Ghost Ship | Prison Renaissance Prison Renaissance Special Issue Volume One | Page 43

J.S Long

Jeff was born in Colorado and grew up traversing life's mountains. He now spends his days cultivating a garden in the latest meadow of his life.

Artist Statement

Art is a reflection of people's spirits. The death of one artist is the loss of a universe. What was taken from us in Ghost Ship is irreplaceable. The artists who remain have a duty to create and celebrate, share and inspire, showing that what is gone is not wasted.

Malena

Malena is a community organizer, educator and artist originally from El Salvador.  She has worked to defend immigrant rights, covered grassroots movements in the US and Latin America through photography and video, created a gender-based violence prevention program for community college students, and participated in the Parallel Plays at San Quentin State Prison.  

Artist Statement

I admire the work that writers, poets and artists who are imprisoned at San Quentin State Prison are doing to bring awareness to their realities, to cultivate their art and express themselves creatively, as well as humanize and open the dialogue and possibility of collabora- collaboration between people on the inside and on the outside through Prison Renaissance.

I hope that those involved in this project find a receptive space through which to speak their truth and foster connection, as well as that those who read and respond are moved to further understanding.

In the face of much harm at the hands of a system that reproduces the cycles of violence, this project can add greatly to the much needed healing in our communities.  As Emile DeWeaver wrote in the Inaugural Editorial, ¨In art, we have the medium to, not only change an individual, but to present this

Biographies & Artist Statements

person as a transformative force to the world.” Prison Renaissance reminds me of an inspiring quote by Audre Lorde.  In Poetry is Not a Luxury, she wrote, ¨It is our dreams that point the way to freedom.  Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.” My hope is that we all dare to be transformed by this exchange. 

Zoe Mullery

Zoe Mullery has been teaching creative writing in prison since 1997, and at San Quentin since 1999. She also taught for nine years at the residential rehab program Delancey Street. When Zoe started the MFA program at San Francisco State, practical-minded people would ask her, “What the heck are you going to do with an MFA in Creative Writing?” Teaching in prison had not yet occurred to her, or she would have worked it into one of her snappy comebacks. It turns out that teaching in prison is exactly what she wants to be doing. Zoe and her teenage daughter live communally in a Christian intentional community in San Francisco.

Artist Statement: I submitted this story, “The Fool,” on the theme of the relationship of art, environment, and community. Without saying too much about it (as I don’t like to tell anyone how to read a story), I will say that Zack is a character who I see as having certain gifts which he doesn’t value—including his artistic gift—and he chooses to exit the world of human relationships in order to serve humanity in a grand gesture from afar. Yet he is disciplined and willing to sacrifice to serve the whole. His vision of humans evolving to not need one another anymore is the opposite of community. Yet in spite of himself, he connects, and his art expresses aspects of himself he is not willing to claim.

And perhaps the narrator, in her more narrow focus of finding a single other to connect with, lacks a large vision of her life in the context of the human community rather than just one person. I’ll stop there and hope the story’s connections stand for themselves.

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