these dungeons: betray my friends,

I thus turn to climb the mountain of time set before me. I am aware of no impending reward except that once climbed I breathe fresh air again…

[Rapper Gil approaches, as the Guard locks the gate.]

GIL: Back so soon! Must have writ your name on the wall.

DAnI: Rapper Gil? GIL: Used to rule the pirate waves, but from this place my tongue is tied.

DAnI: Of course. That’s a shame.

[The Guard crosses towards a corridor, with tall cupboards.]

GIL: What did you do?

DAnI: Do? Well... I managed to go legit for a while, try me hand at the

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Etchings by Lucy Edkins

old paint and easel, but you know, it led to nothing. Started to drift, looked up some mates... You know how it goes, bit of the old illicit – had to keep afloat, and... Well, the guards of these walls returned me to their keeping. gil: Unlucky. At least your stay here will be short and sweet. That monstrous ocean of poverty and isolation you tried to avoid has led many to these gates. Particularly those of warmer climes: my country folk.

[The Guard, standing at the linen cupboard, clears his throat] Anyway... let me take you up to your bed for the night. Come on.

[Dani follows Gil to the linen cupboard. The Guard unlocks the cupboard and stands back to watch them. Gil takes out prison issue bedding, and turns to address Dani.]

First you’ll hear them screaming down the block, then up above on the nines you’ll hear the chants of those content to push their burning mattress through the bars. They think it might attract the attention of the good and the free, to whom I shall eventually deliver you.

dani: Good to see you.

gil: Right. Here. Catch. Your pillow, blanket, the lot – you know the routine. Come on.

[Loaded down with bedding, Dani follows Gil up a massive staircase.

Gil bounds ahead]

PART 2 Gil’s ExPlAnATion

[Dani catches up with Gil along a corridor.]

dani: Why are you bothering with me? gil: To be honest, I only came over coz that lot ain’t got a clue. They all thought you was a nutter, sitting there talking to yourself. But one of the girls recognised you from the out. Said I ought to do something, pull a few strings. Before they threw away the key. So I stuck me neck on the line, said you were a poet like me. They’re short staffed, can’t be arsed. Said I’d take you up meself, past the nines. Currying favour, it’s called. Turning me red band into a halo. Hoping they’ll put a good word in for me on the parole board.

[Gil and Dani reach a gate.]

Ay oop! Here we go!

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04/01/2015 21:45

Playwriting

PART 3 HosPiTAl Wing

[An inmate sees them and approaches the gate]

InMAtE: Once you’ve been in here, it never leaves you. Our society

created this segregated city of lawbreakers. We’re here to protect the people on the out who’ve never had to knowingly break the law.

I’m going to be the next prime minister.

[The inmate retreats back into the hospital wing]

GIL: Greenpeace Denise. Handy with the snippers. One

woman op, though, on her own trip, out on a limb. Not fussy which government establishment she brings down. You see, the inhabitants of this City of Incarceration have been disenfranchised; they’ve lost the power of their voice in society; they can’t discern truth from fiction anymore. They can’t even be spiritual.

[Gil beckons to a Guard, who comes to the gate.]

DAnI: I don’t want to go in there.

GIL: Ah, come on, you coward – you have to.

[The Guard unlocks the gate.]

VOICE WITHIN: Me-d-i-ca-a-a-tio-o-o-n!

[As Gil and Dani enter the hospital wing they hear a herd of women running around and shouting.]

Accomplices, this lot – not perpetrators; receivers of stolen goods.

Accessories, we call ’em. Handbags.

[Dani watches the herd rush after a white-coated doctor wheeling a trolley, an HMP banner flying from its mast.]

GIL: Time for sweeties. Lucky buggers.

DoCtoR: Medica-a-tion!

DAnI: Could do with some meself.

GIL: Couldn’t we all? Don’t worry, love, you’ll get some later.

[Gil and Dani come to a cell, with four beds inside. One bed is bare.

There is a woman in each of the other three areas. One large woman sits on her bed totally naked, staring ahead, morose and diffident.

One woman sits by the side of her bed, knitting pink baby socks.

Another young woman has put her mattress under the bed, and is lying on it.]

That lot, when it comes to going out, they get scared. Gate fever.

