Incarcerated Minnesotans pen new book showcasing vibrant writing community
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The essay collection, American Precariat, was edited by a group of incarcerated writers with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. It comes out Nov. 14 from Coffee House Press.
Courtesy of Jennifer Bowen, Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop
Minnesota is home to a robust prison writing community. The Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop teaches creative writing at all of the state’s prisons and its members have published novels, poetry and non-fiction.
But for the first time, a group of incarcerated writers with the program are the editors of a new anthology. It’s called ‘American Precariat’ and it comes out on Nov. 14. Zeke Caliguiri, Fong Lee, and Ronald Greer are among the editors of the new book. They joined MPR News Host Cathy Wurzer for a conversation about the book.
The Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop is hosting its annual student reading this Saturday, Oct. 28, at 7 p.m. It’ll be at Hamline University and streaming online.
Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.
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Audio transcript
CATHY WURZER: You all know that Minnesota is home to a robust writing community, especially an incarcerated writing community. Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop teaches creative writing at each of the state's prisons, and its members have published novels, poetry, and nonfiction. But for the first time, a group of incarcerated writers with the program are the editors of a new anthology. It's called American Precariat, and it comes out November 14. Zeke Caligiuri is with us, Fong Lee, and Ronald Greer. They're the editors of the new book, and they're on the line. Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining us.
RONALD GREER: Hey, thanks for having us.
ZEKE CALIGIURI: Yep, thank you.
CATHY WURZER: I appreciate y'all being here. See, Zeke, can I start with you?
ZEKE CALIGIURI: Sure.
CATHY WURZER: You wrote the foreword to the book. And you wrote about getting involved in the writing community at Stillwater early in your sentence. What does it mean to you to now have this book entirely edited by folks who are incarcerated and recently incarcerated folks?
ZEKE CALIGIURI: Well, I mean it's revolutionary in a lot of different ways. We've always wanted to be validated by a mainstream literary community. And so forever, we were sending our manuscripts to different journals and to different publishers and hoping that somehow we could be validated. Now we can stand at the gate a little bit and have a little something to say about these things.
I think it's super important, especially when you're talking about something like precarity and you're talking about classes that are precarious. Folks being incarcerated tend to be the most precarious in our society. And so there's certainly definitely something there to have those folks editing a volume on the subject.
CATHY WURZER: Ronald, do you find a sense of freedom in a sense when you're writing?
RONALD GREER: Yes, most definitely. That may be the most freeing thing in prison that someone can do. I would say writing and playing sports is one of the most things that can open you up more than any other activity here. Always helping somebody and aiding them also feels good, but when you sit down and write, you're able to go on an adventure within yourself or outside of the body, depending on what you're writing in.
CATHY WURZER: These essays cover a wide range of experiences and thoughts. I'm looking over here-- mental illness, losing trees to climate change. I mean, just, that's kind of a wide range there. What do these stories have in common, Ronald?
RONALD GREER: The common thread with all of them was, I want to say there was either a loss or not being noticed. And one of the things, the most important thing is that within precarity, is that people go overlooked. They're not looked at. They are not given the attention that they need. So whatever issues that they are living with or whatever conditions are holding them down, that now becomes worse because no one has given them the attention they need to just get their head above water.
CATHY WURZER: You know, Fong, what I thought was really neat was-- what is unique is after every essay, there is a discussion between a group of the other editors. Why was it important to include everybody on these pieces?
FONG LEE: It is important to include everybody because everybody, again, came from a different walk of life and have their own experiences, have their own perspectives on what precarity is. So that's how we go about it. It's just that everybody is different. Everybody is unique, and we all matter, so.
CATHY WURZER: So, Fong, I understand you and Zeke were released during the process, right?
FONG LEE: Yes, we were.
CATHY WURZER: So what was it like to start life outside prison while working on the project?
FONG LEE: Zeke, you want to go first? Do the honor?
ZEKE CALIGIURI: Certainly, I can speak to that a little bit.
CATHY WURZER: Sure.
ZEKE CALIGIURI: At one point, like, it's certainly a little frustrating because you're leaving behind a community, folks that have been in there that are working on these same projects and are putting just as much into it, maybe more in some instances. So it feels great to get out because it's necessary, right? You've lived your entire life to get to this point.
But at the same time, we realize that we're really only sort of out here on behalf of the greater group of folks who we want to bring home, too, at some point. I think even what we were speaking about earlier, when we were talking about why it was so necessary to have these conversations on the backend of it-- and you can't tell a story about precarity unless you are going to, in some way, include those voices as well.
