“I am surprised they have allowed you in here to do this”: women’s prison writing as heterotopic space of narrative inclusion

Abstract

The focus of this paper is the hidden world of women’s imprisonment as revealed in their writing produced in creative writing workshops. Proceeding from the perspective of narrative inquiry as a methodology to study lived experience, this study explores the juxtaposed spaces of the closed, exclusionary carceral world and the open, creative space of the writing workshop. Here we come to find the personal, situated within the wider carceral institution, in the marginalised voices of women in prison, writing their stories in their own words. The prison environment is seldom envisaged as a space that promotes literacy, education, the arts or creativity. This paper takes a relational perspective of creative writing workshops as a space which enables and facilitates prison writing, becoming a bridge between the enclosed prison space and the world outside. Following Foucault (1986. Of other spaces. Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacrities 16(1). 22-27) the creative writing workshop and the textual space of writing may be seen as heterotopic spaces of play, empathy and inclusion that reflect the prison in the language of marginalisation. It gives the opportunity to women in prison to write about their inner lifeworld as a process to bear witness to their experience and work through the trauma of imprisonment. This writing in the textual space becomes a reflection of the repressive heterotopic space of prison and serves as a counter-narrative to the master narrative of punishment and prison. Therefore, whilst the writers in prison reach out to poetic and creative techniques to capture colours, metaphors and genres such as the fairy tale, the reader is constantly confronted by the harsh reality of their lived experience of confinement and their lives pre-imprisonment.