This is the fourth 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.

You know when you’ve got a flop on your hands.

This week  I talked to the men about Julian of Norwich, a medieval mystic and religious writer (Revelations of Divine Love) who spent most of her adult life voluntarily locked in a cell — an anchorage on the grounds of a church in England known as St. Julian of Norwich (from which she took her name) Look her up if you’d like, but essentially she devoted her life to God. She was given Last Rites on the day she was locked in the cell and remained there until her death.

What was I thinking? I was hoping the men might get into discussing/writing about the similarities and differences between Julian and serving a life sentence in prison with no chance of release. Certainly, the lifers are more Reluctant Recluses and I really thought they could get into that.

Wrong. They do not want to write about their day to day lives in prison — at least not overtly. I saw that in their eyes.

So, I re-calibrated and pulled another writing prompt out of my pocket. I asked them to write on the subject: How I learned to Drive or Cars I Have Known.

Several of the men wrote that they learned to steal cars but never became licensed drivers. Others’ stories were about the people (mostly mothers and would-be lovers) they took advantage of in order to get their hands on their car keys.

And the best part:  the exercise allowed me to point out to the men the ways in which their particular underlying issues are emerging week by week in their writing. They got that point right away. They understood and appreciated what was happening. I could see it in their eyes.