A Shadow to the Visible Canon: A Conversation with Doran Larson

MOST AMERICANS have little idea about what actually happens behind the walls or concertina wire, or they have skewed images from movies or TV. Doran Larson has worked to foreground the voices and experiences of those who are incarcerated, notably through the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA), which he founded in 2012 at Hamilton College and which is now housed at Johns Hopkins University Libraries.

The outpouring of submissions for Larson’s 2013 anthology, Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America, led him to found APWA, and his new book, Inside Knowledge: Incarcerated People on the Failures of American Prisons, surveys work from it. Larson has also written about prisons in many scholarly and mainstream venues, as well as Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration: Discovering the Ethical Prison (2017). A professor of literature and creative writing at Hamilton College, Larson started his career as a novelist.

This interview took place via Zoom on April 17, 2023, and was edited for brevity.

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JEFFERY J. WILLIAMS: For the past 20 years, you’ve taught in prisons, organized teaching programs, collected writing, and written about it. How would you encapsulate your project?

DORAN LARSON: My work aims at bringing incarcerated people into the conversation about incarceration. They have been writing about the experience of incarceration for as long as we’ve had penitentiaries and prisons, but their work has been censored or destroyed or marginalized when it does hit print. Now, in the era of mass incarceration, there’s just too large a population to keep out of the conversation!

So, through the American Prison Writing Archive, book collections, and my own writing, I’m trying to convince people that incarcerated people have to be part of that conversation. They are the vanguard of understanding the most extreme form of state and police violence, short of execution, and one that’s legally sanctioned. Prisons are designed to keep us out as well as keep the incarcerated in, and without the voices of incarcerated people, we really don’t have a sense of the human cost of the current legal order. How much suffering do we require or tolerate in the name of public safety?

What does the archive entail?

It’s a continuation of the history of American prison writing, but with more people incarcerated than ever before, there is much more writing. Before the digital age, gatekeepers—publishers, agents, contest judges—created a bottleneck through which just a few writers would get their work out to a global readership, but with support from the Mellon Foundation, APWA is becoming the archive of record for direct prison witness in the United States.

How much have you gathered so far?

About 4,000 pieces, but our goal is to get to 10,000 by June 2025, which is the end of the grant period. We have work posted from every state except Hawaiʻi, and we’re working on that.

What are the criteria, other than originating from someone who is incarcerated?

And the formerly incarcerated as well—anyone who has firsthand experience of carceral facilities—and the writing has to deal with criminal legal involvement.

What kinds of writing does it include?

Nonfiction and poetry. We don’t take fiction because I didn’t want there to be any ambiguity about whether it’s made up. We post everything exactly as it comes in. We scan the original manuscripts and then provide transcripts alongside anything handwritten in order to make them searchable.

How do people find out about it?

We have calls for essays in a number of newsletters, but our main solicitation is through Prison Legal News. That prompts people to write to us, and then we send them our permissions questionnaire and a description of the archive. Personal identification details are voluntary because we want incarcerated people to be represented as they choose to represent themselves.

What types of nonfiction do you get?

There are full-scale policy critiques that are very well informed and researched; there are notes that are scratched out in the 24-hour light of isolation cells; there are pleas for people to help them out of some egregious situation—which we’re not really equipped to do, but we might direct them to a legal aid clinic or a local ACLU person.

Fourth City, the volume that started all this, is organized into 11 categories, and the most common category is the slice of life: “This is what it’s like to be in here, this is who we are, and this is what this place does to us.” Forget all the pop media images you’ve seen because they’re grossly misrepresentative, as are the Department of Corrections websites. It really is a witness literature, bearing direct witness to their experiences.

A number of essays are basically shout-outs to other incarcerated people to give them hope, or to kids on the street, trying to redirect them from following the writers’ paths. There are also essays about medical and mental health treatment and essays about coping with being in prison and finding peace there.

What have been some of the surprises?

How unified the writing is—there are 6,000 legal confinement facilities in the United States, if you count reservation jails and military lockups along with state, local, and federal prisons, and you would not expect such a high degree of consistency. There are specific details about locations, but if you take the location names off the essays, it’s as though they come from one metropolis. We called the anthology Fourth City because, at the time, the prison population would have been the fourth largest city in the United States.

Another thing that impresses me is the incredible generosity of these writers. As often as not, they’re not writing about themselves; they’re writing about what everyone is experiencing there. There’s a profound sense of community, with all the tensions and violence and rivalries that go on in prison.

How did you come to do this?