Their mates don’t want to know ’em, in case they’re tailed. So they do something stupid to get brought back in. Well, this is your kip.

What you waiting for? You look like you’ve been dragged through a battlefield.

[Dani drops the bedding and sits heavily down on the bare mattress.]

Petty thieves, vandals, arsonists – they’re harmless really.

Wouldn’t hurt anyone. But they always get caught. Grasses, tappers, you pinch, they squeak – play one side against the other.

In the pocket of the Old Bill, bred from criminality. Come on!

You got to make it first! We ain’t got no maids here! Those griffins don’t take kindly to a messy cell. You’ll be stripped bare and down the block before you can open your mouth to holler for help. Ha ha! And that’s your chance of an early jam roll up the spout. Oh, I forgot. You’re in la-la limbo-land, aren’t you? Hoping they’ll come to their senses and unleash you. Well, good luck mate. Happens to the best of us. Oo-oo! Here comes the troll!

[A Guard arrives at the cell to lock the four up.]

Don’t worry, love, you’ll be alright. The rats got fed earlier. Have a good kip. See you at free flow.

[Gil leaves. Dani stands up & stares at the bed. Gil lifts the flap and puts her eye to it.]

Hey, you think this is bad? We ain’t even started yet! Wait till later!

Horrors big-time at Association, man! Ha ha ha ha!

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04/01/2015 21:05

Safe Ground Poems

I, fish

Puma

Anonymous

I was raised in deep water, at 10 I lost my mother, I was sad, heartbroken lonely. It was hard, working for myself, having lost what I loved the most, what I love still now.

I swim on anyhow, down rivers dark, filled with piranhas and sharks.

Got nothing else to tell, so I wave you all a fishy farewell.

Dawid Tychon

Cloud

T. Glowacki

Chased and pulled by winds this way and that I’ve seen cities villages beauty coarseness joy and wrath From time to time this way and that dashed the sun illuminated calm meadows my shadow cast my tears giving life It was cold in my shadow but that is where rain and hence life was found that was my asking price

I was raised on a street, a street of dark, cold nights.

To survive them I had to blend in like a black puma, out of sight.

I took the street on, abandoned home, but there seemed to be more than I could handle alone.

So I gathered a wild brood of black pumas like me, we got up to no good, and so couldn’t see that the street was darker, meaner than any of us, and all of our brooding just couldn’t last.

The heart of a puma still beats within me, even though the black street failed at concealing me.

I got caught in a trap, a cage of my own making, in my life there’s a gap, a break from freedom I’m taking.

Inside this dark cage a puma’s heart beats still, tho no longer in a rage.

I’ll be patient until I can roam again the streets of my home, keeping well out of trouble, if alone, then alone.

If I had more strength to struggle against such gales I would choose a place peaceful and pretty and there I would dissolve into fog

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Useful Info

Art organisations worth knowing about Here is a list of organisations working all across the UK with those who are or have been in custody – if there is anyone we have missed out, let us know!

ArTs AlliAnce is a coalition of artists, arts and Criminal Justice Sector organisations and individuals who work with prisoners, those on probation and ex-offenders in the community, promoting the power of the arts in transforming lives.

Arts Alliance, 59 Carter Lane, London EC4V 5AQ cleAn breAk is a theatre company with an independent education programme, which uses theatre for personal and political change, working with women whose lives have been affected by the criminal justice system.

Clean Break, 2 Patshull Road, London NW5 2LB english Pen is the founding centre of a worldwide writers’ association with 145 centres in more than 100 countries. They campaign to defend writers and readers in the UK and around the world whose human right to freedom of expression is at risk.

English PEN, Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3GA fine cell Work is a Registered Charity that teaches needlework to prison inmates and sells their products. The prisoners do the work when they are locked in their cells, and the earnings give them hope, skills and independence.

Fine Cell Work, 38 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 0RE inside job ProducTions is a unique new non-profit multi-media production company which works with women prisoners to produce highly professional video, print and multimedia products with a social purpose.

Inside Job Productions, 16 Hoxton Square, London N1 6NT koesTler TrusT are the UK’s best-known prison arts charity. They have been awarding, exhibiting and selling artworks by offenders, detainees and secure patients for 50 years.

