In my early 20s, having received an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, I sought to cobble together a living by teaching. Although I had taught an undergraduate class as part of my fellowship, I hadn’t yet published a book, so the only such work available to me was intermittent and, often, unconventional. I spent the first summer after I graduated not working with words but performing the same kind of maintenance and handyman tasks that had helped pay for college—this time for the university from which I had just received an expensive degree. Some of the rooms I cleaned and refurbished had recently been vacated by the students I had just taught.
As my summer maintenance work came to an end, I found a part-time job teaching creative writing at the state prison in Cranston, Rhode Island. Twice a week, I’d drive to Max, as the maximum-security facility was known, a three-story gray-brick building that was topped by an imposing green cupola and surrounded by razor wire. It had been built in the 1870s and expanded several times since, but little seemed to have changed since the 19th century except for
