Doing Time

by Bell Gale Chevigny

  Robert Rutan was released in May 2010.

  Of Irish and Lithuanian stock, Jackie Ruzas (b.1943) grew up in Queens. At parochial school, he wrote, “I achieved both an education and bruises from the Grey Nuns.” Turning sixteen at Aviation Trades High School, he was invited to quit or be expelled. He joined the ranks of construction workers. “When the sixties brought protest, alienation, and drugs, I joined those ranks as well. It all led to a final curtain on a sunny autumn day in October 1974, when a confrontation between a state trooper and myself resulted in his tragic death.”

  Though charged with a capital crime, a jury spared him a death sentence; he is serving “an exile of thirty-seven years to life.” He earned a G.E.D., but says he is mostly self-taught, “with a thirty-six-year addiction to the New York Times.”

  “I realized many years ago that writing provided me with a sense of flight to anywhere I chose to travel. I could leave my cell without sirens in my ears and dogs at my heels. Over years I have tutored in classrooms in every maximum security prison in this state, and nothing gives me greater satisfaction than being part of an inmate’s journey from illiterate to literate.”

  “The Day They Lost Their Keeper” won first prize in fiction (1982), and “Ryan’s Ruse” an honorable mention (1994). In 1995 Ruzas took an honorable mention in poetry. His poems have appeared in Candles Burn in Memory Town and Prison Writing in Twentieth Century America. His story, “Reentry According to Bond,” appeared in The Hard Journey Home: Real-Life Stories about Reentering Society after Incarceration.

  While incarcerated, Ruzas married his childhood girlfriend, with whome he now has three children fathered from prison. He is about to meet his ninth parole board. He is active in championing parole restitution.

  Paul St. John (b.1956) grew up in Long Island and holds an M.A. in sociology. “I went down in the war on drugs,” he says, “but decided that my life wasn’t over. I started writing fiction as a means of experiencing what I could not otherwise.” He won third prizes for fiction in 1992 for “Peeks by Gnome of the Slums on the Bad Hardened to the Absolute” and in 1994 for “Behind the Mirror’s Face.” He has received other honorable mentions in PEN contests. He has published fiction in Midnight Zoo and wrote a few novels. He plays jazz piano and trumpet and writes music as well.

  St. John was released in 1999.

  The son of a card player, Michael E. Saucier (b.1948) hails from a small Cajun town in Louisiana. He graduated from Mamou High in 1966, hitchhiked to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco with his guitar, and protested the war instead of going to Vietnam. “I drifted across the USA and Mexico living a vagabond’s life until I finally and mercifully got busted for drug-dealing in 1990.” His prison job as a literacy tutor gave him access to a decent library and a grammar book that he devoured, testing himself until he could write clearly. With time and money enough for writing supplies, “I had no more excuses. I told myself that if I wasn’t willing and enthusiastic about writing a novel than I had to shut up and never talk about writing again. That scared the hell out of me.” He wrote his first novel twelve times, then another, Saga of an American Hippie, and a screenplay.

  Saucier won an honorable mention in drama for Thinking Twice (1991), third prize in poetry for “Cut Partner” (1992), and first prize in poetry for “Black Flag to the Rescue.”

  Later unhoused first by Hurricane Katrina and then by Hurricane Rita, Saucier lived briefly in a trailer provided by FEMA. He now lives in his deceased father’s house just outside Lake Charles’ city limits with a woman he first knew in the movement against the Vietnam war. In 2008, the Southwest Louisiana Historical Association awarded the prize for historical writing to Saucier for his narrative poem, “My Sweet Secret.” He is writing about his great-great cousin, the Confederate soldier who lived to be 105 years old. He continues to write songs, mostly with Acadiana themes, and performs them with his guitar.

  “A child of the oil fields,” Barbara Saunders was born (b.1944) in Lub-bock, Texas. Her father was an independent driller. The family followed the “boomtowns” of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Louisiana. At five years of age, Saunders began writing to entertain herself. She became a U.S. Navy nurse. In the late sixties, she earned master’s degrees in art education and in counseling psychology.

  “I write because I have to,” she says. “I sculpt my life through writing.” She cites her poem, “The Poet’s Plight”: “words slide behind my eyelids / go crashing through my brain / crying ancient sorrows / speaking ancient pain.”

