by Rebecca Childers

In the poem “Timothy McVeigh,” by Jill McDonough, the reader is left with the following image describing the audience’s perspective of his execution:

Most saw The Devil, back in hell, which caused
One man to say He’s not a monster, guys,
Not when you’re looking him in the face. He paused.
There’s no facial expressions on him, so there’s
No way of knowing exactly what he is.

The observer does not take away McVeigh’s humanity, he does not even ponder the possibility of it and begins to attempt to define the other that he believes defines McVeigh. This is a common occurrence for death row inmates: being stripped of things that seem intangible. Innate in the rest of us. One of the main casualties here, is voice. The ability to speak is not a given, and to be heard is almost an impossibility. Demands of the Dead: Executions, Storytelling, and Activism (from the University of Iowa Press), a collection of creative writing edited by WVU’s Katy Ryan and the authors she collaborated with on the collection, works to return that voice. The authors include: Jill McDonough, former WVU student Jason Stupp, Sherman Alexie, the late Willie Francis who survived the electric chair at sixteen then put back in it, Thomas Dutoit and many more. Other contributors are current death row inmates who find the inspiration to write words that so desperately need to be heard (we should all take a lesson from this).

I discovered the value of creative writing in the death penalty field last year when I took English 693B: Special Topics: The Death Penalty and 20th Century American Literature. In Caryl Chessman’s autobiographical novel Death Row: Cell 2455, the author begins in third person. Telling the story of a boy with a tragic life. Illness, poverty, a sick mother, a town scandal, and we see him slowly take to a life of crime after everything else falls through. The author cannot help but feel for the character and root for him. Then Caryl turns the tables. I am that boy, he tells the reader at the beginning of the next section. We’ve been rooting for a murderer. But you don’t feel tricked, you feel enlightened. Society’s view of death row is seen through a dirty window. We can pretend that if the window isn’t opened we won’t realize how like ourselves these people are, and how easily it could be us. But Caryl, and any writer who has been through the experience or even just thoroughly studied and cared, can show this in a forum that is approachable and riveting.

Eight years ago, Katy Ryan and one of her graduate classes found a way to allow prisoners to be heard even more: through letters. The Appalachian Prison Book Project is a free service to prisoners. Volunteers open letters, read the request, find a book to fit it, send it, and for a few hours that prison cell seems a little less small. Then the prisoner passes the book on to a friend. The requests vary greatly. Some ask for books to help them find employment once they get out, some ask for dictionaries to help them read and write, some ask for fiction: James Patterson, Louis L’amour, the Harry Potter series. The organization often receives thank-you letters in return, sometimes directly to the sender. Sometimes they include drawings.

In Katy Ryan’s class we read the play The Exonerated by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen. It highlighted the stories of six former death row inmates who at the time the play had been written, had their names cleared. One of the men was Delbert Tibbs, a poet, whose work is included in Demands of the Dead. The authors of the play chose to conclude on these words from him:

This
is the place for the thoughts that do not end in concreteness.
It is necessary to be curious,
and dangerous to dwell here; to wonder why
and how and when is dangerous—
but that’s how we get out of this hole.
It is not easy to be a poet here.
Yet I sing.
We sing.

In Demands of the Dead and through projects like the Appachian Prison Book Project people dare to dwell and the accused dare to sing.
If you would like to read Katy’s book, you can obtain a copy here. It is a lesson in how important the simple act of putting pen to paper can be.

Recently, Katy kindly took the time to discuss her book, and her beautiful answers are below:

1. Congratulations on your book Demands of the Dead: Executions, Storytelling, and Activism in the United States! That is so exciting, and I cannot wait to read it. What led you to get involved with this project?

Thanks so much for the chance to talk about this book.

