The Prison Book Club Read Online Free Page A

characters’ choices. But I would need to attend several monthly meetings if I really wanted to understand their reading level, their reaction to different types of fiction and non-fiction and what kinds of narrative engaged them. I thought back to the book list that my colleagues on the selection committee and I had composed two months earlier without ever having entered a prison. It included Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace ; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon; Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight , Alexandra Fuller’s memoir about her wild Rhodesian childhood (a kind of African The Glass Castle ); and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle. They were all books I had read and enjoyed. With the immediate threat of being inside the prison behind me, I was now feeling a familiar tug: curiosity. What would it be like to hear the men talk about Roddy Doyle’s Paula Spencer—the abused alcoholic woman that he so brilliantly conjured up, and Charlo, her abuser? Would literature change the men’s lives in any way?
    But curiosity about the unknown is so often paired with fear of the unknown. And I needed to consider what it would take for me to return on a regular basis and get to know the men. It wasn’t just my own safety I was worried about, but that of my family.
    I drove past the highway sign marking the exit to Prince Edward County—the beautiful peninsula of farms and sand dunes on Lake Ontario where I had grown up, partway between Kingston and Toronto. It had been a happy childhood. An image of my father came to mind. In 2000, to mark the millennium, he and I took a father-daughter driving trip in California. At one stop he approached some menacing-looking men to ask for directions. I tried to dissuade him, but it was then that he reassured me, “If you expect the best of people, they will rise to the occasion.”
    Fear is judgment. I knew that. It is at the heart of some of the worst social injustices. If the men were bringing their best selves to a book club and trying to live a different life for a couple of hours, I should honour that effort, just as Carol was doing. And then it just came down to a decision not to spend my life living in fear and to adopt some of Carol’s bravery. I thought if Carol could walk through the doors of Collins Bay, so could I. Sometimes we borrow our courage from others.
    At the same time, I thought about that other well of courage I could draw upon: my creative drive. I was a relentless diarist and note-taker. If I could write about Carol’s idea to run a book club in a prison and depict the men’s reactions to the books’ themes of loss, anger, courage and redemption, I might gradually forget my fear. I approached the prison officials with a request for broader access in 2011 and 2012 to write a book about the prison book club. And then I made plans to return to the book club meetings to observe from the point of view of book selection and to bring a writer’s perspective to the book discussions that Carol was leading.
    It was March 2011 when I returned to Collins Bay, and some things had changed in the book club. The old meeting space was being torn down and the club was now convening near the northeast perimeter guard tower in a nondescript building whose corridors smelled strangely of smoke. Later I learned that the smoke emanated from the aboriginal programs wing, where First Nations inmates were permitted to burn sweetgrass and sage in traditional smudging ceremonies designed to cleanse away negative thoughts or feelings. Smoke in a prison? I couldn’t quite fathom how the guards handled the fire needed to light the grass, but it was a progressive policy.
    I felt better about the new meeting space.The guards were now in the same building—about twenty-five metres down the hall. And the officials hosting us—the prison chaplains—had a glassed-in office overlooking