Strickland’s short story, “Waiting,” won the PEN Prison Writing Award for Fiction, and will be published in the forthcoming 2024 edition of the PEN Prison Writing Awards Anthology. It’s also published here by The Lens.
What is your writing process like? When and where do you get your writing done?
This has varied over time. For 23 years, I was confined to solitary, which afforded me all of the time I ever needed to write. Since being released into general population in 2016, I have written when and where I could. I have always eeked out a space to think quietly, with jobs that provided me the time to do so. I was a librarian here for two years, so I wrote in the library, later I was a facilitator teaching pre-release classes for the Transition Dept., which provided me with a room I could write in when not instructing class. Since November 2022, I have been a full-time writer for The Angolite. My daily job now is to write (journalism). It is from there I am also able to pursue creative fiction.
My writing process is simple. I tend to start with the germ of an idea and build out from that. It is usually character for me that begins a story. Character, followed by context. I am a gardener, not an architect. My stories tend to grow to form, they are not mapped out in their entirety to begin with. I revise as I go, working back over the previous day’s work, so that by the time I have completed a piece, it already enjoys a bit of polish. I enjoy the process of revision, of cutting back into a story to remove that which is unnecessary to reveal the essential.
The main character in your story “Waiting” is simply referred to as the “old man.” He is incarcerated, and works as a gravedigger at the prison cemetery. He has come to hate just about everything around him (except for maybe a horse in a pasture next to the cemetery). How did you come up with the character? Is the old man based on a real person?
As for the old man, he is not real. Not in his entirety. He is an amalgamation. A composite sketch made from observation. There are many old men who have spent lifetimes incarcerated (30 – 40 years) who are grown tired, worn down, and faded into ruts. Prison is for young men, not the old. It is difficult to maintain a sense of happiness when bereft of even the benefit of youth’s exuberance, after life has passed one by and nothing is left except bad food, overcrowded dorms, poor medical care, ill-fitting clothes, and the daily ritualistic humiliation of incarceration at the hands of incompetent and often-inhumane guards who are poorly educated, ignorant, and the age of your own grandchildren.
I derived this character from my own thoughts on death, of dying here. I am a member of the Point Lookout burial crew. We are volunteer trusty inmates who bury inmates here at Angola’s Point Lookout cemetery when they are unclaimed by their families. So “Wait” is informed by my own participation in this process. Of course, I take liberties with factual reality for creative purposes. Graves are no longer dug by hand, though they once were.
Despite his hatred for it, the old man seems to take pride in his work. His boss asks, “Ain’t you getting too old for this shit?” as if the “old man” has the option of quitting, or finding a different job. Does he? Would he want to if he could?
The old man could probably “retire” from his position if he chose to. But he does take a sort of perverse pride in his work. His pride in his work is reflective of his identity of himself. It defines him and provides the energy for him to continue on, through an endless succession of days that lack any other meaning. This man has no hope of going home. He is not working towards a release date. That is not on his horizon. He merely exist in one place and is defined by what he does there, judging himself by all the others who have come before.
There is also an element of status. The old man may seem to hate all he does but his position as a trusty, and the jobs such a status entitles him to, can come to be seen as coveted positions over time for inmates who have nothing else. To be able to walk out of a security gate and go to a “drop” that is your own, even if but a shack in a cemetery, where he is granted at least some privacy, of being alone, away from the incessant claustrophobia of being crammed into a dorm with 80 or 90 men, can become the entirety of one’s existence.
Your story has a rhythmic quality to it, with words and phrases repeated throughout. In some ways, it seems to mimic the monotony of prison life that the old man has come to resent. Was that intentionally done? How do you find the right tone for your stories?
I did intentionally use repetitive phrasing. I utilized both the monotony of describing him climbing down from his bed to sit and put his socks and boot on, along with the repetitive use of the word “hate.” But this usage, especially of the word hate, does not seem violent to me, it felt more of despondency. I wanted the reader to experience this sense of living a meaningless life, day after day, with no end in sight. Maybe for some readers this will seem like just punishment for whatever they imagine the old man’s crimes are for others, there may be a sense of—if not compassion—then at least empathy.
I am not sure how the right tone for a story appears. I tend to have a general tone as a writer, my “writer’s voice.” The voice of a story seems to appear in my mind with the idea for the story itself—set by the temperament of the character and the situation I discover that character in. These things seem to spring fully formed into my mind with little initial deliberation. Once I am well into the story and judging it more clinically, there may be some conscious adjustment to the tone or style of a piece, but that is an editorial process which takes place after the initial creation.
The story touches on some racial dynamics in the prison. The old man hates the white trustees who are given more privileges and treated more leniently. Yet he also seems to have come to internalize some of the racism he sees around him, and feels some shame regarding his relative place of status in the institution. Can you talk about that?
Racial dynamics are everywhere. In prison, they are laid bare without the veneer of social niceties. In prison, everything is judged through racial lenses. Angola has a predominantly Black inmate population, yet the upper security administration is predominantly (and historically) white. Within this steroidal version of racial politics, every benefit or achievement or privilege granted to one inmate will almost automatically be viewed by others through a racial lens. It is within this dynamic that the old man lives.
When men come to prison, they generally tend to adopt an adversarial stance towards the institution. This is common. We have our career criminals, outlaws, renegades and rebels, freedom fighters and political prisoners. For many inmates, though, this time passes and eventually they begin to pulled into positions which once they would have felt amounted to collusion with their captors. They do this for many reasons but it is often mostly just to make the best of the situation they find themselves in.
