Six Books I Read This Summer

Short stories! Back in late June I ran across a collection of them by Kelly Link and was struck full in the face with a reminder of my love for the genre. Link's collection Stranger Things Happen is reportedly what Wikipedia contributors label slipstream fiction. I prefer the label "speculative fiction," which might be imprecise but at least isn't as outright douchey as "slipstream." Tomato, tomahto.

Link writes surreal little fairy tales—stories of the afterlife, pretty blonde space invaders, little girls with the power to disappear, spectral dogs, and much else. Oh, but now I'm making her writing sound less uniquely fantastical than it is. Some of it reads like a fever dream. Jonathan Lethem blurbed this book with great enthusiasm. Link clearly has a wonderful imagination and a gift for plainspoken perversion, traits that made Stranger Things Happen a pleasant summer read for this indoor-only weirdo.

I followed her contemporary takes on the age-old form with what I trusted would be a genuine classic of Victorian horror, The King in Yellow, by Robert William Chambers. It features ten stories that I was told all concerned madness and woe. The description says that the stories are linked by a fictional play entitled (what else?) The King in Yellow. I was drawn to this book as much for its purported creepiness as for its renown. Horror icon H.P. Lovecraft said it "really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear." Others obviously agree; The King in Yellow has been referenced in books, on TV, and in songs, videogames, and movies for 130 years.

It does start strongly, with stories of horror, dread, and overall unease, but suddenly lurches, around the halfway point, into four tedious, unrelated tales of French romance. I kept waiting for a connective thread to reveal itself. Neither the fictional play within the novel nor even the color yellow receives additional mention after "The Street of Four Winds." All of this makes me want to ask, "What the hell happened, Chambers?"

Such a promising start. Alas! The King in Yellow: two stars do not recommend.

My introduction to the humorist David Sedaris came from NPR's This American Life. Afterward, I was happy to find his occasional contributions to The New Yorker, after I took a subscription to the magazine. His very funny collection Me Talk Pretty One Day had come out a few years before that, but I didn't read it until this summer. It's pure early Sedaris. We might even go so far as to call it his Temple of Aphaia (a stately marvel of Greece's Early Classical period), except, you know, it's a book not a building, and makes repeated references to taxidermy and methamphetamine use. Hilarious!

No pun intended, but I found Sitting Inside: Buddhist Practice in America's Prisons, by Kobai Scott Whitney, to be an enlightening read. Whitney served a six-month sentence for drug charges, where his previously halfhearted Zen practice blossomed. He's now a spiritual leader in the Tien An tradition. In its array of related topics, his book breaks down the ways that Buddhism works (and sometimes doesn't) in prison's quasi-monastic setting. As Whitney writes in Chapter One, "Discipline, in its external form, is imposed by the very structure of prison, but sitting still in silence is so out of keeping with the chaotic, noisy atmosphere of prison that it takes great courage and cleverness to practice at all."

Whitney covers the history of Buddhism behind bars, from the earliest days of Buddhist prison outreach to the Constitutional battles that practitioners had to win before they were allowed to meditate together. I had no idea, before I read Sitting Inside, that it was a Buddhist whose lawsuit (Cruz v. Beto, in 1977) went to the US Supreme Court and opened the gates to prisoners' religious freedom. This book is intended for imprisoned practitioners, for the volunteers who visit them to teach and assist, and for readers curious about the great effort that prison practice requires.

Shunryu Suzuki's book Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness explores Buddhist practice via the Sandokai, a seventh-century work by Chinese poet Shitou Xiqian, that's become a tool of Zen in the modern world. A lot of contemporary practitioners recite its forty-four lines to remind themselves of the ultimate nature of reality. Suzuki was instrumental in bringing Buddhism (specifically, Zen) to the United States. Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness represents a series of talks he gave in 1970, which his students preserved in transcripts. He speaks digressively and incisively, in ways that are silly and profound. As far as I can tell, it's Zen, through and through—but what do I know? That's why it's called "practice."

