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THE TWO BOOTS’ STORYTELLING
Contact us:
THE Two Boots’ Storytelling
10040 Penn Avenue South #8
Bloomington,
Minnesota 55431
Email: tim@twoboots.net
For years I taught moral judgment, anger management
and social skills to juveniles at the Minnesota
Correctional Facility at Red Wing.
Folktales and fairytales were very important tools in my work. This essay appeared in the Journal For Living special issue KIDS AT THE EDGE.
THREE ESSAYS from Red Wing Days
JOURNAL FOR LIVING * No. 21* 2000, pp.37-39
Bullroarers and Stories
an essay by Timothy Young
The very
nature of young people insists that if they are to mature into useful,
fulfilled adults, they must examine the outer edges of their culture, and
then return to community. Many
young people go to college where their family or community beliefs are
challenged at the edge of academia.
Some chase to the edge of physical ability in the intense environs of
high school, college or professional athletics. Some challenge themselves with
risk-taking in extreme individual sports, such as bungee-jumping, sheer-face
rock-climbing or high-flying moto-cross.
For others, the edge may be more personal, and sexual experimentation
becomes the mode for testing boundaries.
Maybe the drug culture or the internet “dot.com” domain
becomes their personal trek site.
For others, a trip into cultic thinking, curious spiritual habits or
spiritual isolation may define their edge. For some, it’s the Marines or
the Peace Corps as a way to go beyond a familiar boundary. For certain young people that edge is
a criminal one.
Young people
are driven by universal forces.
As they feel their individuals begin to sing its personal song, they
spin to the outer edge of their community, like bullroarers creating loud
noises. A bullroarer is a flat
piece of wood at the end of a rawhide string that makes a roaring noise when
twirled. It is used in some
tribal people’s ceremonies to call forth spiritual forms or energized,
especially when there is some lethargy in the individual or community.
The
bullroarer is both a tool to call the spirit, and an audible manifestation of
the very spirit called. Young people serve the same rejuvenating
purpose. Maybe through the sound
system of a slick car or squealing tires, through loud parties or
extravagant, shocking attire young people announce their presence to us and
to the spirited realm. Through
these forms they are also celebrating their existence. More often than not, that’s when
they irritate the rest of us at the center—elders, parents, neighbors
and younger children. Lest we
forget, many of us older people, when gathered with our peers, reminisce on
our own edge-playing days, because those events were integral to our
development.
Although
young people may pretend to that they do not want to be a part of their
community, their loud songs are meant to remind us that they are still at our
edge—courageous and useful.
As a biological level they are calling to other who may bring genetic
vitality to the community. And
they don’t want us to abandon them.
They want us
to hold tightly to that bullroarer thong. It is their lifeline. As they mature, they want to be
reassured that when the time comes, we will be strong enough to pull them
back from the edge as they exhaustedly struggle to rejoin the center.
How do you
who use crime as a risk-taking adventure return to the community? The athlete can return to his
community, and give back to his community, merely by playing on his team. For those testing the educational
limits, they may graduate and bring their knowledge back to jobs, community
or family.
At the
Minnesota Correctional Facility—Red Wing, where I teach, one of our
stated goals is that “when a juvenile leaves he should have the ability
to function in society as a productive citizen.” To do this we work diligently to
provide the instructional methods best suited to the individual needs and
interests of the student and his learning style. Our job is also to help the young man
identify the skills he already has, to learn new skills and then help him
identify the center of his personal community and his lifeline (the
bullroarer thong), which can guide him back from the edge. Some bullroarer thongs are not strong
enough and the increase tension brought by the individual youth actually
breaks the bond to his family.
Many of our students have not had any familial, communal or social
center, so we try to identify a meaningful life-center for them, whether it
is another family, his child if he’s a parent, a neighborhood, or a
work place. To be a successful
adult he will have to be responsible to more than his own whims.
Every student
participates in an ongoing class on anger management, social behavior skills
and moral judgment. We try to
lead the young men through the pitfalls of thinking errors, victimizing
behaviors and inadequate social skills. Our curriculum is based on the
principles and practices of cognitive/behavioral restructuring and
cognitive/social skill development.
Through these classes I have listened to young men describe the edge
where they find themselves. Very
little holds them to any center:
not personal, family or community ties. Often, only a fantasy or a hope is the connection. In some cases the facility fence is
the only thing keeping them from spinning further into the oblivion of
criminal chaos. Our fence, a
concrete symbol of the corrections system, is the backstop catching young men
who have slid past the social programs and communities meant to catch them. Like a wild pitch, or a foul tipped
baseball, they gather, often neglected, along the backstop of the Great
American Playing Field.