  “The Red Dress” won second prize for poetry in 1996; “Wolf won second prize for poetry in 1998. Her work was published in Rattle.

  Saunders was released in 2000. Her essay, “Transition,” about her experience of re-entry, was published in Feminist Studies in 2004. Now she works with Stand in the Gap, an interdenominational ministry, mentoring women in prison. Oklahoma incarcerates women at a higher rate than any other state in the union. Twice a week, she teaches in a Women in Transition program she created in the Tulsa County Jail.

  Oklahoma native Jon Schillaci (b.1971) was raised in Dallas, Texas. “When I was four years old, my parents gave me an enormous Underwood manual typewriter—the thing weighed as much as I did—and I promptly wrote my first story.” He says he does not recall ever wanting to be anything but a writer.

  “The writers who matter the most to me are the ones who stretched my view of what was possible in the art”—Dylan Thomas for poetry, James Joyce for the novel. “Writing is a way to capture an experience— not merely a thought or story but an entire experience with thoughts, emotions, values all wrapped together—and present it in a way technically designed to make it happen again. If you read my writing, and feel something like what I felt, then I have succeeded.”

  Schillaci has an M.A. in humanities from the University of Houston at Clear Lake and is working toward a second master’s degree in literature. He is a member of the National Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi. His poem, “The Danger in Crowds,” won an honorable mention in 1998 and “Americans” took a poetry prize in 1999. His poems have been published in Rattle, RE:AL, and Heliotrope.

  Joseph E. Sissler (b.1949) was born in Washington D.C., attended the naval prep school Admiral Farragut Academy, enlisted in the navy, received a B.A. in English from the University of Maryland, and served forty-eight months at FCI Morgantown for “the all American charge of conspiring to possess.” There his appeal was opposed, he is pleased to report, by the then Solicitor General Kenneth Starr. From Morgantown, “a thick sandwich of boredom and despair,” he writes, “I was shipped to a Virginia county jail—my halfway house—and soon farmed out to the local stockyard for employment.” Free of the system, he acquired some cattle of his own for his Gobbler Hollow Farm. He returns to the stockyard for hay “in exchange for running with the bulls on sale days.”

  “I See Your Work” tied for third prize in fiction in 1995. “I read a great deal and writing seems to be a responsibility flowing from it. I suppose that writing is a way to get things right even if I never quite seem to grasp that goal,” he says. His favorite writer, the one that seemed to most persistently pursue and pin down America’s nightmare shadow, is Robert Stone.” Sissler has published in Harper’s and Rolling Stone (a defense of Hugh Hefner).

  In 1999 Sissler read from his story in bookstores in Washington D.C. and New York, where the advice of the poet Marie Ponsot inspired him. (“I was a single mother raising seven children, and if I found fifteen minutes a day to write, so can you.”) Trying his hand at poetry, he won Antietam Review’s poetry contest with his first effort, To Sit Done. Later Charlottesville’s Streetlight published his poem “Mule Zen.”

  Sissler sees the stockyard “as an illustration of Pynchon’s entropy. Yet with the fallen arches and teeth, the limps, broken pens, bad checks, it continues to roll on, now draped with peacocks and flowery roosters, guinea fowl din, along the loading dock. Look in some of the pens and besides the strange goats you mig
ht see a zebra foal, or a cross between a zebra and donkey known as a zeedonk. Couldn’t make this up.”

  Richard Stratton (b.1946) grew up in Wellesley and was a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1970. Convicted of conspiracy to import marijuana and hashish in 1982, he was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. While incarcerated, he wrote a novel Smack Goddess (1990) and “A Skyline Turkey,” which won first prize for fiction (1989). He also became a jailhouse lawyer, wrote his own appeal, and had his sentence vacated. Released in 1990, he read at the PEN Awards ceremony in 1991, where he met Kim Wozencraft, ex-convict author of Rush; they married and for two years collaborated in producing Prison Life.