Acknowledging ignorance in spiritual matters is all well and good, but feeling a cleverness deficit in other areas can be troubling. I experience mine when confronted with the writing of William Shakespeare. Like most people, I first ran afoul of the Bard's poetry in high school. I don't even remember the play, only that I gave up pretty quickly on his opaque Elizabethan elocution. When my book club elected A Midsummer Night's Dream to be our midsummer read, my first thought was, Well, shit.

I read it, though. We all did. Together. Aloud.

Specifically, I recited the parts of Bottom and Puck (aka Robin Goodfellow), and of the fairy queen, Titania—in a Monty Python–like lady voice. Keith read the lover á la Scarlett O'Hara, and Danny did silly voices for the fairies the whole way through. No one else hammed it up as much as the three of us did, but everyone managed to have fun with it. Without our silliness to guide me, I doubt I'd have been able to actually follow the play's dialogue and plot, as four interchangeable lovers run afoul of two feuding fairies and proceed to caper around the stage in demonstration of how "the course of true love never did run smooth."

How have I changed in the last thirty-odd years? Only in all ways. I still feel no particular desire to engage with Shakespearean drama on the page, but at least I have an open mind about it. I didn't even dissent when the club voted to start reading Titus Andronicus, come October.

Most recently, I read the curious Dana Spiotta novel Innocents and Others, a book about three women whose lives focus on seeing and being seen. It tells their story in somewhat experimental ways, through both traditional third-person narrative and first person "articles" written by the characters. I love this almost mixed-media style in fiction, and Innocents and Others used it to deliver a deeply satisfying convergence of three seemingly disparate narratives. On the strength of this book alone, I might have to venture deeper into Spiotta's work.

The Staggering Heartache (or Not) of Coaching Returning Citizens

Working in the prison's Reentry Center gives me an active role in people's pre-release self-improvement efforts. It also highlights the severity of my own LWOP sentence—the infamous life without parole.

I'm allowed to help returning citizens prepare résumés, coach them for job interviews, tutor them in computer literacy, do after-hours research on other states' reentry programs, and write proposals that could bring better opportunities to these people who are so eager to return to society as engaged, productive members of society—but no one who has more than one year left on their sentence may benefit from the Department of Offender Rehabilitative Services. The DOC's computer system shows my release date to be 99/99/9999.

People ask how I can do this kind of work with such a heavy sentence hanging over me. "Isn't it hard to watch them leave, knowing you can't?" one friend asked. "How do you deal with the jealousy?" another wanted to know. Still another wanted to know if I secretly resent the clients I see. These are all good, valid questions. My answers probably seem either annoyingly vague or disgustingly pious.

I'm not jealous of others' successes. If someone has expended real effort or dearly yearned for a particular outcome, I enjoy seeing them achieve their desires. Also, it makes me happy to make people happy. Whatever the opposite of schadenfreude might be, that's what I feel.

The people I help seem sincere in their intention to do good after prison. They want to work respectable jobs, stay clean, get an education, and generally live a good life. I tell them all that my greatest hope is to never see them again. In other circumstances, that comment might be considered rude. In this place, it's a testament to my desire that they do well out there.

I don't discuss my sentence with them, but of course they talk. That's what people do. Word got around that the shadow of LWOP hangs over me, and now they have a different perspective. Before this tidbit got around, they thought I was just performing the duties of a job like any other.

In prison, almost no one gets to work a job they actually want. It's all kitchen slavery, factory toil, janitorial drudgery, library tedium—forget about interests, let alone passions. Beyond cultivating the general experience of pride in a job well done (which is tricky under these conditions), few prisoners are fortunate enough to find employment fulfilling. I recognize fully how precious an opportunity my reentry job is. That's why I sought it out.

The first client I helped to complete a Medicaid application told me he was getting out "on Thursday." It blew my mind. The excitement he must've felt, having not years or months but days remaining on his sentence! This was unfathomable to me, and I told him so. He smiled. I smiled back. Sharing in even a fraction of his joy felt nice.

