Exhilarating moments are rare behind bars.
Yet one came my way on New Year’s Day when I checked my tablet and saw an unfamiliar name on the message app. Curious, I clicked on it and was instantly elated to read this text from Patrick Berry, a professor at Syracuse University in New York:
Dear Fred: I am writing with some good news. We are pleased to accept Ruling the Roost in the 2025 issue of Mend. We could not be more pleased to be publishing your work.
This story I’d written about ravens nesting and raising young atop a light pole on the yard wasn’t my first piece to be published. The Prison Journalism Project picked up my submission about an apple tree I’d grown from seed in my cell. Mend is a prestigious print and digital journal featuring prisoners’ writing from across the country. It was a triumph. I was on a roll when three months later a second acceptance notice arrived for an article I had sent to Journal X, a social justice yearly out of Cabrillo College in California.
Putting pen to paper is a passion of mine. It’s in my blood. I have excelled as a writer since elementary school in rural southern Wisconsin where I was born to a pretty poetess and a star struck astronomer during the baby boom. I still remember my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Eliot, who had us listen to a radio show from Chicago called Let’s Write which sparked a lifelong love for the written word. In high school honors English class, taught by Mr. Stewart who was critical and demanding, my papers came back covered in penciled scrawl that terrified my fellow students, such as W for wordy and awk for awkward. He was preparing us to produce A papers once we reached the hallowed halls of higher education. At UCSB in 1971, I was enrolled in the College of Creative Studies. A visiting professor from Japan gave me an A+ for a paper comparing Buddhism and ecology. Next to the grade, he wrote Please read this to the class.
My way with words opened many doors. My work was published in a weekly newspaper in the Santa Ynez Valley where I managed organic peach, pear and apple orchards. I kept a journal for the land owner who was old in age and valued my monthly reports until the day she passed and left me a little money.
Sent to prison on trumped up charges and fabricated testimony in 2019, I began writing for the Mule Creek Post. Hooked on Books was my first article accepted and came out in February 2020. Since then dozens of my bylines have appeared in print. From memoirs such as Solar Homestead and Backyard Bakery to reports on life inside the razor wire as in Forever Prisoners and Quarantine Quagmire, my devotion to journalism and the environment earned me a monthly column on climate change which I titled Healing Our Home and has appeared in twenty issues of the paper.
Writing fills the void left by missing friends, family and the fruit farm I planted and nurtured. Whereas I used to wear out tractor tires to ply my trade, now I replace typewriter ribbons..