Koestler Arts Centre, 168a Du Cane Road, London W12 0TX Prisoners’ Penfriends was formed to build on the prisoner-penpal scheme created by the Prison Reform Trust. It is approved by the Prison Service and provides a confidential forwarding service, with guidelines, training and advice.

Penfriends, PO box 33460, London SW18 5YB The Prison ArTs foundATion aims to release the creative self of all prisoners, ex-prisoners, young offenders and ex-young offenders in Northern Ireland using all of the arts and crafts including writing, drama, fine art, craft, music and dance.

Prison Arts Foundation, Unit 3 Clanmil Arts & Business Centre, Northern Whig Building, 2-10 Bridge Street, Belfast BT1 1LU The Prison rAdio AssociATion is an award winning education charity that provides support, guidance and expertise to existing prison radio stations and advises prisons interested in setting up radio stations and radio training facilities.

Prison Radio Association, HMP Brixton, Jebb Avenue, London SW2 5XF

synergy TheATre ProjecT, established in 1999, works towards rehabilitation with prisoners and ex-prisoners through theatre and related activities.

Synergy Theatre Project, 8 St Thomas Street, London SE1 9RR

NOT SHUT UP Equalities and Inclusion Policy NOT SHUT UP encourages and supports anyone who has experienced incarceration and wants to express their creativity through literature and other forms of art. We understand that “difference” and “otherness” is a daily reality for those behind bars and we are committed to addressing issues of prejudice and discrimination in relation to gender and gender identity, sexual preference, disability, partnership status, race, nationality, ethnic origin, political or religious faith, age or socio-economic class of individuals and groups.

The reAder orgAnisATion shared reading groups contribute to long-term, sustainable changes to prison reform, offender rehabilitation and offender prevention.

The Reader Organisation, The Friary Centre, Bute Street, Liverpool L5 3LA

NOT SHUT UP is an artist-led organisation – those involved in it have often had direct experience of prisons and understand the range of challenges and inequalities faced by those we work with: reduced access to education and the arts, high levels of psychoemotional illness and low levels of physical fitness and well-being, social and cultural exclusion and others. We see the arts as essential in helping both artists and audiences understand and celebrate the notion of a thriving, diverse and modern society.

sTorybook dAds is a registered charity based in Dartmoor Prison. Their aim is to maintain family ties and facilitate learning for prisoners and their children through the provision of story CDs. Storybook Dads, HMP Dartmoor, Princetown, Yelverton, Devon PL20 6RR

NOT SHUT UP keeps its policies and procedures under continual stakeholder review in order to ensure that the realities of discrimination, exclusion, oppression and alienation that may be an aspect of previous experience of its partners, as well as project participants, are addressed appropriately.

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Managing Editor: Marek Kazmierski Poetry Editor: Anna Robinson Art Editor: Matthew Meadows Creative Director: Phil Tristram Online Editor: Piers Barber Thanks to our Trustees: Kate Pullinger (Chair) Jane Wynn (Treasurer) Timothy Firmston Simon Kirwin Sarah Leipciger Sarah Mansell Simon Miles Annette Prandzioch Raphael Rowe Ella Simpson

NOT SHUT UP generates no income of its own and is produced solely through the generosity of Arts Council England and our patrons, which include: 29 May 1961 Trust Anton Jurgens Charitable Trust Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society Batty Trust Bonus Trust City & Metropolitan Welfare Fund Coutts Charitable Trust David Hammond Charitable Foundation Eleanor Rathbone Charitable Trust English PEN Esmée Fairbairn Foundation Foyle Foundation Garden Court Garfield Weston Foundation Garrick Charitable Trust Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation

Jessie Spencer Trust J Paul Getty Jr. Charitable Trust Goldsmiths’ Company Lady Hind Trust Lankelly Chase Foundation Leigh Trust Mercer’s Company Michael Varah Memorial Fund Norda Trust Rathbones Royal London Society Sheriffs’ & Recorder’s Fund Sir James Roll Charitable Trust Swan Mountain Trust Topinambour Trust Tudor Trust

Not Shut Up is a registered charity (Charity No. 1090610) and a company limited by guarantee (registered in London No. 4260355).

Subscriptions

Anyone interested in submitting work, volunteering or working as part of the Not Shut Up Academy, which works with in- and post- custody writers on developing their creative entrepreneurial skills, is invited to write in to us at the address below or contact us via our website.