Every beginning I can think of leads to another. Here’s one. In the mid-1990s I was introduced to two men on death row in Illinois, William X and Renaldo Hudson. In many ways, the collection grew out of my friendships with them. I met them through my dad who, after reading Dead Man Walking—and this will tell you something about my dad—called Sister Helen Prejean to tell her how much he liked her book. She encouraged him to visit someone on death row, and he did. At the time he was working at the Jane Addams Hull House in Chicago, and he ended up creating a mentoring program between some of the men he met on death row and the young people at Hull House. My dad retired a year or so later so he could work full-time on a death penalty moratorium in Illinois. I remember thinking it would never happen. Illinois issued a moratorium in 2000 and that was followed by abolition in 2011. So, a book and my father led me to visit death row.

But another beginning might be my best friend playing the song “Two Good Arms” for me when we were in college. Or Upton Sinclair’s admonishment in Boston: “So many hundreds of professors, of every kind of subject on earth, and they couldn’t teach anything worth while!” Or maybe it was a look on my mom’s face whenever one person harmed another.
I know two things came together in 2008: a question and a sabbatical. My question was, What is the American literary record of resistance to state killing? How have writers contributed to, or created, efforts to end executions? During my sabbatical, I was a research fellow at the University of Utah Tanner Center for the Humanities, and I had time to start to answer my question. I started by asking a bunch of people to send me their writings.

2.
Why do you feel it is important to write creatively about the death penalty rather than just critically?

Oh, this is so important. Debates about the death penalty are often abstract, driven by statistics or a vague, sometimes vicious, sense of justice. The human suffering on all sides is lost. Many years ago, I met the daughter of a man who had been executed, and talking with her was a shock: it woke me up to the impact of the death penalty on families. It is very hard to believe that mothers watch their sons be killed a few feet away, that a daughter knows her father is going to be killed next Tuesday. It is also impossible to understand the grief caused by (nonstate) murders, to even begin to fathom how lives can be so shattered. We do a poor job at preventing violence on streets and in homes. And we do a great job of masking violence carried out by the state.

Creative writing is one way to access these details and complexities. Emotion is never enough. And creative writers are skilled at sketching and analyzing cultural and personal dynamics. Facts aren’t enough either. I love this line from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping: “Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.” We need fuller, more accurate stories about why so many people end up in prison and why some end up in execution chambers. You can’t talk about prisons in the US without talking about race and class and inequality. This subject takes you right into history, and creative writers can be fantastic guides to this territory. Mumia Abu-Jamal credits prison walls in our country to a lack of imagination. I think that’s true.

3. Who did you get to work with while working on this project and what was it like?

Many wonderful people. I want to name all of them!

I’ll start with Kia Corthron, an amazing playwright from Cumberland, Maryland, who now lives in Harlem. In addition to over twenty plays, Kia has written episodes for the TV series The Wire and The Jury. I knew she had written a play about the death penalty, but it had never been published. I managed to contact her with help from the Women in Theatre program. She sent me the manuscript of Life by Asphyxiation, and I loved it. The play is set in the present, with Crazy Horse and Nat Turner on death row next to JoJo, a black man in his 50s. JoJo is visited by Katie, a white girl whom he raped and murdered when she was fifteen. There is nothing easy about this play. The rendering of death row—and of the racist history that surrounds and shapes it—is stark and painful. The characters are entirely moving. Kia is an exceptional artist whose work you must read and, if you can, see.

Another contributor is the poet Jill McDonough, who wrote a stunning book of sonnets called Habeas Corpus. Each sonnet is focused on a particular execution in US history. Jill recently won a Pushcart Prize and has taught creative writing in a Boston prison program for many years. Like Kia, Jill was a joy to work with, and both buoyed my spirits in the long book process.