In Minnesota, our
correctional philosophy for youth emphasizes therapeutic and educational
programming. In most cases, when
a young man is released from our facility he has proven he is capable of
responsible and productive behaviors.
Yet we cannot guarantee to what environment the young man will
return. If no center exists for
him, any chance of a useful life is greatly diminished. He must look to himself for inspiration
and psychological sustenance and hopefully, he will be able to deal with any
isolation and the negative pressures he surely will face. This becomes a very difficult dilemma. He has no group to keep him
accountable for his actions as he did in his Red Wing cottage group. Nor is he attending to another’s
accountability. Without parental or familial disciplines, his attitude about
his dilemma is crucial. In most
cases inappropriate self-centeredness led him to our facility in the first
place. Now he must balance his
self-centeredness with appropriate behaviors and find a connection to an
actual community outside of himself.
What do I, as
a teacher, offer the young man with little or no helpful community? I once asked the poet, Robert Bly,
(whose books Iron John and The Sibling Society address some of
the cultural difficulties from which these young men emerge) what he believed
to be the best way to engage and teach young men in a correctional
facility. He said that they
should first hear the story of how I or any other man familiar to them lived
to be fifty years old. The youth
will then know men who overcame obstacles and understand that there is hope
that they, too, can live that long.
Secondly, Bly said that folktales and traditional stories should be
part of any instruction.
Folktales instill a sense of hope with “happily ever after,” and
“he lived to see another day.” Stories give us access to a center, a
collective human experience, which is a trustworthy anchor for individual
experience. In this case, a story
is a bullroarer thong.
I first heard
Bly tell a folktale to adult men who later discussed how the story mirrored
their own difficulties. I sat
stunned as those men talked about the story as a personal map into adulthood. The psychological twists and
turns of life, the difficulties and thresholds of life’s danger are
played out through the vivid imagery and flamboyant plots of folktales. Years later, when I began telling
folktales to elementary school children, I found that their observations were
as often as astute as those of adults.
Because there is inherent story logic in all folktales, a logic that
has come down through millions of storytellers and listeners, the story
becomes the expert text for life’s survival skills. Often listeners will correct a
storyteller who adapts images or plot alterations that overstep the bounds of
that internal and communal logic.
Something in the human psyche knows when the story is off the beam.
The images,
the plots, or the characters in fairy tales or folktales have universal
resonance—the third son who is a simpleton, the girl whose father is a
widower, the brother who turns into a bird, the hag who cannot be tricked, or
the ghosts who can. The human
psyche, whether in childhood, adolescence or adulthood, can absorb these
story images easier than those present through the fine arts or mass marketed
icons. When an individual hears a
story, the pictures he sees in his mind are as individualistic as he is. In this way the lessons of a story can
penetrate his intellectual defenses.
Also, by
telling story, rather than reading it, the storyteller becomes a living and
breathing part of the immediate creation. One mythologist said that the
voice is half of the story’s wisdom. (I feel I’m finally getting old
enough to properly tell stories.)
When I tell a story, I have little difficulty with listeners who do
not pay attention. And if I can
dim the lights in the room and set up an atmosphere of mystery, I almost
always have perfect attention, even with the rowdiest of adolescents.
Before I tell
a story, I use a technique the storyteller and mythologist Michael Meade
suggests. I ask each listener to
pay attention to the story so that if a detail, an image or a plot change
really strikes his imagination, he should carefully note it. That detail is then the
individual’s personal “door to the story” and discussion
about that “door” will indicate a personal issue the listener
must address. That personal issue
connects to an unacknowledged grief, which has coagulated around the image.
Once I told a
Grimm’s tale, The White Snake, to a group at Red Wing. One young man said that he was
astounded that the character in the story gave away his most precious
possession, a fine horse that the king had given him. In a discussion that followed, the
young man acknowledged that he had burglarized goods because of a
self-centered fear that he would never have anything of his own. In the story, the character gained a
princess and the king’s throne and lands after giving away his horse
and trusting the fate of his
Goodwill. A fear and grief about material things
blocked the heart of this young man in Red Wing who, upon release, received a
job from the very man he burglarized.
By acknowledging his fears and grief, he loosened the bonds that held
him to criminal behavior. This
sort of anecdote abounds when storytellers and listeners exchange
information.
In folktales
the tricksters, young hunters, magical beings, treasures and beautiful
princesses can captivate the imaginations of the most cynical young men. Once they see how a fairy tale can
help them make choices and how different choices have different consequences,
they become enthralled with stories.
