One of the editors who helped me with The Honey Locust Tree wrote this about an early draft of the manuscript: “The strongest approach to revision would be to make this about your quest to find light in everyone, with the school as the propelling factor for...
I tried many times to describe silence in The Honey Locust Tree, but I always failed. So little happened in a Quaker meeting. Worshippers entered the meeting space, sat in a pew, closed their eyes, and only spoke if they felt moved. In an effort to remedy this...
Halfway through writing “The Honey Locust Tree,” I realized that the list of people who had a role in the memoir was getting long. How many characters was too many? Where did I draw the line? The number became so lengthy that I created a document where I listed the...
In writing The Honey Locust Tree, I realized that my memories of prison ministry had some gaps, so I got in touch with two people who I hoped could help me. The first person was Per Bykstra. He was the drug counselor from Woonsocket, Rhode Island, who had...
Just before lunch, two eighth-grade girls appeared at my office door. The tall girl was slender and tipped forward from the weight of her backpack. The short girl wore a pink headband. The tall girl said, “Can the middle school have a lock-in?” “Come on in.” Students...
A central theme of the memoir I’ve written, The Honey Locust Tree, has to do with mistakes. How do we recover from our mistakes? Do we need help—from a parent, friend, society, a prison—to recover from our mistakes? Who can doubt the pain, and the power, of a major...
We’d just sat down in the medium security chapel when Ralph Maloney, an inmate who never missed a Quaker Meeting, took two envelopes out of his pocket. He looked at the six inmates sitting in the circle of chairs. “Chaplain Medina’s mother died recently. Can you guys...
The Canadian writer Jean Little wrote: “Memoir is not the whole head of hair, but one or two strands of the hair.” When I started writing The Honey Locust Tree, I thought it would be easy. Pick a few strands of my own hair and proceed. How naive. First, there was the...
I wasn’t surprised when my prison ministry colleague, Tim Putnam, told me that a guard wouldn’t join us in the minimum security chapel. He said minimum at the A.C.I.—Rhode Island’s state prison is called the Adult Correctional Institutions—didn’t have a lot of locked...
My wife and I are driving from our home in Providence, Rhode Island to the airport. We pass the exit for Route 37. Years ago, I used to take Route 37 to get to Pontiac Avenue. Pontiac led me to the state prison. From 1994-1997, I was part of a group that conducted...