Kim Batchelor

Writer of magical realism and other imaginative fiction

A Dark and Starry Night

  • Share on Tumblr

fairy-tale-moon-and-trees-copy

Fall is my favorite time of year. I may not like the winter waiting in the wings, except for the rare occasions that snow covers the ground. There is something mystical, though, about that period between when summer takes its last breaths before sliding into hibernation and the bitter winds and rain of winter make their entrance.

Something distinctly different happens on fall days that has nothing to do with the change of leaves, which here in Texas, we get very little of. Can you feel it? Day or, especially, night, something slips in with the cooler air to give a slight sheen to the light of day and the stars at night. I’m sure the scientists would remind me that the gigantic orange orb that hovers just above the horizon doesn’t happen only in autumn. Or is that why it’s called the harvest moon, because that’s the only time you see it? A moon so fleeting that it slips away into ordinary moon-ness in no time.

A dark and starry sky captures best my experience in my last class teaching at the Dallas County jail. We talked life stories and focused on events, happy and sad, that make up that life. We used Deborah Harding’s poem, “How I Knew Harold” which tells the story of a life in events in non-chronological order. As the female prisoners constructed their lives, there were many common themes of taking the wrong course, meeting and hanging out with the wrong people, turning to drugs to self-medicate against difficult situations.

The class wasn’t all seriousness. During the opening activity when each person compares her mood that night to food, one class participant characterized hers as ‘smashed peas.’ By the time she constructed her poem, she shared a hilarious story about her childhood. And another, a 60-year-old, told of her excitement at going to junior high school so she wouldn’t have to see the same 50 boys she’d known since first grade.

Most poignant of all was when a young woman of 27 related how the judge had told her he was giving her one last chance. One last precious chance to turn her life around after many missteps. For that moment, she seemed to value that chance and planned not to waste it. One bright star in the darkness. One moment of possible transition between the bleak and a sunny day.

I see those stories, happy and sad, as points of light, like the stars overhead when I left the jail a free woman, able to drive into the evening and go anywhere I pleased. Able to stand outside and breathe in the air of the in-between place of fall. Enjoying the different feel of it without exactly knowing why that was so.

  • Share on Tumblr

Freedom and Apology

  • Share on Tumblr

inmatesThe jail where I teach creative writing once a month is almost all concrete and steel. I check in on the first floor, trade my id for a clip-on card indicating I should be escorted and make my way up to the classroom on the fourth floor. At various steps, I wait at those heavy steel doors to be buzzed in, one right after the other, passing the desk where I tell another set of deputies who I am and who I’m with before making my way to the final set of doors where the class is held, to examine the subject of apology.

Last  month, the subject was apologies. We started with three songs—from Brenda Lee, Elton John and John Lennon. “What’s the common thread?” I asked them. Several surprised me by how the songs brought out their emotions of regret. Children, partners, family members—they related to the singers’ words of apologies even though the songs were more than a decade old and they are largely in their 20s and early 30s. Later, gathered in groups, they turned the words of those three songs into one of their own—and then sang or rapped them. One performance was musical, another serious and passionate, and the third, extremely funny.

We wrapped up with one of William Carlos William’s poems, the one about the plums he apologized for taking from the ‘ice box’ but that were so cold and delicious, so how could he not? Apology with no regrets. The women wrote their own poems about apologizing for something that they weren’t really sorry for. One wrote of the rush from taking a drug she was now ready to say, ‘bye, bye’ to. Another prefaced her reading by saying she never really believed an apology was sincere, while all around her the women she shared space with spoke of their feelings of regret. About what they’d done in the past. The affect of their actions on others.

We ended by talking about the act of saying, “I’m sorry,” apologizing with intent of making things right. The 12 Steps of Recovery are posted on the wall. Make a moral inventory. Make a list of all persons harmed. Become willing to make amends to them all.

And not apologizing for everything, as we women tend to do, as if everything’s our fault.

Once the class was done, I walked into the night with the two volunteers who provide vital assistance during those two hours. We escaped the concrete and steel, free to do what we wanted to do and go where we wanted to go, I thought of those women I left behind, hoping the power of putting their thoughts to paper helps them along to that same freedom I enjoy at the end of each class. Free of whatever regrets holds them now and threatens to keep them coming back.

  • Share on Tumblr