This is the fifth installment in a weekly series by Dianna Marder about her volunteer work with prisoners serving life sentences in a local prison.  Read the whole series here.

In some memoir-writing classes, the students don’t really believe they  have stories worth telling. They’d like to believe it – that’s part of the reason they signed up. But when pen meets paper, uncertainty looms.

Not so with maximum-security inmates. A lifer has a built-in plot line and a curious, if not entirely sympathetic, audience.  When a story ends with, “… and now I’m in prison for the rest of my life,” we want to know more.

Still, parsing that story and coaxing it onto paper in the form of a compelling narrative takes guts. Yesterday, I saw that strength in the lifers I’m working with.

Tell me about someone who was a stand-out in your family, I said, somebody who stands out in your mind as an influence, positive or negative. The person may be dead or alive, young or old, male or female. I’m talking about someone who would always be expected to attend family get-togethers – he or she may not show but was always expected.

Maybe this is someone accomplished; maybe it’s the family clown. It could be someone who taught you something or a relative you couldn’t stand to be around. In short, they just stand out.

And, I said, please write in the present tense if you can.

It was a complicated assignment to write in 20 minutes, but they did it – probably better than I would have.

* One wrote of a woman whose care he was left in as a child when his father disappeared for months at a time; another wrote of an aunt who was a terrific cook and always made people feel welcome at her house; one wrote about a cousin with whom he always competed in show of grit, mostly for the girls.

Nothing fabulously revealing, but they were really into discussing what each other had to say and talking about the difficulties of tense. A few of these guy are very smart and two or three others are terrific storytellers.

That’s what makes this such a great experience for me.

-dianna marder