"You don't get paid?" one staff member asked me this week. "If there's no money involved it's not a job, it's a passion."

In a sense, he wasn't wrong. There's purpose in this work. It doesn't just keep me from being press-ganged into food service work, it lets me share inspiration and teach life-changing skills. It's said that if you do what you like, you'll never work a day in your life. Every day I'm reminded how true that adage is.

Prison's War on Paper

With the worsening problem of synthetic drug use in America's prisons, officials have started thinking of paper as a pernicious evil. Other states saw a rise in their incidences of K2 use (and overuse) as early as ten years ago, but Missouri's K2 problem became an epidemic at the same time as COVID-19 did.

K2 (known around the prison yard as "deuce" or "two") is nominally synthetic marijuana. I say "nominally" because so many chemicals are used to create it, its composition and, we can safely assume, its effects change all the time. Only its manufacturers know what's in the stuff—whatever works to get users high, I guess. A batch of K2 could just as well be wasp spray on a piece of paper, which someone then smokes. If the process sounds inelegant, its end results are even uglier.

K2 may not show up in standard drug tests, but I see its effects every day. Deucers stumble and droop and appear blinded by their stupors. Some of them twerk in slow-mo. Some of them mumble incomprehensible syllables from the floor where they sprawl. Some don't get back up. Overdoses are rampant. The prison's already understaffed medical department has to cancel or postpone normal operations a couple of times a day to deal with emergencies such as K2-induced nonresponsiveness or seizing. The worst part may be many deucers' reactions when they see another prisoner's collapse: "Man, he got the good shit! Where can I get some of that?"

More than half of US prisons have reacted by prohibiting prisoners from receiving paper mail, which could be laced with drugs. Instead, they use electronic mail. Missouri contracts with a so-called digital mail center in Tampa, Florida, to receive and scan prisoners' snail mail, then forward it to the mini tablets provided by Securus Technologies.

Less effectively, last year, Missouri also cut off people's ability to order books or magazines for their imprisoned loved ones. I can still place an order with Bookstore X, using my own money and a certified check, but they won't let you order the same thing for me from that same bookstore, because policymakers fear that the pages could be laced with synthetic drugs. I never knew a payment method could have such power!

Legal scholars have authored reams of papers dissecting the benchmark 1987 case Turner v. Safley as it applies to prisons' curtailment of correspondence and books sent to prisoners. They all seem to agree that electronic messaging and e-books are the solution to the flow of K2 into jails and correctional centers. I happen to agree. But there's no evidence that book bans or granting monopolies to for-profit prison telecommunications companies (Hi, Securus!) is effective in that regard. Missouri's book-ordering policy took place in 2024, yet the rampant overdosing continues. According to a recent episode of the Marshall Project's Inside Story, book bans to curb the prison drug problem are highly suspect.

There's no question that synthetic drugs have significantly changed prison culture in a very short amount of time. Before K2, the suggestion of bringing a computer—let alone a USB storage device—into a maximum-security prison would've practically got the police called on you. Computerized devices in this cloistered environment were considered a major threat to safety and security. The Department of Corrections and facility administrators believed such technology might be used to endanger an institution with the introduction of pornogrpahy, blueprints, maps, or other types of illicit information—to say nothing of laptops' ability to record audio and video, which is a whole other kettle of fish.

Anyone who entered a Missouri prison as a teacher or group facilitator had to print out hard copies of the class materials they wanted to bring in. In our digital age, this posed a significant inconvenience. It was also rather wasteful. Printing thirty color copies of a multi-page packet, for instance, seems far less efficient than simply copying a PowerPoint slideshow to a thumb drive and displaying it on a projector screen at your destination. Inefficiency like this is characteristic of virtually every circumstance involving prison, which just tends to make things difficult.

I never thought I'd see the day when a warden was more concerned with stemming drug use in his institution than with preventing violence or security threats. In a way, though, it's refreshing. There are human lives at stake, after all. Saving people from themselves is a more humane and admirable goal than simply striving to keep nude photos or maps of the state out of prisoners' hands.