I was fortunate to work with two writers, Steve Champion and Anthony Ross, who have been on death row in San Quentin for over twenty-five years. Steve and Anthony were close friends with Stanley Tookie Williams who was executed in 2005. In prison, the three of them, all former Crips, dedicated themselves to a disciplined working relationship, supporting one another and collaborating on writing projects. Steve’s essay recounts his spiritual and intellectual transformation and the unexpected moment when he fell in love with the writing process. Anthony wrote a haunting meditation that imagines his own death on a gurney. I just received a letter from Steve, and he and Anthony have co-written a philosophical and practical manual for young people called Architect. I’m going to try and help get that out into the world.
Working with imprisoned people presents logistical challenges. There is no access to email, phone calls are expensive, mail can be slow or lost entirely. Sometimes there would be a great exchange over email between contributors, and I hated that they were out of the loop. But those of us on the outside just have to work harder to make communication possible.

The collection also has poems by Delbert Tibbs, a writer and activist whom I admire more than I can say. In the 1970s, Delbert was wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to die. A few years later, he was exonerated. Delbert has dedicated his life to speaking out against the death penalty and mass imprisonment. He visited WVU in 2004 and spoke to my classes about the global need to work for peace, for health, for justice. Delbert was also featured in the play The Exonerated and Studs Terkel’s collection Will the Circle Be Unbroken. He’s a remarkable human being.

I wasn’t kidding about mentioning everyone!

Sherman Alexie contributed a poem, “Capital Punishment,” told from the perspective of a prison cook preparing a last meal for a Native American man. Elizabeth Stein co-produces a radio program in Houston each night an execution occurs in Texas, and she wrote a marvelous ten-minute play. Rick Stetter, a former Texas correctional officer, wrote a personal essay that takes us into the place of the most executions in the country (and hemisphere). He also describes solitary confinement. It was important to me that this collection not isolate state killing from other torturous conditions in US prisons and jails, and Rick’s thoughtful essay helps to make connections.

And there is Willie Francis. In Louisiana 1946, an African American sixteen year old was convicted of killing a white pharmacist by an all-white jury in a quick and absurd trial. Willie Francis had no history of violence, there was no physical evidence, and his attorneys did not bother to offer any kind of defense. They actually made a motion—without his permission—to change his plea from not guilty to guilty. First-degree murder carried a mandatory death penalty, so the judge would not accept the plea. On the day of his scheduled execution, Willie Francis walked to the electric chair, was strapped down and subjected to two separate charges of electricity. He did not die. The men who set up the chair, it turned out, were drunk. So, Willie Francis walked out of the execution chamber and back to his cell.

A year later, a divided Supreme Court ruled that another execution would not violate the Eighth Amendment, and Willie Francis, who should have been in high school, was killed. Between the botched and final execution, Willie Francis wrote a pamphlet called “My Trip to the Chair” to help to raise money for his defense. It is probably the most important undefined116122.undefined116123.undefined116124.undefined116731.undefined213152.document in the book.

I’ve neglected my own crowd—the literary scholars! Bruce Franklin is the leading scholar of American prison literature, and he helped me from start to finish with this collection. My first conversation with him at a conference would be another beginning to this book. Bruce contributed a brilliant essay on Melville’s Billy Budd. I’m also indebted to Thomas Dutoit, a professor at the University of Lille in France, who co-edited Jacques Derrida’s final lectures on capital punishment. He took the time to write a fabulous essay on Derrida, Kant, and Kafka. Jennifer Lierberman, an expert in science and technology, returns to an obscure novel by Gertrude Atherton and to the use of electricity in state killing. David Kieran examines lynching imagery in post-1960s African American poetry. Matthew Stratton delves into Da Lench Mob’s 1992 hip hop album Guerrillas in the Mist. Tom Kerr discusses his friendship with Steve Champion. John Barton provides a survey of nineteenth-century anti-gallows writing. I comment on the documentary play The Exonerated. A graduate of our doctoral program Jason Stupp looks at Willie Francis’s narrative and Ernest Gaines’s novel A Lesson Before Dying. It was Jason who put “A Trip to the Chair” into my hands. And Gaines’s novel is surely one of the great twentieth-century American literary responses to the immorality of executions.

I could not have asked for more. Every contributor was professional, considerate, and committed to the project.