  Earlier Stratton had edited Fortune News, the journal of the Fortune Society. His writing has appeared in journals like Rolling Stone, High Times, Spin, Penthouse, and Newsweek. He is co-author and producer of the dramatic film, Slam, which won the 1998 Sundance Grand Jury award and the Cannes film festival’s Camera d’Or. He has several other film and TV credits. Whiteboyz, which Stratton also co-wrote and produced for Fox Searchlight, was released in 1999. He recently completed an adaptation of Edward Bunker’s novel, Dog Eat Dog, which he is directing.

  Stratton’s documentary film credits include Prisoners of the War on Drugs, The Execution Machine: Texas Death Row, Thug Life in D.C, which won an Emmy in 1999, and Gladiator Days: Anatomy of a Prison Murder, all produced for the America Undercover series on HBO. Crude premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009 and has won numerous awards around the world including the Peace Prize at the Berlin Film festival in 2010. O.G:Joe Stassi, Original Gangster, is currently in production. Godfather and Son: The Legacy of John Gotti Junior is in development.

  Stratton also served as technical consultant on the first season of HBO’s dramatic prison TV series, Oz. He was the creator and executive producer of the dramatic TV series Street Time, which aired on Showtime; he wrote and directed The Whole Truth, the season two finale of Street Time. Nation Books published his latest book, Altered States of America, in October 2005. He lives in New York City with his second wife, Antoinette, and son Ivan. An activist in criminal justice reform, he testifies as an expert witness on prison culture and violence in state and federal court.

  As the son of a Navy man, David Taber (b.1950) moved from his native Philadelphia to Hawaii, Tennessee, Morocco, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Maine. With a B.A. in Classical Languages and German from the University of Colorado, he later studied for two years at the University of Tuebingen, and earned an M.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts in Boston. He most admires German Expressionist poetry; his models for poetry are Silvia Plath and George Trakl.

  Taber’s “Diner at Midnight” won first prize in poetry in 1997. His “Abraham’s Son” took first prize in nonfiction in 2000; “The Recital” took first prize in drama in 2002. He has published three poems in Inner Voices and an abridged version of a collection of poems, Luna Moth. He has organized poetry recitals at MCI Norfolk; Derek Walcott, Robert Pinsky, and Rosanna Warren are among those who have performed. He has completed a book of poetry, Stone Circles in the Sand, and is looking for a publisher.

  Jon Marc Taylor (b.1961) was born in Topeka, Kansas, finished high school in Indianapolis in 1979, and in 1980 was incarcerated in Indiana. After more than thirteen years, his sentence was reduced to time served; the original sentencing judge remarked that this was “the most remarkable case of self-rehabilitation” that he had ever seen. Taylor was remanded to Missouri to commence another sentence. He received the American Red Cross Certificate of Merit for administering CPR to a heart attack victim. He has worked as a literacy tutor, First Aid and CPR instructor, and narrator and director at the Missouri State Prison’s Center for Braille and Narration Production.

  In 1989 Taylor became a crusading journalist on behalf of what he believes to be the best hope for successful rehabilitation to occur in America’s prisons: post-secondary education. His essay, “Pell Grants for Prisoners,” won the Nation/I. F. Stone and Robert F Kennedy Student Journalism Awards in 1993. With the loss of Pell Grants, his endeavors have centered on efforts with Missouri legislators to create prisoner-generated alternative funding to reinstate post-secondary programs in the state’s prisons. He serves as the inside coordinator of the Education from the Inside Out Coalition (www.collegeandcommunity.org), a nonpartisan collaborative of criminal justice and education advocates, campaigning to restore prisoners’ Pell Grant eligibility. He has published three editions of the Prisoner’s Guerrilla Handbook to Correspondence Programs in the U.S. and Canada.

  Taylor has won a second prize and three honorable mentions for fiction and nonfiction from PEN. His extensive research in corrections and educational policy has appeared in journals like Criminal Justice, Educational Policy, and Federal Probation. His editorial voice has been featured in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Indianapolis Star, and the New York Times, among others; the Times piece was read into the Congressional Record during the debates on Pell Grants for prisoners. More recently he has published in the Journal of Corrective Education and the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, among others.

  He has earned four college certificates and degrees and a doctorate in public administration from Kennedy-Western University. He is currently enrolled in a master’s of science degree program in criminal justice through Southwest University.

  The resolutions committee of his prison’s NAACP branch, of which Taylor is chair, has collectively written one-third of the NAACP’ criminal justice platform.

