We Are Family, by John Proctor

This past year has been a revelation. For many of us, and I include myself here, the pandemic and ensuing social isolation has marked a turn inward. But ironically, this time has been for me also a time of intensive expansion of my sense of community. 

Many of you have been reading these dispatches for years, even back to the time when I was sending them out from my solitary outpost, the writing workshop on Rikers Island. You’ve probably noticed that the dispatches have changed in the past few months. Most noticeably, you’ve seen less of my individual voice, and more of the voices of the people I’ve now worked with for years, honing the craft, figuring in conversation what it is each of us wants to say. We’ve also slowly built our team of facilitators, including our Literary Editor Jaclyn Watterson, who has been primarily responsible for getting a different dispatch out to you every Friday this year.

Most of our workshop members haven’t seen each other in person for over a year, but even as we’ve moved our workshop online, we’ve deepened our bond. We’ve also expanded our reach, securing early releases for some of our most vulnerable workshop members inside at the onset of the pandemic, advocating for clemency and parole for incarcerated men in upstate prisons, setting up support groups for spouses and family members of these men, working as we can with the video capabilities at various county jails and state facilities, and facilitating conversations between our seasoned writers and the student community of Manhattanville College, where I teach.

Through this all, as our formerly incarcerated writers have found their voices and used them in powerful ways, I’ve struggled continually with placing my own written voice. I wrote a dispatch about this earlier this year, and I’m pleased to report that, after some conversations with people with pretty great advice, I’m coming around. I’m even more pleased to report that my voice is not alone.

We are battling an unjust American carceral apparatus that preys on us by pulling us from each other and separating us from the social fabric that binds and protects our communities. We fight this battle every day by grabbing hold of every thread we can find, holding tightly onto it, and pulling ourselves to each other. The next step in this reclamation, I’m finding, is weaving those threads back together collectively, as an organization and a coalition.

For this reason, it’s no coincidence or surprise that everyone in our Re/Creation workshops calls each other family, or that we frequently end our workshops spontaneously telling each other that we love each other. I guess it should be no surprise either that our recent workshops have been delving deeply into our shared stories over the past four years, and what they say about us and about the apparatus that has shaped us.

I’m looking forward, in the weeks ahead, to continuing to develop and weave together these stories, many of which we’ve told so far only in threads. Sonny’s determination to maintain his cat Bentley while battling homelessness, Prisoner K’s journey from incarceration mere months ago back to his life as a professional copywriter, Mike Colbert’s huge open arms connecting all of us to each other while he’s gone from upstate to mental health treatment and back to repair relations with his long-lost family, Carolina advocating for everyone at the state and national level while discovering writing as perhaps her primary mode of expression after a lifetime in painting, Marvin gaining confidence as both a storyteller and a spiritual activist in his late 40s after losing 25 years for a crime he committed as a teenager--we’re discovering together that all of these stories are not just our own, but each other’s.

So, with this in mind, we are continuing a journey together of exploring those connections, weaving our stories together in writing, and sharing those collective stories in the coming weeks while continuing to do the work of advocating for at least some of the millions of voices that have been muted by a violent, retributive, broken system of criminal punishment. You’ll undoubtedly see these in the dispatches to come, and we’re also planning on seeking wider publication as the stories develop. It’s an exciting time to shout out loud, together!

John Proctor is a writer, educator, activist, and founder of Re/Creation. He teaches academic writing at Manhattanville College, where he is faculty advisor for this academic year’s Human Rights Awareness Week and Undergraduate Research & Creative Achievement Fair. His work has been widely published and anthologized.