How do we overcome?, by Jaclyn Watterson

This week’s dispatch is from the newest member of the Re/Creation team, Editor Jaclyn Watterson, sharing some new work from our indomitable workshop member Carolina Soto.

Dear Friends,

My name is Jackie, and I’ve been working behind the scenes with the Re/Creation collective for the past several months, helping to get our weekly Dispatches from the Carceral Apparatus ready for you. I’ve also been attending our workshops every Tuesday night (on Zoom!). I joined these weekly workshops because, like many of you, I was searching for meaning and human connection in a lonely, isolating year. 

Getting to know the members of the Re/Creation collective, albeit virtually, has been a joy and a challenge. Our regular members ask difficult questions, and they don’t accept easy answers. They hold me, and all of us, accountable for our shared humanity—demanding that we examine what binds us together and what we can never understand about one another’s experiences—while teaching me what it means to be an active and responsible ally.

With each piece we publish on our website, we invite you to practice radical empathy, to examine your own positionality in relation to the other beings with whom we share the planet, and to act out and speak up—whether that means donating time or money, running for political office, writing your truth, or lifting up someone else’s voice. 

And we ask you to join us in celebrating the process of always becoming, ever creating and re-creating.

This week, I have the honor of introducing you to the simultaneously heart-warming and bone-chilling  essay “Cold Prison” by our very own Carolina Soto. In it, Carolina recounts having to shovel the prison grounds during a blizzard and, as a result, missing the monthly queue for laundry detergent. Carolina describes in detail one harrowing day in her sentence, and she asks us: what does it mean to respect or disrespect another person; when does a physical task or chore become a spiritual reckoning; and how do we overcome that which cannot be overcome?

I hope you will read “Cold Prison”and love it as I do, and I hope it will remind you that, in the words of Yiyun Li, “One has made it this far; perhaps this is enough of a reason to journey on.”

Jaclyn Watterson is a writer, teacher, and human based in Astoria, Queens. The newest member of the Re/Creation collective, she earned her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah. Her first book, Ventriloquisms, won the 2016 Spokane Prize in Short Fiction and was published by Willow Springs Books (Eastern Washington University) in 2017. Her second book is looking for a home.