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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Novelist Mark Salzman, who spent four years teaching locked-up young hoods in L.A., talks about his students, their writing and how they inspired him to have a child of his own.
Sep 18, 2003 | The plot is pure Lifetime television: Pulitzer Prize-nominated novelist struggles with writer's block and tortured self-doubt while working on third novel. Novelist reluctantly agrees to teach a writing class for violent offenders in the local juvenile hall. After an initial stage of mutual distrust, he and his students redeem each other: The hoodlums learn to love themselves and the word, and the novelist emerges from the experience with a critically acclaimed book, a refreshed outlook on life and new insight into the True Meaning of Writing.
The only hitch is that the story is real. "True Notebooks," Mark Salzman's memoir of the four years he spent teaching creative writing in Los Angeles Central Juvenile Hall, is an unexpected delight, with not a treacly or self-consciously "inspiring" moment to be found. At the story's onset, it's 1997 and a minor character in Salzman's stuttering work-in-progress is a juvenile delinquent. Needing more concrete information about a demographic he knows very little about, he reluctantly takes up a friend's offer to attend a writing class and meet some locked-up teens face-to-face. He is full of trepidation: He doesn't much like teenagers, especially the criminal kind, and he is both mildly pro-death penalty and comfortable with the idea of trying children as adults. In his own words, he "wishes we could tilt L.A. County and shake it until everybody with a shaved head and tattoos falls into the ocean." Furthermore, burdened with his own memories of being teased and bullied as a teenager, he's terrified that he won't be able to win his students' respect.
As Salzman and the reader quickly realize, his own personal issues are simply not that important. It is the young men -- boys, really -- who quickly take center stage. There is Francisco, an earnest recovering gangbanger studying for his confirmation test in the Catholic Church, who despite his newfound relationship with God cannot go five minutes without cursing; Benny Wong, an undersized, geeky outcast whom Salzman cannot protect from the others' relentless hazing; and Kevin Jackson, a shy and "sweet-faced" young man whose murder trial Salzman ends up attending. These boys don't need to be taught the importance of self-expression. Through their spirited class discussions and the immediacy and honesty of their own work, they emerge as complicated but fascinating characters, writers in their own right, whose humor, dark wit and surprising innocence hold the reader's attention and affection as surely as they do Salzman's.
Salzman spoke with Salon from his home in Los Angeles about the act of writing, what he's learned about the American criminal justice system and how after hundreds of hours with the boys he still doesn't like hip-hop -- even though at this students' urging, he has written a rhyme or two of his own, under the nickname of "M.C. Powdered Donut."
You started working with kids in juvenile hall while you were writing your novel "Lying Awake," about a Carmelite nun suffering from a crisis of faith. Meanwhile, you were having a crisis of faith about your worth as a writer, and working with a bunch of kids who were also in crisis: The kids were trying to keep faith in themselves and hope for the future alive. Did teaching this class help you in your own work?
Seeing the kids' ability to shut out their fears and focus and write -- because they somehow knew that when it was done they would feel better -- was deeply reassuring to me at a time when my own writing was causing me so much suffering. I was feeling so lost and wondering if I was meant to write, and if I were meant to do it, wouldn't I be doing it better?
But if the only measure of your work is the result -- whether you get it published, or how it is judged by others, then as a writer you are in a terrible fix. The kids made me see that the experience of working has value, on its own, regardless of the future outcome.
Did you have any reservations about writing up the experience in "True Notebooks"?
I had two reservations: One, how do I present this story without seeming self-serving -- it should be about the kids' stories, not mine. This led to another: It should be about what they went through, and that means it should have an arc of some sort, something to leave the reader satisfied. But there weren't any success stories here -- not with kids getting life sentences, or disappearing from class one day unexpectedly because they'd been moved to another facility. But then I thought, my book "Iron and Silk " didn't have a big beginning, middle, and end story either -- I was just trying to write about the experience of living in China. I decided that I would try to write another fragmentary and ephemeral book, but try to make it as satisfying as my time in the workshops.
How did you manage to keep yourself out of the book?
With editing. As I went through the different drafts, I could smell me coming out like a rotting carcass. So I'd just yank myself out each time, and do my best to let the kids take over.
Did you have moments when you were intimidated by the kids, or angry with them, when they showed their "thug" sides?
Oh sure. It would happen if they were goofing around, if they weren't concentrating, and there was that moment when all the kids picked on Benny Wong. Oh God, did I hate those kids at that point. All of my experiences being picked on by bullies in junior high and high school came flooding back, and I wanted to just boil them in oil!
But then, a few minutes later, a kid would do something that was so touching and so vulnerable and so generous. And I would realize that this is exactly it: They are a complex mixture. They're not misunderstood angels, they're not monsters. Wherever they grew up, these are kids who would probably have been restless, the kinds of kids who are natural thrill seekers or risk takers. In a positive environment, I'm pretty sure nine out of 10 of them would have ended up being successful. But in the environments they grew up in, that restlessness got twisted into negative behavior.
Did you see your students as men or boys?
As boys. Before I worked in juvenile hall, I had pretty much accepted the idea that trying minors as adults was appropriate in some cases. Frankly, if I read about a gang member getting three consecutive life terms -- say, if he had opened fire into a group of people because he was pissed off because some enemy had flashed him a gang sign -- I just thought, "Fine. It's sad, it's tragic, but this person has forfeited the right to participate in society."
But after meeting these kids, the deepest and most sudden impression I had was a shocking recognition that they were children. In fact I'd say that emotionally they were younger than other kids their age. It's just that they want to believe that no one can hurt them: Out of jail and out on the streets, they have adopted this persona of hardness, of invulnerability.