  Eric (“Easy”) Waters (b.1960) of Brooklyn, New York, was convicted of felony murder in 1976 as a non-killing accomplice. While imprisoned, he earned an M.A. in theology from New York Theological Seminary, after earning two B.A.s in sociology and in history/English. “I started writing,” he says, “because I learned that if one doesn’t tell his or her story, others will. I agree with Isak Dinesen that ‘all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.’”

  Waters has won six PEN awards as well as four Honorable Mentions in poetry, drama, and nonfiction. In his prize-winning 1997 poem, “My Hero was a Street-Corner Philosopher,” he describes learning to raise questions about history from a old-timers in the ghetto. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and Newsday, The Defender, The Other Side, and AIM, and in several poetry anthologies.

  After his release on Election Day 2000, Waters became a member of the PEN Prison Writing Committee. He has worked in child welfare and for the last eight years at the Osborne Association, a non-profit organization working with people impacted by the criminal justice system, i.e., people arrested, people in prisons and jails, and their families. He is also involved in advocacy around criminal justice issues, including parole. He edits the Deuce Club, the newsletter of the Coalition for Parole Reform.

  Jessie L. Wise Jr. (1954–1999) of St. Louis, Missouri, was raised mostly by his grandmother; after her death, he went to a boys’ home and then to prison. Finally he was sent to death row at Potosi Correctional Center. He earned a general education degree and taught himself to read and write music: “I just gathered all the books I could, made drumsticks out of pencils and fretboards and keyboards out of cardboard and went to work.” He went on to teach music fundamentals and instrumentation and to lead a prison band mordantly called “The Final Appeal.”

  In “No Brownstones, Just Alleyways & Corner Pockets Full” (second prize for poetry in 1994), Wise experimented with narrative that is “not rap or standard verse.” Admiring works by Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Stephen King, he became a writer in prison “through pure self-determination.” He sold a teleplay for the sitcom TheJeffersons to CBS in 1984. “I want to write my books so bad,” Wise wrote. “When they come to get me, I just want to tell them that I’m not through with this life, that I have so much to say, and ask them if they can wait awhile. Crazy, isn’t it?”

  Despite a strong legal effort to gain clemency
and a letter-writing campaign to which PEN members contributed, Wise was executed in 1999.

  Born in Manassas, Virginia, David Wood (b. 1957) was raised in Pennsylvania and in Florida, and earned a bachelor’s degree. Although he began writing at twelve and had published fiction and poetry before doing time, he has now published fifteen more stories and one hundred poems. “Although I’m sure that after ten years I am institutionalized to some degree,” he wrote, “writing has been most responsible for helping me keep what lucidity, reasoning, and sanity I still have.” In prison, he became a Buddhist.

  “Feathers on the Solar Wind” won first prize for fiction in 1997; Listen to the River won first prize for drama in 1994. Wood has won several other prizes and honorable mentions in fiction, drama, nonfiction, and poetry. He has published in the Jacksonville, Florida, Times-Union, Sun Dog, State Street Review, and Black Ice. “Whenever I get published outside these walls,” he wrote, “it is as though a piece of me gets out.”

  After his release in 2003, Wood received the Prison Writing Program’s Dawson Special Citation for a Body of Work.

  Born in Chicago, raised in Miami, Dax Xenos (b.1949) took a degree at the University of Texas. After traveling in Europe, he settled in Los Angeles where he began writing and painting. He painted a 60’ x 12’ mural on Westwood Boulevard and, for twelve duck dinners, a Chinese restaurant. He toured California in a converted bread truck taking notes for stories in a journal. He worked as a lifeguard, carpenter, painter, model, contractor, magazine editor, and fisherman and he drove a taxi in Watts after the riots.

  Arrested for possession of cocaine in Texas in 1981, he spent thirty-four months in maximum security, He resurrected the award-winning prison newspaper, The Echo, wrote several screenplays (unproduced), a novel, Twist of Faith (published) and many stories, including “Death of a Duke” which tied for first prize in fiction (1984). “Duke” was later published in Witness and in the 1989 O. Henry Awards volume. Xenos is happily married and is writing, painting, and producing videos. Widely published (using pseudonyms), he has won many awards for his work. He values his family life above all else.