The stories about bags of gold may appeal to the more materialistic
young man, yet with a little explanation, with a little shift of
consciousness, that same young man might see a bag of gold as a symbol for
his freedom. Then his attention
is snared.
Traditional stories
are, according to storyteller and writer Joseph Bruchac, “cautionary
tales and guides to behavior.”
Because of their criminal behaviors, the youth a Red Wing need
guidance and cautionary lessons that can penetrate their usually defiant and
hardened habits. They need to be
convinced to choose appropriate behaviors. In our work we teach that internal
choosing precedes behavior.
Impulsive youngsters have not often thought about this concept.
Often these
young men see themselves as cleverer than the average youth, and fairytales
often emphasize how cleverness can pay off. In folktales, the cleverest one has to
think ahead, make plans, be able to think on his feet, and understand the
consequences of his choices.
These are the skills that are reinforced by our program. We help guide their thoughts about
themselves to help them toward appropriateness. They might also learn that, as in
fairy tales, sometimes too much cleverness can backfire.
However,
sometimes, foolish courage is needed.
How many youth display this quality? In the Russian fairy tale, The
Firebird and Princess Vasilisa, when a young hunter is told, “If
you pick up the firebird’s feather, you’ll know trouble,”
the young man picks up the feather anyway. He then has to pass a series of trials. Throughout the story his horse advises
him. Eventually, he wins Princess
Vasilisa’s love because he trusted his horse and heeded his advice.
Maybe the
horse represents the basic instincts of the youth. Maybe the horse represents the words
of a dead grandfather. Maybe the
horse symbolizes the “horse sense” a young man inherently
has. In our program almost every
lesson is structured to remind the young man to stop and think, plan ahead
and listen openly. So many
respond and say, “This is
just common sense.” When a
storyteller can equate horse sense with common sense, the story suddenly
carries more weight and its lessons slip into the imagination of the defiant
mind of a youthful offender.
The choices of the young men in Red Wing are similar to those choices
of many fairy tale heroes. Time
and again, they have been told by parents, police, probation officers, court
officials and educators that if they choose certain behaviors they will know
trouble and incarceration. Like
fairy tale heroes, they may not have listened to the advice of their elders,
or to their horse sense.
Yet, in story
after story, despite the ordeals, despite the quandaries and desperate
situations, there is always hope.
Cleverness is rewarded, if the hero’s heart is good. The simpleton triumphs, if his heart is
good. Strange animals help the
prince if his heart is good. Most
young men believe that their own hearts are good. We must encourage them to continue to
value the goodness they feel. We
must honor that inner knowing at every opportunity and acknowledge the
shining heart behind the hard façade. If his heart feels good, the light of
hope penetrates a young man’s darkest fears.
A young man
thus supported sees commonality in his personal experience and becomes connected
to the rich sweetness of the wider human experience. Now connected to other young men who
have lived that same type of story, he can add his story to the stories of
his family or community, and suddenly he knows in his deepest mind that he is
both, unique and connected, useful and involved in the universal process of
growing up.
The following essay appeared in
PARABOLA
Myth, Tradition, the
Search for Meaning
Summer 2003 * Volume 28 *
Number 2 * p.123-124
Sometimes, at the end of a difficult day, I’ve
heard a corrections worker say, “I feel like I’m doing
life--eight hours at a time.”
Prison work takes it toll.
I teach anger management and moral thinking skills at the juvenile
correctional facility in Red Wing, Minnesota,
the institution a young Bob Dylan sang of, but never visited. Work with juveniles is stressful; work
in a treatment-oriented, prison environment is, often, more so. An entire nation’s projections
stew in this culturally constructed cauldron. This year, I’m working with
juvenile sex offenders--young pedophiles, prostitutes, flashers and rapists.
Some are mentally ill. Some were
homeless. Their childhoods were as ugly and disturbing as the acts that
brought them to us. If a worker
is to remain healthy in this unique environment, he must look for a a spiritual connection to a
deeper or divine entity. Every
day is a day of spiritual work in this crucible. The day-to-day activities of teaching
are intensified by the physical structure and the psychological containment
of the young men.
Many of the teachers, officers,
administrators and caseworkers have served youth for decades. One colleague, a frontline caseworker,
Dane Petersen, has worked at Red Wing for over thirty years. He has had to teach basic
hygiene skills, find appropriate foster homes, arrange jobs, contact courts
and schools, complete reams of mandatory paperwork, and guide shamed young
men toward a deeper sense of self-worth.