Establishment Annual Subscription: ten copies four times a year, p&p included, for just £50.00.

BCM NOT SHUT UP PO Box 12 London WC1N 3XX Or Freepost RRXA-AHGR-ZCZL

Individual Annual Subscription: one copy four times a year, p&p included, for just £15.00.

Cut out and send the coupon to BCM NOT SHUT UP PO Box 12 London WC1N 3XX

Please send me one / ten copies four times a year.

I enclose a cheque / postal order for £15 / £50 Name Address Email contact

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Not Shut Up Academy

I

produced my first ever painting in drug rehab in 2003, thanks to my friend William. He’d set up a little morning painting session at the rehab centre.

Nothing to do with drug recovery, just us trying to make a little difference to our lives. I recently had a flashback memory of asking Mike Patton, a kid from my school days in America, 40 years ago, to make a squiggle of anything he wanted on a piece of paper for me to then make something of.

Shapes and things. Which is interesting, ‘cos that’s a technique I use now. It’s called frottage, Leonardo Da Vinci did it, the Surrealists did it. Sometimes, I throw coffee onto the canvas and sit and wait as it soaks in and images manifest. And it makes sense, ‘cos you bring your psyche with you into the things you see taking form. Your William Blake, your everything, if you’re connected enough.

For me this is a powerful time, as the images which emerge come from certain individual visions. I have been trying to get down images of psychic events, powerful moments from my past or some ancient history that I turn into symbols which start popping up in my paintings. It wasn’t until later that I started reading about Jung’s archetypes and began to see a similarity between my cast of characters and older art, Neolithic, prison tattoos, tarot cards, seeing the jester pop up out of what seemed like nowhere.

I started out painting in my flat, where I lived, absolute chaos. Painted the ceilings, the walls, I could barely get into the doors.

Girlfriends were lost. You couldn’t bring kids there. I lived ferally, as a result of living the way I had lived before, on the streets of here and there. I am now embracing some of that ferality, knowing I can live like that, I can go without electric, without conventional forms of order. I think it’s a strength which frees me up to be more honest in my work.

The title of this book, “Ruin”, might sound like I am being defeatist, but it’s not as simple as that. Although I only stated painting recently, I’ve been writing since I can remember. Back in my San Francisco

RUIN

By Chris Wilson

tattoos should be, home made ink, out of melted chess pieces, toothpaste, tattooing machines made with a high E guitar string, a Walkman spindle and a compass connected to a battery pack. Fantastic. I smile, ‘cos I’m very fond of those memories, that innocent crazy fucked up world, where human kindness does exist. Yeah, it’s brutal, and you do find all those crazy people, but there is a form of sincerity which you don’t get out here.

days I was also in bands, and so lyrics and music were important for me. They come from the very same source, connect with the same things as my visuals. “Ruin” was something that came to me in prison, when I was in CRC (California Rehabilitation Centre) and thinking if I ever had a band again, which is what you wonder about as you lie in your bunk, I’d call it Ruin.

It’d been fifteen years since I last played anything, but still hoping I got it tattooed on my chest. A Mexican prisoner did it.

It’s a shitty faded thing now, as all good

In my childhood, I experienced a lot of illegitimate authority. The whole environment was all selfish and petty and felt like a prison house to me. I know other people went through far worse abuse, but our own realities are our our own realities.

Now, every environment I know of, the education environment, the business environment, the prison environment, the charity environment, the celebrity environment, the political environment, all the world I live in now, makes me very happy to call my book Ruin. If you’ve been to the other side and you’re lucky enough to have survived, you might get to put the pieces together in a way that resonates, that harmonises with your being and the natural world. Even if the journey you take into your own soul is a mad lashing out of self-laceration, because you don’t fit, ‘cos none of us who have been down the rabbit hole fit, still it’s better to face ruin than to compromise your true inner self and just blend in to the point of vanishing into the herd.

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Photography by Bogdan Frymorgen

Launch of RUIN, London 2014

RUIN is a limited edition art book, containing 40 full colour plates printed on high-grade paper, produced with generous support from the The Sheriffs’ & Recorder’s Fund.

Each numbered copy is then hand-bound in canvas painted by Chris Wilson himself, making it into a unique work of art.

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www.notshutup.org

NOT

SHUT

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