Inmates with ability eventually gravitate towards being program facilitators or mentors teaching rehabilitation or education classes. They become clerks in colonels’ or wardens’ offices (“warden’s boy”). They are eventually granted a trusty status and spend their days repairing, fixing, and up keeping the very gates and bars and walls that keep themselves and their fellow prisoners confined. Or, even like myself, they work for something like The Angolite and are often perceived by their fellow inmates as nothing more than a propaganda mouthpiece for the administration.
As such, there is often an internal struggle each inmate faces. Am I a collaborator? Am in collusion? Every inmate may feel this internal dilemma, white or Black. But it is especially vicious when racial politics underpin it. The old man faces this struggle through that sense of shame he feels when seen by other Black, non-trusty field inmates, to be seen as having sold out to this white carceral system. A feeling he is familiar with, having viewed other Black trusties from that same position, when he was a veritable field slave in a striped convict outfit picking crops under the gaze of a white field boss with a gun.
To defend himself from that shame, he can only distance himself psychologically by viewing his fellow Black inmates as incorrigible and ignorant. The irony is that even as he distances (justifies) himself in relation to how he may be seen other Black inmates, he shares their same sense of anger when he looks at white trusties. Yet, I think for the old man, there is also a sense of envy, that he must carry such a burden of shame while it seems that white trusties must not. White trusties do not have this extra, added burden of race to contend with. They do not carry the weight of historic racism and plantation slavery into their encounters or relationships with their “bosses.” For most white inmates serving long or life sentences, becoming a trusty—with the work that entails and the concurrent privileges and benefits—is purely transactional.
Are the resentment and hatred the man comes to have for his life in prison inevitable? Are there things that can stave it off, or redeem it? Does writing help?
Resentment is not inevitable. Individuals will survive prison in the ways available to them based upon their will and the abundance or scarcity of the internal resources they possess. Some men are physically strong but prison and time will eventually break them of that. Some men are psychologically or spiritually strong, these may survive. There are those who will slowly die in prison, and others who will thrive. There are those who will grow wherever they are planted. There are some who will live larger than the conditions they find themselves in, and others will be crushed by them.
Writing for me is such a venue. But there are any number of options. Men become painters, musicians, teachers … I am fortunate to the degree that I am not a person who came to prison and became a writer, I am a writer who happened to come to prison. There is a difference. In writing—though I would rather be doing it anywhere else—writing is a part of me that cannot be taken or co-opted by my incarceration. It is independent of my incarceration. It is an act that is the same, wherever I might be sitting when doing so. When writing, or thinking about writing, I occupy the same headspace here, inside prison, as I would were I sitting on a hotel balcony in the French Quarter, or a sidewalk cafe in Paris. I think that is the key. Value in life can be found anywhere.
The title “Waiting” seems to refer to the wait for everyday events and ultimately, for death. How does waiting for others, on their schedule, affect your daily life inside? How many guys that you know have made plans for their bodies to leave the grounds versus being buried there?
In prison, all one does is wait. Every inmate’s life is affected by having to wait. Waiting to be told when to eat, when to wake up, when to go to bed, when to work, when not to. We must wait on each other— to shower, to use a toilet in an overcrowded dorm, to receive medications in a long pill-call line. We wait for visits, for phone cells, for mail. All of which is beyond our control and may be delayed or taken from us at any moment for often little discernable reason beyond mere arbitrariness.
Many men here do indeed have plans for their bodies in anticipation of death. Some inmates do already have family plots paid and awaiting them. There is often time for an inmate and his family to prepare for this, especially if the inmate is terminally ill on the prison’s hospice ward.
Most often, we on the burial crew are left to bury inmates who either have no remaining family left to retrieve them, or whose families are too poor to afford the cost of transporting the body home. It is generally the poor and abandoned who we bury here.
The character is Black, while you are white. It might be helpful to our readers to have you explain your choice of race and language, in a short intro to the story.
As for my choice of language, I live by the exhortation to write fearlessly. I understand the politics of language and understand that language may be used to hurt, demean, ridicule, and disenfranchise. But for any writer, fiction must be true. It must reflect the reality it intends to depict. I have lived in prison for over 30 years. I live within a predominately Black population. Every day, I listen, I observe and study language and the cadences of speech, the nuances of communication. People in prison do not speak like Harvard graduates, neither white nor Black, free or incarcerated.
How I may speak, or what language I feel is acceptable for me to use in my life, in addressing others, is not that of the old man in the story. The old Black man in the story is not the old white man writing it. It is this failure of current literature, out of fear of reprisal or of being “canceled,” that strips literature of its power.
I do not use certain words or language in any instance gratuitously, but only out of a desire to reflect the true nature of what is being depicted. Were I a writer who happened to be Black, or if my skin color was not known to the reader, then it is probable that no offense would be taken as the use of certain words is ubiquitous in certain social or cultural settings and no offense is taken. Therefore it is not the language itself that automatically offends, it is merely whether a particular reader desires to be offended due to their own racial lens.
Human beings are complicated, with complicated emotions, full of contradictions. I feel that I have written an empathetic description of this man’s life. One that the vast majority of inmates here can readily identify with. That they can understand.
The Lens “spoke” to Strickland about his story and his work in messages exchanged through JPay, the prison’s email system.