The National Writers Conference, Going to Prison, and more...

I spent two days this week working in prisons, running creative writing workshops for PeoplePlus.

On the first day I was in a men's open prison. Before we got into the writing part of the workshops, I talked about growing up in a working class town and being creative when nobody else was, or at least appeared to be. I told them about feeling like an alien in my own family, about my parents who worked in a shoe factory, and how ‘working hard and playing hard’ was the culture back then, and how there was no room for creativity. I’ve written a little about my upbringing here.