So it was super necessary, and it ended up only being a small group at the very end because through the pandemic, we had a whole bunch of different things happen, different transfers and stuff. And so it consolidated to maybe a smaller group. But really, the thoughts and the insights that went into it, this book wouldn't be what it is if we didn't have that element in it, too.
CATHY WURZER: Right. You mentioned the pandemic, of course, and that made everybody feel like life was pretty precarious, right, you know? Ronald, do you want to talk about that theme and how that's reflected?
RONALD GREER: So inside of the anthology, there are some of them that directly show what happened during the pandemic, especially an essay by an anonymous writer, who we still don't know who he is, but he was the delivery person in Manhattan. And he was kind of bummed that these rich people were not giving him tips. So first off, he has to deliver inside of the pandemic, which shows that he is living this very precarious life to where he is dependent on his own day in and day out grit to bring money into his household.
Now, for us inside prison, especially myself, who had to work on this project through the pandemic, I was very dependent on the education department to make sure that I could get access to the essays to read over, to edit, the selection process. And then a lot of us were all in different facilities. It kind of started in one place, but through time, we got transferred to other places. That just made a major roadblock, but I mean, we found a way to persevere past that.
CATHY WURZER: So the book really has themes of the precarious nature of life, but I also thought there are some essays that talk about time, time, in, really, some pretty interesting ways. Time was measured differently at a rest stop when there was a community of people living out of their cars. There was a woman dealing with debt, wanting to avoid talking about the past or the future. So when you talk about time, are these experiences kind of similar to how time operates in prison?
ZEKE CALIGIURI: It's similar, but at the same time, it's different, too, because in prison, a lot of people assume that we have a lot of time to think or to do, whatever. But in reality, we all have the same 24 hours, seven days a week and whatnot. So time is sacred in there. It's something that we all treasure, I like to say, especially me. I treasure time a lot, right?
CATHY WURZER: Mm-hmm. So Ronald, you're still in prison. What is time like there for you?
RONALD GREER: My thing with time is that I really just try and consume this day of bookends. I wake up in the morning. I try to get busy. I go to work. I get off of work. I go to my second job as a newspaper editor, a prison newspaper editor here. And then I exercise, I do yoga. I go to the library. I'll read. I'll make a phone call. I'll go outside, play sports. So I try and fill my whole day up with some type of activity.
CATHY WURZER: Zeke, I wonder here, did you feel any grief for the loss of time that occurred outside of prison for you?
ZEKE CALIGIURI: No, absolutely. I would say that there was a constant awareness of time that never goes away. It's a thing. You always know how far you are from your out date or from the date that you have to go see the board. For me, I just wanted to finish projects. And it's just much tougher while you're in there. So for me, it was a matter of wanting to have these things.
I wrote a little bit in the foreword about wanting to make sure that we had this documentation so that the people that we care about out there in the world sort of can know and understand what it is. And it becomes a thing. I lost all of my living relatives while I was incarcerated, so I understood that we had a really short period of time. The line that I used to always tell folks is that our lifetimes are short, right? The bid is really long, and we feel it and understand it. But the lifetime within it is much shorter.
CATHY WURZER: OK, thank you. Say, before we go, I want each of you to tell me if you have a favorite essay or a discussion in the book. Fong, can I start with you?
FONG LEE: One of the discussions that I enjoyed was with Ronald about Kao Kalia Yang's essay. And we kind of edited it, and we just going back and forth, like just a brotherly debate, I like to say. And yeah, it was fun. It was fun hearing Ronald's perspective on how to change certain words and how he didn't like certain sentences. [LAUGHS] Yeah, it was good.
CATHY WURZER: Ronald?
RONALD GREER: The most work I put into the book was going over Kao Kalia Yang's essay, which I was just elated by. Like, oh, I get to edit Kao Kalia Yang, ha, watch this. [LAUGHS] So that was just so fun for me, that essay. But it was also because just, you know, the saying, my mother is beautiful, and I was like, well, yeah, my mother is beautiful. All mother is beautiful, but they just get overlooked because they're mother. So people just don't always give them that credit.
The other essay that I also really like was by Todd Warren, "There Are No Bars in Rush City." And Rush City is a prison that has solid metal doors, and they don't have bars. But it's also, more metaphorically, about a guy that he knew inside prison that made a sweet treat that we call bars, just like dough with chocolate on top or whatnot. And it was fun for me to read that and see that included inside the book because Todd Warren is currently incarcerated.
CATHY WURZER: And Zeke, did you have a favorite essay or discussion in the book?
ZEKE CALIGIURI: I liked Todd Warren's for sure. And that's our buddy, and I remember reading it in some of its early stages. Kiese Laymon's "How to Kill Yourself and Others Slowly in America," right? I tend to go back. There are so many. Michael Torres's "Pinatas" also was one that's particularly special to me, too.
