Words Without Walls

Writing programs in prisons and rehabilitation centers have proven time and again to be transformative and empowering for people in need. Halfway houses, hospitals, and shelters are all fertile ground for healing through the imagination and can often mean the difference for inmates and patients between just simply surviving and truly thriving. It is in these settings that teachers and their students need reading that nourishes the soul and challenges the spirit. Words without Walls is a collection of more than seventy-five poems, essays, stories, and scripts by contemporary writers that provide models for successful writing, offering voices and styles that will inspire students in alternative spaces on their own creative exploration. Created by the founders of the award-winning program of the same name based at Chatham University, the anthology strives to challenge readers to reach beyond their own circumstances and begin to write from the heart. Each selection expresses immediacy--writing that captures the imagination and conveys intimacy on the page--revealing the power of words to cut to the quick and unfold the truth. Many of the pieces are brief, allowing for reading and discussion in the classroom, and provide a wide range of content and genre, touching on themes common to communities in need: addiction and alcoholism, family, love and sex, pain and hope, prison, recovery, and violence. Included is work by writers dealing with shared issues, such as Dorothy Alison and Jesmyn Ward, who write about families for whom struggle is a way of life; or Natalie Kenvin and Toi Derricotte, whose pieces reveal violence against women. Also included are writings by those who have spent time in prison themselves, such as Jimmy Santiago Baca, Dwayne Betts, Ken Lamberton, and Etheridge Knight. Eric Boyd ennobles the day he was released from jail. Stephon Hayes reflects on what he sees from his prison window. Terra Lynn evokes the experience of being put in solitary confinement. Because in 2011 almost half of all prisoners in federal facilities were in for drug-related offenses, there are pieces by James Brown, Nick Flynn, and Ann Marlowe, who explore their own addiction and alcoholism, and by Natalie Diaz, Scott Russell Sanders, and Christine Stroud, who write of crippling drug abuse by family and friends. These powerful excerpts act as models for beginning writers and offer a vehicle to examine their own painful experiences. Words without Walls demonstrates the power of language to connect people; to reflect on the past and reimagine the future; to confront complicated truths; and to gain solace from pain and regret. For students in alternative spaces, these writings, together with their own expressions, reveal the same intense desire to write and share one’s writing, found in the Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya, who scratched her poems on bars of soap in a Gulag shower, or the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, who smuggled bits of poetry out of jail in the clothing of visiting friends. Wole Soyinka, in solitary confinement forty years ago, wrote that “creation is admission of great loneliness.” In these communal spaces, our loneliness is lessened, our vulnerability exposed, and our honesty tested, and through these revelatory writings students receive the necessary encouragement to share the whispering corners of their minds.

""An anthology of poems, essays, stories, and scripts by contemporary writers that provides a wide range of content and genre, touching on themes common to communities in need: addiction and alcoholism, family, love and sex, pain and hope, prison, recovery, and violence"--Provided by publisher"--

Jonathan Meades has an obsessive preoccupation with places. He has spent thirty years constructing sixty films, two novels and hundreds of pieces of journalism that explore an extraordinary range of them, from natural landscapes to man-made buildings and 'the gaps between them', drawing attention to what he calls 'the rich oddness of what we take for granted'. This book collects fifty-four pieces and six film scripts that dissolve the barriers between high and low culture, good and bad taste, deep seriousness and black comedy. Meades delivers what he calls 'heavy entertainment' – strong opinions backed up by an astonishing depth of knowledge. To read Meades on places, buildings, politics or cultural history is an exhilarating workout for the mind. He leaves you better informed, more alert, less gullible.

There is a part of each of us that is a monk or a mystic. We yearn for perfect peace yet live our lives far removed from traditional monasteries--yet most of us would not want to give up our personal and spiritual freedom to join monastic life. We seek wholeness but realize that wholeness is not possible without sacredness. Sacred life takes root in solitude, in the time we take to develop a relationship with our inner life--in the kind of setting a monastery would offer. This book speaks to the monk or mystic within us. It affirms our place in the sacred silence of solitude and inner reflection, showing how even everyday life is filled with opportunities to live fully in the world--as if it were a holy monastery. Here we learn to live within the limits as well as the spirit of everyday life, how to appreciate our most human self as the path to explore the divine.How we encounter a world that is clearly available to us, a world filled with nothing less than the gift of sacred silence within the monastery without walls.

The Benedictine monk John Main was one of the most profoundly influential spiritual teachers of recent times. His belief that the desert tradition of meditative prayer practised by the earliest monastic communities had an immediate and contemporary relevance gave rise to the vision of a totally new kind of community, one made up of men and women scattered throughout the world yet united in their daily practice of Christian meditation. It was to be, literally, a monastery without walls.

In the footsteps of Andre Bazin, this anthology of 15 original essays argues that the photographic origin of twentieth-century cinema is anti-anthropocentric. Well aware that the twentieth century stands out as the only period in history with its own photographic film record for posterity, Angela Dalle Vacche has convened international scholars at The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and asked them to rethink the history and theory of the cinema as a new model for the museum of the future. By exploring the art historical tropes of face and landscape, and key areas of film studies such as early cinema, Soviet film theory, documentary, the avant-garde and the newly-born genre of the museum film, this collection includes detailed discussions of installation art, and close analyses of media relations which range from dance to painting to performance art. Thanks to the title of Andre Malraux's famous project, Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls? invites readers to reflect on the museum of the future, where twentieth-century cinema will play a pivotal role by interrogating the relation between art and science, technology and nature, from the side of photography in dialogue with digitalization.

In June 1985, David Peterson was sworn in as the leader of Ontario’s first Liberal government in forty-two years. This collection of speeches explores the activist agenda the London, Ontario, lawyer pursued through his premiership, which sought to ensure all Ontarians were able to participate fully in provincial society. When Peterson was asked what he viewed as his most important accomplishment, he thought for a brief moment and then whispered with obvious emotion, “breaking down walls and barriers.” Through his speeches, readers can see Premier Peterson on the wider Canadian stage by addressing the economic challenges faced by the federation – most notably free trade – and by supporting the Meech Lake Accord, which was designed to bring Quebec into the constitutional family. His speeches also show him on the global stage, engaged in the challenges of the transformation of world politics and Canada’s trading relationship with the United States. By the time Peterson’s premiership had come to an end in 1990, the Berlin Wall had fallen, Europe was increasingly integrated, a fragmented Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement was in full force and effect, and the age of globalization had begun. Through this selection of speeches, the editors also present insights into a range of other figures, from former premiers and Peterson’s political contemporaries to the British royal family. Particularly powerful tributes include Nelson Mandela’s first visit to Canada and Peterson’s eulogy for MPP Dalton McGuinty, Sr, the father of Ontario’s 24th premier. TVOntario’s Steve Paikin provides an in-depth introduction that puts the life and political times of Premier Peterson and his government in broader perspective.

The Oxford Handbook of Methods for Public Scholarship presents the first comprehensive overview of research methods and practices for engaging in public scholarship. Public scholarship, which has been on the rise over the past 25 years, produces knowledge that is available outside of the academy, is useful to relevant stakeholders, and addresses publicly identified needs. By involving stakeholders in the entire process, and making the findings accessible, public scholars contribute to a crucial democratization of research. The Oxford Handbook of Methods for Public Scholarship features a wealth of highly respected interdisciplinary contributors, as well as emerging scholars, and chapters include robust examples from real world research in varied fields and cultures. The volume features ample discussion of working with non-academic stakeholders, coverage of traditional and emergent methods including those that draw from the arts, the internet, social media, and digital technologies, and coverage of key issues such as writing, publicity, and funding.