4. What are some moments in the works you edited that you found particularly inspiring?

I included a poem from Delbert that has nothing to do with the death penalty. It is a lyrical, lovely celebration of art, beauty, the impulse to create. I read it often.

The murder victim Katie in Life by Asphyxiation offers a key to the whole collection: “Murder . . . once you been through it, you never wish it on anyone.”

As an aside, and this is not in the book, Kia said in an interview that she “would rather error on the side of being a little didactic than error on the side of not really having said anything, not challenging the status quo.” I appreciate that artistic clarity.

Willie Francis explains at the start of the pamphlet that he doesn’t want to talk about the execution, but “if it could help people understand each other, then I want to tell everything.” I had to stop reading when I came to this line from him: “it is one of the hardest things to make yourself learn how to die right.”
I’ve received letters from people in prison who were inspired by Steve’s work, by his insistence on having a purpose, finding a fulcrum. There are moments of quiet revelation in Rick Stetter’s essay, and I love the ending of Elizabeth Stein’s play—but you’ll have to read the whole thing to get it!

Before each section in the book I have an epigraph from people who have had a family member murdered and who are opposed to executions. Azim Khamisa’s son, at twenty, was fatally shot by a fourteen-year-old named Tony Hicks. Azim Khamisa writes, “I decided to become the enemy not of my son’s killer but of the forces that put a young boy on a dark street holding a handgun. Tony now writes letters from prison that we use in our programs and that we see having a positive effect on other kids. Think of how many kids he may save. That’s going to bring me a lot more healing than if he had gotten the death penalty.” Click here for an interview with Azim Khamisa

I also have an epigraph from Kimberly Davis, Troy Davis’s sister. It is very much about remembering the dead and working for justice.
I could go on, but I should stop.

5. Congratulations on becoming a non-profit! How will this be able to expand your outreach?

We are now eligible for more and larger grants. APBP attracts great volunteers, amazing students, lots and lots of letters from men and women in prison. The only thing we never have enough of is money. Some grants would allow us to expand into specific areas—into women’s prisons or GED and educational programs in prisons. To become a nonprofit, we also had to restructure our organization and bring more people onboard. This has been a great thing in itself.

6. What is a moment (one of a million I am sure) during your work at APBP when you felt you had really made a change.

Certain letters stay with me. One man wrote to tell us he had won a writing contest and that he had been inspired to write after receiving a book we had sent him by Sherman Alexie. Another man who had been receiving books for years told us that his health had deteriorated and he was now in a wheelchair. He wanted us to know how much books help him every day. We receive letters from mothers whose children are in prison. People describe living in isolation, locked in cells 23 hours a day. Sometimes a note arrives on a tiny piece of brown paper or napkin. Several people have written that they stayed up all night reading a certain book. One person said he had been trying to find Paradise Lost for three years and was so grateful to have received it. Another joked that he wanted a Scrabble dictionary because he thought it would cut down on the fighting inside. But honestly, every letter tells a story and assures me that the work of APBP is essential.

I’m also inspired by the people who volunteer at APBP and the staff at the Aull Center. We have created a place for conversations, ideas, good company. That’s also part of making change.

8. What led you to start the organization?

ABPB grew out of a graduate class on American prison literature that I taught in 2004. I mentioned to students that there were no projects devoted to sending books into prisons in West Virginia. We soon discovered that there were very few in this region of the country. So, we decided to try to make something happen. We spent two years collecting books, raising money, and finding donated office space. People who love to read are drawn to the project; they get the importance of a book. Mark Brazaitis, the creative writing program director, has been part of APBP from its inception and has helped in every way, especially grantwriting. This summer we sent out our 10,000th book, so that’s pretty phenomenal.

If anyone is interested in joining APBP, we always need help! Just email me.

Follow the link to find out more information about Katy’s book, Demands of the Dead: Executions, Storytelling, and Activism

Finally, please join us to hear Katy read on Wednesday, October 3, at 7:30 pm in Colson 130.