Bellingham organization connects incarcerated teens through creative writing

STORY BY JACQUELINE ALLISON | PHOTOS BY NICK DANIELSON

Four teenage boys wearing navy blue t-shirts and pants sit hunched over their composition notebooks, scribbling away. Silence. They occasionally stop to think, tapping their feet in their identical orange sandals. The boys are inmates at the Whatcom County Juvenile Detention Center participating in a two-hour creative writing class.

“It’s poetry. You make it up as you go,” says teacher Matthew Brouwer to the class. He has asked the boys to write a poem where each line starts with “I like.”

In the classroom hang world maps, a National Poetry Month poster and a sketch of hands drawing themselves. Through a window the main detention area has white walls and cell doors marked by “C1” and “C2.”

Sharing is voluntary. One boy reads his poem, which is about how he loves to go midnight fishing in Bellingham. He once caught 36 king salmon in one day, he explains. Brouwer encourages him to describe the sights and sounds in his writing, such as water lapping against the boat.

“I look forward to that every year,” the boy says. “Hopefully I’ll get out before then.”

Brouwer, 33, founded the Whatcom Juvenile Justice Creative Writing Project in 2013 to give teens in juvenile detention an outlet to express themselves. He is one of three teachers who run a weekly creative writing class at the detention center, located on the sixth floor of the Whatcom County Courthouse in downtown Bellingham. The project is part of the nonprofit Whatcom Young Writers.

The teens, who range from 13- to 17-years-old, often come from troubled homes where child abuse and alcoholism are problems, he says. Many are serving sentences for drug possession, theft and assault. He hopes to show his students that writing can be a way to process difficult experiences.

“Learning to tell stories becomes a way to figure out what’s going on in your own story,” says Brouwer, a Bellingham performance poet and creative writing teacher at Shuksan Middle School.

To inspire the class, he performs his own “I like” poem about walking the streets in the early morning. He gestures with his hands and spits images of streetlights surrounded by darkness and cats scurrying out from under cars like criminals, his sandy brown hair flying around his face. One boy says he can relate to the image of cats as criminals.

“Keep putting [words] down — even if it’s gibberish, repetitive — so you can unstick your brain,” Brouwer says to the class.

In spring 2013, Brouwer taught the first workshop — a two-week writing intensive course — and then began hosting a weekly writing club. Brouwer, English teacher Sue Likkel and local poet Kevin Murphy take turns teaching the class each week. Likkel loves grammar and plays word games with the kids, while Murphy performs his poetry with drums at the start of class.

Classes are small, made up of three to six teens. As a warm-up, Brouwer shows the teens CNN Student News and tells them to free-write about a news story on a student robot competition. “What abilities would your robot have?” he asks.

The lighthearted activities make it easier for them to open up about heavier topics. “We let them play and have fun because they’re teenagers,” he says. “So much of their life is so serious.”

Working with imagination can help the teens understand themselves in a new way, he says. It’s a powerful exercise, especially for his students, who often don’t have outlets.

The teens write personal narratives based on the prompt “times I told a lie” or “times I was lied to.” One boy writes that he promised his girlfriend he wouldn’t get “locked up” and that she might be pregnant. Another talks about sleeping in the bushes with his girlfriend one night. Brouwer nods, acknowledging that they are sharing difficult stories.

Brouwer suffered a serious backpacking injury in 2012 that left him in chronic pain for nine months. Unable to continue managing a Seattle food bank, he moved back in with his parents in Bellingham. During his recovery — through which he spent several months in a wheelchair — he turned to his poetry.

“When everything else was falling apart, [poetry] was my place for personal expression,” he says. After his recovery, he decided to become a full-time poet, performing in Bellingham and around the West coast on two poetry tours. He also began teaching writing to people with chronic medical conditions, as well as middle-school and high-school students.

“To have creative writing be something that is alive for people’s development — that stood out to me during my episode of chronic pain,” Brouwer says. In 2013, he released a poetry book called “Stories We Must Tell” about his struggle with chronic pain.

This project has been a community effort. A 2013 Kickstarter campaign raised $2,500 for the initial workshop, and house shows have helped fund the weekly writing club, which includes compensation for the teachers and printing “Word from the Inside,” a booklet featuring student work. The booklet was sold at fundraising events and given to supporters of the Kickstarter campaign.

“These kids matter,” Brouwer says. “This is our way of reaching out to them.”

He is currently applying for grants to create a second writing club for Whatcom teens following their release from detention. In the words of one of Brouwer’s former students: “If I had something like this on the outside, it would help keep me out of trouble.”

Pongo Teen Writing is a Seattle non-profit that teaches poetry to youth in King County juvenile detention and psychiatric facilities. Since 1992, Pongo has worked with more than 6,000 teens, according to its website.

Teens who receive community-based services following their release, including educational and vocational training, counseling and substance abuse treatment, are more likely to avoid reoffending and attend work and school, according to Pathways to Desistance, a study which examined 1,354 teen offenders over three years.

Northwest Youth Services is a Whatcom nonprofit that provides at-risk, runaway and homeless youth with housing and job training. Case managers work with young

people to help them apply for jobs, get their G.E.Ds and find safe places to live, says Director Riannon Bardsley. For those with criminal backgrounds, talking to employers and landlords can be especially challenging, she says. The program offers legal assistance to help them navigate potential problems, such as what information they must legally disclose about their criminal histories.

As part of a gardening program, youth can learn to plant, grow and harvest food to be sold at a community market stand. Job training helps them build confidence, Bardsley says.

“You see young people start taking care of themselves, washing their hair, smiling,” she says. “They’re participating in their life in a different way.”

At the Whatcom Detention School, teens take reading, writing and math classes, which are typically online courses in computer labs, says Suzanne Harris, a teacher who plans the curriculum. She likes to supplement the core classes with physical education and a book club. When she approached Brouwer with an idea for a creative writing workshop, he immediately ran with it, she says. The teens call Harris “Sully” and she writes alongside them during class.

Teens cycle quickly through the detention, but some return due to new offenses. When they turn 18, they move across the street to Whatcom County Jail.

Since stays are short, it’s hard to measure the workshop’s impact, Harris says. If anything, the teachers help to positively engage the teens.

“I like the students to get the exposure to adults who are willing to accept them as students and work with them,” she says. From what the teens have said, teachers at their regular schools aren’t always as accepting of them.

In the 13 years Harris has taught at the detention, the teens always ask her one question: “Have you been in jail or detention?” It surprises them when she answers no. Most of the adults in their lives have been incarcerated, she says.

Likkel, an English teacher for a Bellingham homeschooling program, explains that the teens in detention often need more love and support than her regular students.

Once she asked her class to write a letter to their 5-year-old selves. The teens dived into the exercise, aside from one girl who couldn’t seem to start writing. The 15-year-old was in foster care when she was five.

“You’re smarter now, you’ve survived,” Likkel had said to her student. “What can you tell her? Where would you be?”

Since the teachers aren’t allowed to keep in contact with students after their release, they don’t know where they go. But it doesn’t seem they go to healthy, productive places, Likkel says.

“It would be really great if there were more opportunities for kids to do what they enjoy, that’s not destructive to them or others,” she says.

At the end of class, Brouwer performs a poem entitled “There Goes a Poet.”

I look into a woman/and I see a garden. I look into a man/ and I see a budding tree/This is the way the world comes to me.

With Brouwer’s words ringing around them, the boys line up single file at the doorway, hands behind their backs, and wait to return to their cells. Their composition notebooks stay behind on the desks.