I started teaching at Attica prison in 2006 and ran a workshop for 10 years, and I was really struck by the work coming out of it. I became interested in prison writing as a genre and spent a couple of summers at the Library of Congress, reading everything I could get my hands on. Then I started an undergraduate course on American prison writing at Hamilton, but there was no anthology of nonfiction writing by incarcerated people. There are some specialized collections, like Joy James’s Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion (2003), but no broad samplings.

So a research assistant and I sent out a call for essays, and that brought in 154 essays, from which we selected 71 for Fourth City. The deadline was in 2012, but essays just kept coming in, and it was clear that, once they had the opportunity, people wanted to write about their experiences. They just did not have a place to do it.

How do you deal with the fact that the people writing these have most likely committed a crime?

If you look at the patterns of criminalization, we are locking up whole demographic categories. But the issue is not why people are there. These are people who have been convicted and are doing their time, but now they are resources for understanding the actual experience, right?

You will find yourself sympathetic, but you have to understand that the vast majority of people who are in prison did the things that they have been accused of. You may think that their punishment is not appropriate, or that they are there for too long, but they are an important resource for understanding how prisons work or do not work. And we should care about the actual human effects of incarceration.

How did you get into Attica in 2006?

It was completely haphazard. I was living in Buffalo and met someone who facilitated a discussion group at Attica. It was formed shortly after the uprising, when men inside asked for more connection to the local community. I attended three or four times and was profoundly moved by the level of honesty and earnestness of the conversation, so I proposed a creative writing class, which started on November 13, 2006.

It was so different from teaching traditional undergraduate students. Often, traditional students address limited content: is a dorm party really the subject of a great story? In Attica, all they had to do was write about how they got to the room. It was just a matter of helping them through the mechanics of clarifying their writing.

All the men had accepted their crimes—they all had perpetrated violent crimes and were dealing with the fact that they had killed someone. People who accept those kinds of crimes and want to move on have to go through a process of melting themselves down to see which parts of themselves are worth salvaging, and then moving forward. And particularly in Attica, they are witnessing what I call “passion plays” every day, in the hands of the state without any accountability. The publication record from that group is stunning: they have had work in The New York Times, Esquire, Tikkun, and The Kenyon Review, and produced two books, writing about what they saw and experienced.

Your new book, Inside Knowledge, draws on the archive. What’s the aim of the book?

The only history of American prison writing is H. Bruce Franklin’s Prison Literature in America (1977; expanded edition, 1989). It’s very good but only goes up to the late 1980s, which was just at the beginning of the era of mass incarceration. So that history needed to be continued. Americans need to understand that there is a rich canon of prison writing, but it has not been widely read.

I know the prison population in the United States has trebled since around 1980.

The low was between 200,000 to 300,000 in 1972, and now it is 1.9 million. And it was higher than that before COVID-19.

In Inside Knowledge, you say that prison writing constitutes a “shadow canon.” Could you explain that?

When you look at actual practices, claims about justice and the rule of law and equality turn into a shadow compared to the bright light of these great ideas. But the shadow reveals truths about the prison, and they have been remarkably similar for over 200 years—similar problems, similar groups of people being locked up. Basically, it is an institution for the poor.

The writing is also a shadow to the more visible American canon.

Are there other models than the American that you would advocate?

There are other working models. I’m not suggesting that there should be no consequences when people have done things that are not tolerable within a free society. But we are not getting what we want prison for; it’s just damaging people, which is a different thing than punishing them.

Even with their problems, Northern European prisons start with completely different premises that are more forward-looking, asking, “How do we prepare you to leave prison?” For example, I visited Finland, and the prisons try to normalize life inside to be much like life outside—people wear their own clothes and go out and work during the day. Here, prison is our default response to everything from murder to homelessness, but there are lots of alternatives we should look into before locking people up.

One prison in Finland had 22 people locked up and 22 staff working with them on retraining, rehabilitation, and teaching. They use what’s called the “import model,” where teachers come from the outside. This works better when prisons are closer to people’s home communities. Otherwise, when they get out, they have almost no connection to anyone if they’ve been away for many years. In the United States, people are located too far from their homes when they are locked up.

Do you still write fiction?

No, I stopped writing fiction on June 8, 2008, after I started working in prisons, and I cannot tell you how liberating it felt. It was the end of navel-gazing, and I thought, Now I am going to write about things that matter more than me. It was one of the best turns of my life.

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Doran Larson is the Edward North Professor of Literature at Hamilton College. He is the author of Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration: Discovering the Ethical Prison (2017), editor of Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America (2013), and founder and co-director of the American Prison Writing Archive.