Coping in the margins

Four young men file into the classroom of the Skagit County Juvenile Detention center across the way from the county court house in Mount Vernon on a Wednesday after Christmas.

Matt Malyon, a chaplain with the jail and juvenile detention center through Tierra Nueva and creator of the Underground Writing program, sets up his handouts on tables. The four teens in bright orange sweatshirts and sweatpants pull out black notebooks with Underground Writing stickers on the front brought in by a young female guard.

Malyon inquires about Christ-mas in the facility for the teens who joke about how full they were after their holiday meal.

Malyon, who earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia in July of 2015, met the director of the Juvenile Detention Center for Skagit County the day after graduation. He held his first workshop two months later.

“My vocation is writing,” said Malyon in an interview before the workshop. “Since 2003 I started thinking I was supposed to be using my writing for something beyond just my own writing.”

Malyon writes poetry along-side his work with people on the margins of society, and says writing has been integral in overcoming his own life struggles. A year of writing about the death of his father while living in La Conner unearthed a lot of buried issues for Malyon.

“When you do writing that names past events that are traumatic and you talk in your writing about past events and emotions linked to them then and now, research shows that it’s almost as good if not better than therapy and it’s a way to process your emotions in life and move forward.”

Before returning to grad school he came across Mark Salzman’s book “True Notebooks” about his time teaching writing to incarcerated youth.

After seeing Salzman’s program in action and his own focus on processing through writing, he set himself a path: “That’s what I was doing, and that discovery process was part of me discerning, I’m supposed to be using writing for more than myself.”

Malyon begins each session with what he calls a brain spill. “No profanity, no gang stuff. Ok, let’s go for five minutes. Write whatever you feel like.”

The young men begin to write. Some, like the young man with pages already filled, scribble away. Another of the teens gets in few lines. One stares at his paper.

Participants in his workshops – the program also operates with the Migrant Leaders Club at LaVenture and Mount Baker Middle Schools and at the Skagit Valley Recovery Community – are invited to summarize what they wrote, read it, or pass. The goal is to create a space of trust where sharing is encouraged, but not required.

Each session, Malyon brings in poems from a variety of poets which he or the participants read at least twice. He starts this session with “The hour is striking” by Rainer Maria Rilke then asks what lines from the poem stood out for the students.

“It’s weird,” said a boy with light brown hair after a long pause.

“Why do you think it’s weird?” asks Malyon.

“The line, ‘I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it.’ What does that mean?”

“What do you think it means?”

The young man hesitates and thinks. “I think it means that whatever you do makes you what you are.”

Malyon responds in the affirmative – his manner is quiet, accepting of anything that arises during the hour-long session, encouraging thoughts, connections and self-reflection. After more conversation, he asks the writers to take the line, “I feel it now, there’s a power in me,” and compose a poem.

The program, says Malyon, is about creative writing and exposing the kids to a variety of voices in literature. “What I’m trying to do is inspire youth to get excited about reading and writing and to learn to use it as a tool for coping. We go through the door of literature, and then you get to the therapeutic aspect, you get to the processing aspect as well.”

After five minutes Malyon asks if anyone would like to share. The more prolific writer says he wrote about someone who ran and ran and then he died – “He ran so fast he perished.” Another of the teens references his worries about his judicial proceedings.

After more sharing, Malyon hands out the next poem from the anthology “Dream Field; a Peak into the World of Migrant Youth”, compiled by Janice Blackburn, a bilingual educator from La Venture middle school. The poem, written in 2011 by 14 year-old Yesica, is a study in contrasts. After reading “Choices” Malyon asked what they noticed about the poem.

“It’s like a rap,” said the boy with close-cropped hair who had struggled to write the first couple rounds.

“She can write better than me,” said the more prolific writer.

Malyon asks what they noticed about the sounds at the end of the poem. The students notice the rhyming, another, the contrasts in each line. Malyon points out that many modern poets do not rhyme, however much of poetry over time used rhyme, much like hip hop, noting the important connection the student had made. He then asked for favorite lines.

Each of the four men chose a different line from the poem laying out choices across the spectrum of our lives: “Be caring or don’t care at all”; “Start a relationship or put it to an end lose a fake, earn a friend”

Malyon asks the students to use their line to prompt a poem. “I’m a get down on this one,” says the student who struggled with the first prompt.

“One of the things I’m trying to do with prompts,” says Malyon, “is to try to get them to start to project themselves in the future and project them changed in the future.

What happens fairly easily is they start to lose their imagination for something different. We try to foster hope and imagination and brick by brick, build this bridge to the future, otherwise it’s really hard to get there if they don’t have something motivating them.”

Most of these teens are only in the facility for one- or two-week stretches, but some kids, due to their particular cases, have stayed in longer. Malyon uses the example of a young man he worked with in the Skagit detention facility, now in Chehalis. He has maintained a strong correspondence with Malyon and has not only submitted his work to literary magazines, but is working on his high school diploma and has enrolled in a college class.

“Is underground writing a part of that? Definitely. Is it everything? No, but it’s a part. He can start seeing towards the future. I don’t think when I first met him he was at that point,” Maylon said. “Those kinds of things are really encouraging.”

After the writing prompt, one of the boys said he had written about his regret that he hadn’t taken school more seriously. He also regretted seeing his younger brother follow his footsteps into the detention center and wants to be a better role model.

Students keep their notebooks from the sessions. The hope, says Malyon, is that further down the line they remember they have this tool and that they can follow up with the writing or some of the author’s they have been introduced to.

An aim of the program is to take these voices from the margins and release them into the open. Malyon hopes to find funding to publish an anthology produced in the workshops. The program received a micro-grant for the Undergroundwriting.org website where some student writing is published.

“We push a lot of things down, but those are the things that need to come out in your writing and people that are underground or underheard need to come up and be heard and as a writing program, as people, as teachers on our crew we think it’s really important for these voices to be heard.”

At the end of the session after a third poem by Seattle-based writer, Sherman Alexie, the young men have only a minute to share why they chose to attend the session.

“It helps me think about a lot of things,” said one of the teens, “just seeing what I can write and people being impressed by it.”

The boys were ushered out, but the writer who struggled remained in his seat. He had come up with a line for a poem during the previous exercise which he said he would be sure to complete during one of his breaks.

“I just write about my life, what I’m going to do when I get out,” he says, talking about his practice. The guard gathers the pencils, then they file out of the classroom, notebooks in hand.