Louis Bourgeois
Unit 29: Writing from Parchman Prison is a collection of writing and artwork not for the faint of heart. Anthologist Louis Bourgeois entered one of the country’s most notorious prisons, Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman, and led writing classes for those who would be considered the worst offenders, those in solitary confinement. For three years, Bourgeois worked with over fifty inmate students individually, going from cell to cell. Many of these men had never read a piece of literature, let alone written one. As Bourgeois told me, “We’re talking about poverty gone insane and distilled in this place.” The result is a collection remarkable for the humanity expressed by those living in one of the most bleak and cruel environments imaginable.
The anthology is the fourth book of writing by incarcerated individuals by VOX Press, a nonprofit co-founded and headed by Bourgeois. He himself has published translations, fiction, memoirs, poetry, and interviews in over two hundred magazines and journals in North America, Europe and Asia. He is the author of Through the Cemetery Gates, The Distance of Ducks, The Animal, Cora Falling Off the Face of the Earth, White Night, Fragments of a Life Thirty-two Years Gone, and OLGA.
Bourgeois has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Cream City Review’s poetry contest, the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Common Ground Review’s poetry award, and an Excellence Award from the Dana Literary Society. His memoir The Gar Diaries was nominated for the National Book Award in 2008.
We communicated via email and spoke on Zoom. I have condensed and edited the interview for clarity.
–Mike Puican
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Mike Puican: What first stirred your interest in teaching writing in prison?
Louis Bourgeois: The history of creative arts being taught in Mississippi prisons arguably begins in 2001 with Gabe Gudding. He was a new creative writing instructor at the University of Mississippi. As a graduate student at Cornell University he used to teach creative writing classes at Auburn Correctional Facility in upstate New York. In Mississippi he was teaching at Marshall County Correctional Facility in Holly Springs. I was finishing up graduate school at the University of Mississippi in 2002. Gabe was offered a teaching post in Illinois. He didn’t want the program at Marshall County to die out and he asked me if I’d take it over once he was gone.
In 2010, I incorporated VOX Press as a Mississippi nonprofit organization for the explicit purpose of publishing marginalized writers. Our first publication of incarcerated writers was In Our Own Words: Writing from Parchman Prison in 2014. The latest, Unit 29: Writing from Parchman Prison, is the fourth book from VOX’s educational outreach program, the Prison Writes Initiative.
Can you talk about the nature of your workshops at Parchman Prison that led to this current collection?
Ten years ago, an instructor at U of Mississippi and I began to offer what for Mississippi was unprecedented—although old hat elsewhere, even then—humanities-based workshops for Mississippi inmates. Initially beginning as creative writing workshops for male inmate students at Parchman, the Mississippi Prison Writes Initiative was offered in several Mississippi prisons throughout the state. Poetry, nonfiction, and philosophy workshops were offered to an array of the prison demographics including women, the elderly, veterans, the disabled, youth inmates, etc.
Our instructors vary in their background and interests, but usually instructors hold at least a master’s in the workshops they are conducting. Classes are typically modeled after the traditional college workshop or lecture course. Presently, we serve about sixty students a year.
And you’ve added classes beyond creative writing and humanities?
I’d seen inmate drawings and a lot of them were really good. A few years ago, someone in town who was a retired art teacher said she was interested in working with inmates. So we set up a class at Parchman for her and it went really well. It’s still going. Currently we have three art workshops. Right now, we want to do a prison art exhibition and we’re grappling with finding the right venue to hold it.
We did meditation classes for a while. We had a sponsor in San Francisco from the Church of Transcendental Meditation. They Zoomed in some of their meditation instructors. It had never been done before at Parchman and I was a little worried that it was going to be too, I don’t know, weird. It was to some of the staff. But the inmates loved it and the staff got used to it. Then something happened with the television at Unit 29. We lost that connection and never got it back. It was the only TV set up for instruction and they never replaced it. You wouldn’t think that something as simple as a TV would throw out a whole program, but it did.
How do you find instructors?
Whatever region of the state we’re interested in, typically I will contact the nearest university and ask them if there are any qualified instructors who would like to volunteer to teach in the prisons. That’s worked out really well. As soon as I put a call out, I’ll get thirty, forty, fifty CVs. It’s amazing. We’ve never had a problem.
How does the prison assure the safety of the instructors?
