Turning the page Reading group provides literary mission for people on probation

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Larry Cyr had a dream when he was a kid. He wanted to play baseball. And maybe, after that, become a cop. More than anything he wanted to be a good dad because his own father had disappeared to jail for most of Cyr’s life. But Cyr’s dream got deferred.

“I pictured me growing up and going to college and being a dad to my daughter,” Cyr said. “Then – boom – I’m sitting in a prison cell somewhere wondering how I got there.”

Cyr is no longer in a prison cell. In fact, the day we met he was at a book discussion group with three other men on probation and Margery Irvine, a professor of English. Cyr was sharing his delight about spending Easter with his daughter – for the first time in years – and coaching her in farm league baseball.

It was a digression from a lively discussion about short stories by Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, whose books are the springboard for the meetings. The stories are primarily about bad things happening to good people, and everyone around the table related to the plots and characters.

“Let me remind you,” Irvine was telling us, “that this situation is not restricted to people who use drugs and alcohol. Millions of people have pictures of themselves they have to give up.”

Although Irvine has been reading and talking about books her whole life, a conversation about literature is less usual for these men, ages 23 to 32, all of whom have been convicted of alcohol and-or drug abuse, all of whom are struggling to find a place in society, and all of whom have been sober for less than a year. Every day they newly face the choice not to use.

The reading group, they said, contributes something humane and thought-provoking to their lives.

“This class,” said Phil Candelemo, “has helped me stay clean.”

When they meet for just over an hour on Monday evenings at the Bangor Department of Corrections on the Bangor Mental Health Institute campus, the participants share their thoughts and listen to the way others see the same story. “I think it’s good seeing other people’s points of view,” said Candelemo. “Even if I disagree with Larry, it’s good.”

Five years ago, it’s unlikely that any of the “students” in these classes were reading books regularly unless they were in prison and had long stretches of unfilled time. Otherwise, most of them did not give much thought to words on a page. But “Stories for Life,” a joint program of the Maine Humanities Council and the Maine Department of Corrections, has brought them together on a literary mission with a core belief that art has the power to transform.

“The program interested me because I see unserved parts of the community, people to whom literature could make a difference but it’s not a part of their lives,” said Irvine, who teaches literature at the University of Maine and is a scholar with the Humanities Council.

“You go into a hospital to teach a reading course, and they’ve read and they’re good at it. With adult nonreaders and probationers, reading hasn’t been culturally available to a lot of them. They are perfectly literate but picking up a book, reading it and talking about it is just not what they are used to doing. They can be shown in groups like this that there’s something in it for them.”

“Stories for Life” began in Maine last year, when the Humanities Council organized four reading groups throughout the state. Now there are six, each with a scholar who meets with readers once a week for five weeks. “We realize the power of books, that it goes far beyond the merely intellectual,” said Julia Walkling, the Humanities Council organizer for the program. “You see people’s eyes being opened in a discussion where there are no right or wrong ideas, and they realize they can have good ideas.”

Walkling asked probation officers to choose participants. In addition to learning about reading, group members also could earn supportive feedback if they met the requirements of reading the stories and coming to class. It can’t change a sentence but being a communicative member of a reading group looks good on a report. All of the probationers are also involved in other department rehabilitation programs as well as Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous.

“The very first group I was in I was flabbergasted,” said probation and parole officer Barbara Mascetta, who works in Bangor. “I had so much tension and anxiety. I thought I’d get there and there would be silence, deafening silence. Then I was awestruck. They were commenting on the stories, about what they meant and about the parallels to their own lives. It was all very humanizing. Realistically, we work with people on probation but we’re limited. Our caseload is over 100 so you don’t actually get to see that side of a person. But you do come to realize that there’s got to be more than telling them to do this, do that and don’t get arrested.”

During my visits to the group, nearly all the men – and the group is open to women, too, it’s just that there typically are more men on probation, according to Mascetta – had read the stories and were ready to talk. They brought their coffees in take-out cups and the scent of recent cigarette smoke was in the air. Before class, they chatted informally about their cars, jobs, mutual friends in correctional programs. One member told me he comes to the group because he has to, not because he wants to. He’s fidgety in class but he still comes, even if he’s not prepared, and usually he isn’t.

It’s fair to say that no one – not the organizers nor the participants – thinks “Stories for Life” will cure anyone from having problems, or making problems, for that matter. The group is simply a way to exchange the life stories between reader and writer, between teacher and student, between you and your buddy.

The members of the Bangor group accepted me eagerly and politely. When I asked if I could use their names in my story, they all agreed. Their names have been in the paper before, they said, but this time they wanted them there because they were working to change their lives.

The discussion inevitably turned to the doomed decisions each had made in his life. But instead of wallowing in the past, they spoke insightfully about where characters in stories made mistakes and what they could hope for in the future.

In a story called “Vitamins,” about a man who fails in his relationships and drinks too much, the readers nailed his actions as classic druggie behavior.

“He’s going to end up in rehab,” said Cyr. “If he does, he’ll be all right. But otherwise, he’ll eventually end up in a gutter with a fifth and no money.”

Mascetta, who also attends each meeting, said she doesn’t ever want to force any information or moral to the story. But she likes to participate and found something particularly cogent to talk about in a Tobias Wolff story called “The Chain.”

“More than any other story we’ve read, this one has made it clear how when we make a mistake in our thinking and we know it’s wrong, it snowballs and goes all to hell. Does that strike a chord with anybody?”

The guys chuckled, and that’s another aspect of the class that works for them. This is not a place they come to be reprimanded or corrected. Here, they come to look at their lives through the prism of the oldest form of community connection: storytelling. If they occasionally veer off into 12-step lingo or anger at the system, the circle of discussion overseen by Irvine brings them back.

“They are incredibly honest and they don’t hold back,” said Irvine. “They know their lives will never be the same because of things they’ve done. But the ingredient we add that is missing from the other programs they are in is that we’re asking them to focus outside of themselves. And I think that’s profitable. By using literature you can begin to empathize with other people. This is not about alcohol and drug addiction. This is about the human dilemma. All human beings have struggles with problems.”

Throughout the meetings, the probationers added their comments, many of which were insightful about the stories, many of which were revelatory and evaluative about themselves. “I meant to take care of my girlfriend and my daughter, but I did the exact opposite,” said John Currier while talking about another Carver story. And sometimes, the participants even sounded like college students.

At the end of one class, Irvine asked about the final scene of a story in which two characters break bread.

“Do you think it’s too much to say there’s communion at the end?” Irvine asked.

“What would you call that: a metaphor, maybe?” Candelemo answered.