CATHY WURZER: Thank you, and I'm so happy you took the time to talk with me. Thank you. And--
RONALD GREER: Thank you.
CATHY WURZER: --best of luck.
FONG LEE: Yeah, thank you.
ZEKE CALIGIURI: Thank you.
CATHY WURZER: Zeke Caligiuri, Ronald Greer, Fong Lee, some of the editors of the new anthology, American Precariat. The book comes out November the 14th. The Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop is hosting its annual student reading this Saturday, October 28, at 7:00 PM. It's going to be at Hamline University. It's going to also stream online. We're going to have a link on our website, mprnews.org.
RONALD GREER: Hey, thanks for having us.
ZEKE CALIGIURI: Yep, thank you.
CATHY WURZER: I appreciate y'all being here. See, Zeke, can I start with you?
ZEKE CALIGIURI: Sure.
CATHY WURZER: You wrote the foreword to the book. And you wrote about getting involved in the writing community at Stillwater early in your sentence. What does it mean to you to now have this book entirely edited by folks who are incarcerated and recently incarcerated folks?
ZEKE CALIGIURI: Well, I mean it's revolutionary in a lot of different ways. We've always wanted to be validated by a mainstream literary community. And so forever, we were sending our manuscripts to different journals and to different publishers and hoping that somehow we could be validated. Now we can stand at the gate a little bit and have a little something to say about these things.
I think it's super important, especially when you're talking about something like precarity and you're talking about classes that are precarious. Folks being incarcerated tend to be the most precarious in our society. And so there's certainly definitely something there to have those folks editing a volume on the subject.
CATHY WURZER: Ronald, do you find a sense of freedom in a sense when you're writing?
RONALD GREER: Yes, most definitely. That may be the most freeing thing in prison that someone can do. I would say writing and playing sports is one of the most things that can open you up more than any other activity here. Always helping somebody and aiding them also feels good, but when you sit down and write, you're able to go on an adventure within yourself or outside of the body, depending on what you're writing in.
CATHY WURZER: These essays cover a wide range of experiences and thoughts. I'm looking over here-- mental illness, losing trees to climate change. I mean, just, that's kind of a wide range there. What do these stories have in common, Ronald?
RONALD GREER: The common thread with all of them was, I want to say there was either a loss or not being noticed. And one of the things, the most important thing is that within precarity, is that people go overlooked. They're not looked at. They are not given the attention that they need. So whatever issues that they are living with or whatever conditions are holding them down, that now becomes worse because no one has given them the attention they need to just get their head above water.
CATHY WURZER: You know, Fong, what I thought was really neat was-- what is unique is after every essay, there is a discussion between a group of the other editors. Why was it important to include everybody on these pieces?
FONG LEE: It is important to include everybody because everybody, again, came from a different walk of life and have their own experiences, have their own perspectives on what precarity is. So that's how we go about it. It's just that everybody is different. Everybody is unique, and we all matter, so.
CATHY WURZER: So, Fong, I understand you and Zeke were released during the process, right?
FONG LEE: Yes, we were.
CATHY WURZER: So what was it like to start life outside prison while working on the project?
FONG LEE: Zeke, you want to go first? Do the honor?
ZEKE CALIGIURI: Certainly, I can speak to that a little bit.
CATHY WURZER: Sure.
ZEKE CALIGIURI: At one point, like, it's certainly a little frustrating because you're leaving behind a community, folks that have been in there that are working on these same projects and are putting just as much into it, maybe more in some instances. So it feels great to get out because it's necessary, right? You've lived your entire life to get to this point.
But at the same time, we realize that we're really only sort of out here on behalf of the greater group of folks who we want to bring home, too, at some point. I think even what we were speaking about earlier, when we were talking about why it was so necessary to have these conversations on the backend of it-- and you can't tell a story about precarity unless you are going to, in some way, include those voices as well.
So it was super necessary, and it ended up only being a small group at the very end because through the pandemic, we had a whole bunch of different things happen, different transfers and stuff. And so it consolidated to maybe a smaller group. But really, the thoughts and the insights that went into it, this book wouldn't be what it is if we didn't have that element in it, too.
CATHY WURZER: Right. You mentioned the pandemic, of course, and that made everybody feel like life was pretty precarious, right, you know? Ronald, do you want to talk about that theme and how that's reflected?
RONALD GREER: So inside of the anthology, there are some of them that directly show what happened during the pandemic, especially an essay by an anonymous writer, who we still don't know who he is, but he was the delivery person in Manhattan. And he was kind of bummed that these rich people were not giving him tips. So first off, he has to deliver inside of the pandemic, which shows that he is living this very precarious life to where he is dependent on his own day in and day out grit to bring money into his household.