In Unit 29, there was no assurance of safety. But, because the inmate students wanted us there, or many did, our safety was guarded by the inmates themselves.
Can you tell me about Unit 29?
Twenty-nine is the largest unit at Parchman. And I’d say it’s one of the rougher ones. The structure is in decay and disarray and all that, but it’s really because this is where the segregated part of the prison population are kept. These are inmates who have been taken out of the general population for violent violations.
Since the inmates spend nearly 24/7 in their six-by-six cells, boredom runs rampant throughout Parchman. To quell this, some turn to prayer, pacing, drawing, writing, reading, and, when they can, attending classes. Others turn to drugs. Alcohol, crystal meth, marijuana. Designer drugs like smoking spice and bath salts are almost always readily available.
It is also where the male death row population is housed. These two populations are different from what you would find anywhere else in Parchman. It’s a very large unit, so you have overpopulation issues as well.
The accounts of those in the segregated units are, at times, horrific and difficult to read. How were you able to obtain access to those people?
It was in response to the well-known riots that erupted in Unit 29 from, I believe, December 2019 to February or March of 2020. By the summer of 2021, with the pandemic lifting, at least the scare of it subsiding, I was asked by the prison if I could bring the program to Unit 29 because, as one of the wardens put it, “We think it would help with offender unrest.” I agreed to teach there if I could work with the “un-movables,” that is, the inmates who aren’t allowed to leave their cages for any reason at all, save a shower twice a week, and an hour or two of “yard.” If I was going to teach there at all, I wanted to go into the very bowels of this thing I heard so much about in the media.
I taught in the segregated wards for roughly three years. Of course, the inmates couldn’t be let out for a classroom set-up, so I taught each student separately, going from cell to cell, individually. At one point, I had thirty students. I went once a week, so to reach all those students took time. It was inordinately noisy. Inmates had to shout across the zone to talk with each other because they’re locked in cells by themselves. The most jarring sounds came from the television sets blaring. Four television sets at different angles bolted to a large iron pillar at the center of the zone.
Something was always burning—cardboard, asbestos, clothing, bath towels—anything that would burn. One way inmates protested bad conditions and bad guards was to start a fire. Cigarette smoke, spice smoke, meth and hash smoke made the air all but unbreathable. I had to step out of the zone several times for fear of passing out.
Eventually any person will crack under these conditions. And when they do, the quite imaginable happens. They begin lashing out at anyone no matter the consequence, urine bombs, feces bombs, lotions with battery acid.
What drew you to working with those in solitary confinement?
I knew that I would get an unadulterated kind of literature and that’s really what I wanted.
I stayed away from any kind of literary pretext. I wanted it to be pure. I did have reading assignments, of course. I was very selective as to what I wanted them to see. Because I wanted the thing itself.
And I think, to a great extent, I got it. In this book, there’s no one with any kind of literary background at all. You’re taking nonwriters and asking them to write something that the world might want to read.
I didn’t want anyone self-conscious about what they were doing. And of course you do pay a price for that, you know, there’s not a lot of subtlety in the book. But that comes across, it comes across so strongly.
Many of these accounts are very bleak. A lot of the writers suffer from debilitating depression. What benefits do you see writing provides for students?
As it relates to Unit 29 specifically, writing offered a rare opportunity to convey a message that would actually be read. For some, it was an opportunity to attempt something they never tried before. The act of writing and the program itself allowed for a structure by which they could order their lives in a chaos that barely ever sleeps. Perhaps the deepest benefit was of simply being heard, of being given a chance to be a single voice among too many indecipherable and indistinguishable ones. It was, in most cases, the only thing they had in their life to work toward.
Can you talk about your teaching approach in such a difficult environment?
We had reading assignments each week, but they usually were short, not more than a few pages. I would show them some poems that other inmates from other prisons had written. We did study Etheridge Knight who was, you know, an educated inmate. He’s from Mississippi, but he was educated up north. He was a Gwendolyn Brooks student. I wanted them to get a sense of writerly form, but I did not want them to be influenced by anyone too very much.
A lot of these guys never had a class They might have gone as far as the fifth grade or so. But they were the best students in the world.There were a few who, who dropped out, who didn’t take it seriously, but the ones who stayed on with me the whole time were nearly always enthusiastic. They always did the work I asked them. They did anything I wanted them to do. They actually tried things I wanted them to try. I think that’s why the book ended up so well.