He has dealt with sexual propositions, violent physical threats and
assaults, emotional breakdowns and radical political policy swings. Throughout, he has maintained a
liveliness and cheerful dedication to his work. As an ordained Lutheran minister
he chose to serve this community, not as a chaplain, but as a caseworker. He
sees his work as a spiritual discipline.
Just as importantly, he maintians a vital
physical, spiritual and mental life outside the institution. Others workers have also been
ordained or are deeply involved in their spiritual disciplines.
Corrections workers must face the demons of the
environment with spiritual and psychological strength or the atmosphere may
deteriorate quickly. It may become dangerous and do more harm to residents or
the staff. Marie-Louise von Franz
described a demon as the one-sidedness of a complex which eats up a
person. When the person is eaten
up, as some of our residents are when they arrive, the demon “entangles
itself in the surrounding environment.”
If a staff member is being eaten by the environment he
spirals into desperate cynicsm. Dane Petersen says, “I have
survived because I look to see where God is hiding in each boy. And God is
always hiding there. That
awareness keeps me going.”
The African medicine healer and scholar, Malidoma
Some’, who has worked with juvenile gang members in California, said that when he first meets
someone,
“I look beyond the physical man and address his soul
standing right behind his body.”
When working in a prison it is necessary that you bring this skill
with you or learn it.
Our residents need to access and acknowledge their grief
to get a clearer sense of their own essences. Sometimes treatment work helps.
Psychological therapy may help.
Spiritual practice sometimes helps. In corrections there is always an
opportunity for self-scrutiny, restorative healing and spiritual work--for
the resident and the worker.
There usually comes a moment when a young man may choose a different
path. Yet, only if we workers do
our own spiritual griefwork, utilize our own self-scutiny and continue our own spiritual practices will we
recognize the moment for what it is and help him take the next step. The environment of a juvenile prison
is a cauldron for us, also.
TEACHING SERIOUS,
CHRONIC OFFENDERS
An Essay written for and
published for blog use.
A fog bank over the Mississippi
River began to swallow the bottom of the red full moon as I
drove west toward the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Red Wing. I had to drive into that fog. It cleared after the Eisenhower Bridge
into Red Wing and the sun light ricocheted off the white stone bluffs. At the facility, a mile south of town,
the sky was high and blue. On my way to work, I had smoked a small cigar, a
daily ritual as I move through the liminal space
from my rural home world to this.
On the way home I will smoke another.
Once inside the Administration
building, built at the end of the 1800’s as a replica of a castle on
the Rhine, I punched the electronic code at each of the two sally port doors
and walked off to Walter
Maginnis High School, a small, single story
school dropped into the middle of a correctional facility. Every time I enter this institution I
enter a world where the rules are quite different than “on the
outs.” I teach serious and
chronic, male juvenile offenders.
Most have been convicted of an average of five felonies in their short
lifetimes.
A few years
ago, a survey indicated that 98% of our boys had been suspended or expelled
from their local schools at one time or another. In the 2000-2001 school
year, 247, 500 students attended high school in Minnesota. Maginnis High School averaged 155 boys that
year. Boys come and go
year-round. Approximately
two-thirds come to us with Special Education IEPs
(Individual Education Plans.) We have no choice but to teach the worst
behaved, and often least educated, student whom other schools can push out
their doors. We cannot do
that. We are the last stop before
adult prison, if they don’t change their habits.
Administrators
assign our boys to particular cottages, depending on conviction and
court-assigned needs. Because a
cottage group attends all classes as a unit, one class may consist of
smaller, chemically dependent boys, fourteen to sixteen, who have educational
skills varying in levels from kindergarten to post-high school. The next class may be older,
meaner gangbangers who must live with boys from
enemy gangs. That class may be
followed by a group of whiny, needy sex offenders. Then another class from the Chemical
Dependency cottages. Then older
sex offenders, and so on and so on for seven hours.
Before my
first class, I sit down in Dana’s room. Numerical equations are scribbled in
marker on his white board. Mike,
the English teacher is already seated, as is Adam, a special education
teacher, LaVoie, another math teacher and Steve,
the science guy. I’m
teaching occupational skills this quarter. Bill (a former physical education
teacher who teaches cursory classes in general education--math, English,
science, social studies and health--in the Dayton Security Unit, or DSU)
begins our morning ritual by reading the Isaac Asimov Quiz. We jump-start our minds with this ten
question quiz from the newspaper’s comics’ page. Most mornings, we’re able to
collectively answer all ten questions and reaffirm our bond as peers in this
unique setting.