Now, for us inside prison, especially myself, who had to work on this project through the pandemic, I was very dependent on the education department to make sure that I could get access to the essays to read over, to edit, the selection process. And then a lot of us were all in different facilities. It kind of started in one place, but through time, we got transferred to other places. That just made a major roadblock, but I mean, we found a way to persevere past that.
CATHY WURZER: So the book really has themes of the precarious nature of life, but I also thought there are some essays that talk about time, time, in, really, some pretty interesting ways. Time was measured differently at a rest stop when there was a community of people living out of their cars. There was a woman dealing with debt, wanting to avoid talking about the past or the future. So when you talk about time, are these experiences kind of similar to how time operates in prison?
ZEKE CALIGIURI: It's similar, but at the same time, it's different, too, because in prison, a lot of people assume that we have a lot of time to think or to do, whatever. But in reality, we all have the same 24 hours, seven days a week and whatnot. So time is sacred in there. It's something that we all treasure, I like to say, especially me. I treasure time a lot, right?
CATHY WURZER: Mm-hmm. So Ronald, you're still in prison. What is time like there for you?
RONALD GREER: My thing with time is that I really just try and consume this day of bookends. I wake up in the morning. I try to get busy. I go to work. I get off of work. I go to my second job as a newspaper editor, a prison newspaper editor here. And then I exercise, I do yoga. I go to the library. I'll read. I'll make a phone call. I'll go outside, play sports. So I try and fill my whole day up with some type of activity.
CATHY WURZER: Zeke, I wonder here, did you feel any grief for the loss of time that occurred outside of prison for you?
ZEKE CALIGIURI: No, absolutely. I would say that there was a constant awareness of time that never goes away. It's a thing. You always know how far you are from your out date or from the date that you have to go see the board. For me, I just wanted to finish projects. And it's just much tougher while you're in there. So for me, it was a matter of wanting to have these things.
I wrote a little bit in the foreword about wanting to make sure that we had this documentation so that the people that we care about out there in the world sort of can know and understand what it is. And it becomes a thing. I lost all of my living relatives while I was incarcerated, so I understood that we had a really short period of time. The line that I used to always tell folks is that our lifetimes are short, right? The bid is really long, and we feel it and understand it. But the lifetime within it is much shorter.
CATHY WURZER: OK, thank you. Say, before we go, I want each of you to tell me if you have a favorite essay or a discussion in the book. Fong, can I start with you?
FONG LEE: One of the discussions that I enjoyed was with Ronald about Kao Kalia Yang's essay. And we kind of edited it, and we just going back and forth, like just a brotherly debate, I like to say. And yeah, it was fun. It was fun hearing Ronald's perspective on how to change certain words and how he didn't like certain sentences. [LAUGHS] Yeah, it was good.
CATHY WURZER: Ronald?
RONALD GREER: The most work I put into the book was going over Kao Kalia Yang's essay, which I was just elated by. Like, oh, I get to edit Kao Kalia Yang, ha, watch this. [LAUGHS] So that was just so fun for me, that essay. But it was also because just, you know, the saying, my mother is beautiful, and I was like, well, yeah, my mother is beautiful. All mother is beautiful, but they just get overlooked because they're mother. So people just don't always give them that credit.
The other essay that I also really like was by Todd Warren, "There Are No Bars in Rush City." And Rush City is a prison that has solid metal doors, and they don't have bars. But it's also, more metaphorically, about a guy that he knew inside prison that made a sweet treat that we call bars, just like dough with chocolate on top or whatnot. And it was fun for me to read that and see that included inside the book because Todd Warren is currently incarcerated.
CATHY WURZER: And Zeke, did you have a favorite essay or discussion in the book?
ZEKE CALIGIURI: I liked Todd Warren's for sure. And that's our buddy, and I remember reading it in some of its early stages. Kiese Laymon's "How to Kill Yourself and Others Slowly in America," right? I tend to go back. There are so many. Michael Torres's "Pinatas" also was one that's particularly special to me, too.
CATHY WURZER: Thank you, and I'm so happy you took the time to talk with me. Thank you. And--
RONALD GREER: Thank you.
CATHY WURZER: --best of luck.
FONG LEE: Yeah, thank you.
ZEKE CALIGIURI: Thank you.
CATHY WURZER: Zeke Caligiuri, Ronald Greer, Fong Lee, some of the editors of the new anthology, American Precariat. The book comes out November the 14th. The Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop is hosting its annual student reading this Saturday, October 28, at 7:00 PM. It's going to be at Hamline University. It's going to also stream online. We're going to have a link on our website, mprnews.org.
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