They weren’t afraid to do even extreme things I wanted them to try. The direction was to go as far as you can go, because you’re never going as far as you think. This could be dangerous for them because they wouldn’t want the officials to know what they were thinking. But I encouraged them to do it anyway. You have to try to get past it.
Do you have any examples of someone who was changed by the instruction?
There was one man in there, Briant Kirk, who took off with the Etheridge Knight poems I gave him. He got it immediately. He saw what I was trying to get across. The man had never read a poem, or maybe anything, in his life, and he just ran with it. His poems come across as strange and very chaotic. They’re often nonsensical, which I like. I think they’re original.
It is fascinating to me how this book reveals the level of corruption inside Parchman. Many of the writers talk about the availability of drugs, cellphones, and tablets, all of which are not allowed. How were you able to get the work out without interference from the prison?
In the beginning, the head of communications at MDOC (Mississippi Department of Corrections) was very concerned with us publishing anything. She didn’t have any issues with the workshops because it offered the prison free classes, but she was very nervous about the publications. With our first volume In Our Own Words: Writing from Parchman Prison, she wanted me to cut the pieces that she thought were too depressing. I worked with the prison on editing it so that it was acceptable and no one was too offended. After that, we didn’t have to show them anything.
It’s interesting, I think for all involved in the Mississippi prison system, including guards and administration, books are not that important. They simply don’t play that big of a role in their lives and consequently we’ve been left alone on this issue. Hardly anyone reads in the Mississippi penal system. There is no intellectual tradition like you find in other prison systems. So the books we’ve released to the general public have not been seen as posing a threat to the system.
Has the administration ever censored any materials you brought in for the students to read?
I can say we’ve never been censored in any way. I’ve taught anything I ever wanted to teach. I taught Black Panther writers like George Jackson’s Blood in my Eye. I’ve taught Sartre. I’ve taught The Communist Manifesto. For the reason that books are simply not valued, I’ve never been censored in terms of content.
It is interesting that there is no introduction to the book. It jumps right into the work of the students. What was behind the decision to not give background or context?
That was a conscious decision on my part. I didn’t want the reader to feel any sense of comfort, since my students have none. I thought about giving some context but I decided that everybody knows about Unit 29. Everyone’s seen the news. Is an introduction really needed? So, bam, open it up and there it is, between the eyes. The first thing you see is from the depths of the beast.
Was there anything that surprised you as you worked on this project?
I can’t say that I was really surprised. I knew from doing this a number of years that these people who are incarcerated oftentimes write really astounding work. I can’t say I was surprised by that.
But what really surprised me was that I got a call from Parchman yesterday from one of my students who’s in the book. He told me that the warden and maybe some of the supervisors somehow got hold of the book and actually liked it. Wow! I was not expecting that at all. I figured, if they ever read it, they’d run me out of there for good. I decided I was going to publish it regardless of the risk. Damn the consequences. There’s so much condemnation in the book. The fact that the people who run the prison liked it, I find astounding.
But, you know, that goes along with what I said before. You have to understand that these people are from some of the poorest counties in the country. The people who work at the prison are themselves poor. They know the extreme poverty and inequality that lead to people being incarcerated in Parchman. They have brothers or cousins in the facility. Even though they do all these things that a lot of us find to be utterly detestable, everyone understands what Parchman is all about.
Finally, what would you like the reader to take away from reading this book?
I want the reader to be disturbed. I don’t want them to feel okay about reading it. We’re talking about the actual reality of Parchman, regardless of the crime. We’re talking about poverty gone insane and distilled in this place. The book wasn’t put together to make anyone comfortable, even enlightened people. The reader should come away being physically affected by the writing.
Excerpts from Unit 29: Writing from Parchman Prison will be published on March 13, 2025.
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Mike Puican’s debut book of poetry, Central Air (Northwestern Press), was published in 2020. He’s had poems in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, and New England Review among many others and he won the 2004 Tia Chucha Press Chapbook Contest for 30 Seconds. He was a member of the Chicago Slam Team and is president emeritus of the Guild Literary Complex. He currently teaches creative writing to incarcerated individuals at the Federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago. He is also a mentor in the PEN Prison Writing Mentorship Program.
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