During my
first class, (this day it is keyboarding practice on word processors), a
“new commit” tries to establish his rank in this CD cottage
group. It’s obvious that
he’s far more intelligent than anyone else in the group, and he’s
loud and trying to prove that he’s street smart and unfazed by
incarceration. He poses as one
who thrives with his “authority issues.” I was told that his mother is a
college professor. Unless we can help him fit in appropriately, he will be a
serious problem in this group, which includes a young man with Fetal Alcohol
Syndrome who reads at a second grade level. The new boy will become a negative
leader, manipulating the weaker members, provoking distrust and
confrontations. Experience tells
me that he will definitely lead this group. The teachers, his caseworker and
cottage staff will discuss his behavior at the next cottage committee, and we
will plot strategies to groom him toward positive leadership and
compassionate mentoring for the other boys. In class I immediately tell him
that foul language is not acceptable in my room. He drops his eyes and looks for
support from the others, which he doesn’t receive. Then he apologizes. Because he does not argue, I know he
will be malleable enough to guide toward that leadership role. He may backslide, and as with most
fellows, he’ll misbehave seriously enough, at least once and go to
DSU. Maybe he’ll try to
hide some homemade “hooch” to drink after lights out. Or maybe he’ll get into a fight
with a group member with whom he spends sixteen hours a day, seven days a
week. Maybe he will throw a temper tantrum and yell abusive, sexual comments
toward a female staff member a few hours after his mother’s weekend
visit. Maybe he will make side comments
and threats to one of the sex offenders who pass him in the hall, a sex
offender who was raped for five years before the age of seven, who has rectal
damage and walks funny, yet has also begun to molest boys. Maybe he will try to throw a punch at
me. It’s not likely
he’ll sit in my class and try to fondle another group member, for which
I must be vigilant when the sex offenders are in my room. But, I can never be sure. One of these CD fellows is back in
class today after a trip to DSU for “horse-playing” and doing a
clothed, “Mississippi Leg Hound Act,” as Dana calls it, against
another boy’s hip. For
years I was assigned to the sex offender cottage committee where I learned the
histories, (mental, physical, sexual and institutional) of all the boys in
that cottage. Many other
boys, not in that cottage, have sexual issues, and their behaviors seldom
surprise me.
On my first
day years ago I had been given a short tour of the school, and immediately
assigned to help the teacher in DSU.
I had not yet attended “The Academy” where I would be
given three weeks of training on the philosophy of Minnesota Corrections, on
corrections policies and in various verbal and physical security
tactics. School policies would be
learned later. On that first day,
after my first hour, the DSU teacher and I were called from the high security
classroom to the day floor. Five
security officers held down an enraged Native American boy. The teacher and I each had to restrain
a leg so the boy could be placed in a special restraint chair. One of the officers quietly, but
authoritatively told the boy, “Relax and come back to us?” He repeated this over and over, with
patience and control. Despite the
careful but firm restraint by the seven of us, this skinny boy would not stop
wrestling. It took everything I
had to hold one leg.
Eventually, he quieted enough so we could put him in the chair.
Once seated
and strapped, he relaxed but ranted about the African American boy who had
taunted him about his race and skinny body. He had been eating his meal on the day
floor. The other boy taunted him
from a cell through the safety glass window on a locked metal door. The skinny Native boy swiftly grabbed
a pencil from the officer’s desk and tried to stab through the glass,
shattering the pencil, which further enraged him and escalated the
other’s taunting. I
wondered, “What have I gotten myself into?” Since that day, every year or so, I
have witnessed or been a part of at least one such incident, and there were
more I have not witnessed. Yet in
Minnesota
we are proud of the fact that there are far fewer incidents here than most
other states.
Once I began
to teach in the school, my days neared normalcy, but normalcy never quite
arrives. I work with some of our
most damaged and volatile young men.
Because of extremely dysfunctional histories they may never be able to
live a normal life. We usually
only hear of former students who make headlines in the news, whether
murdering someone or being murdered.
Sometimes word filters down that ‘so and so’ is doing time
elsewhere. Such news still breaks
my heart, but I have to leave that heartache at the facility. I cannot bring the difficulties
home. We never hear about those
who have turned a corner and live successful and quiet lives. I have heard that since 1998 the
recidivism rate for our population as diminished from 68% to about 35%, but I
do not want to ask for the factual proof. I want to believe that I am doing a
better job and I am helpful to the boys and to the public which entrusts us
with its cast-offs.
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