By Rachel Toor

I had a few weeks when everything seemed to be pointing toward prison. I'd downloaded about 1,000 episodes of This American Life and listened to them while running. One was about a high-security prison where the inmates rehearsed and performed Hamlet. Murderers reflecting on murder: irresistible. Another was about a group of Chicago teenagers who were convicted of murder and, years later after much self-education, exonerated themselves using DNA evidence.

Then I read a couple of cheesy mysteries where the protagonist was a young woman who taught writing in prisons. Nothing unexpected; she falls in love with a prisoner (who is of course innocent) and helps him escape to a happily ever after. My takeaway was that I would never want to do anything as clichéd as falling in love with a prisoner. But I can't resist the idea of being able to change someone's life through reading and writing.

I direct a program that sends graduate students into the community to spread the gospel of creative writing. They go to elementary schools, high schools, centers for troubled youth, and retirement homes. (The students frequently come back from the retirement homes with stories of randy old ladies who want to write—and talk—about sex.) We also send students to women's and men's prisons.

Last spring a student who had been teaching at a medium-security state prison asked if I would come to his class as a guest. He wanted to be able to let his students meet a published author. They were, he thought, starting to question his authority as a writer. I said yes without hesitation.

The class surprised me. A bunch of the guys had college degrees, and at least one had already earned a master's. Many of them had been taking writing courses for years and were adept at deploying the jargon of our trade. They were astute readers, and some were good writers. I realized how challenging it was for graduate students who hadn't published themselves to have writing cred with this group. I decided to go back for more.

In the summer, I tagged along with two other students who had signed up to lead the course. I had to go through a background check and a training session, and learned how to walk through the metal detector without having my underwire bra set it off. I tried to let the graduate students, both of whom were studying to be fiction writers, do the teaching, but I struggled with sitting back quietly.

So I decided to offer my own course at the prison in the fall. I had gotten to know a number of the inmates, and they had expressed interest in working on nonfiction. Because I knew something of the variety of their backgrounds, experience, and intellectual proclivities, I decided to ask the interested inmates to write a letter saying why they wanted to take the course. This, I knew, would filter out those who just wanted something to do and liked the novelty of having a woman around. I wrote the course description to scare off all but the brave and the serious.

Some of their letters were stilted and formal; others, from guys I already knew, sucked up shamelessly. I let in everyone who had bothered to apply and ended up with a hardcore group of learners who had had little exposure to nonfiction as literature.

On the first day, I asked them to say why they were in the course. One of the guys said he was spending a lot of time writing legal briefs and he wanted to hone his skills. He had, he said, dropped out of school in eighth grade. Another just wanted to learn how to write better letters home. Others fessed up to never having taken school seriously and were now eager to learn.

They wanted to write. I, on the other hand, wanted them to read. How can you learn to be a good writer if all you read is Stephen King and Jonathan Livingston Seagull? So I brought them essays. I gave them homework. "What else do you have to do with your time?" I asked, one of my many naïve questions based on assumptions made from watching too many movies.

Most of the guys worked jobs at the prison. They were busy and tired and didn't have access to computers, typewriters, or even paper. The prison library was inadequate, although the librarians were eager to be helpful and said I could make lists of books I thought they should acquire. But that's not the same as being able to assign a book and have all the students read it together. I made a few attempts to get textbook companies to donate anthologies but got nowhere.

So I paid to photocopy a handful of essays. Looking at Martin Luther King's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" with a group of prisoners, we pored over King's sentence structure, looked at the vivid and essential examples he used, talked about the rhythm and flow of the language, the repetitions, the cadences, marveled over his use of the periodic sentence to build tension on the line level. Then I asked them to write a "Letter From a Spokane Prison." Reading their work was gratifying. They understood how to channel a polemical argument into a piece of poetry. They told stories that made me cry.

We read Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," and then the students each wrote a "modest proposal" of their own. Their essays were smart, funny, and bitingly satiric. It was another good exercise in harnessing anger.

It's a truism of community service that doing something for others usually ends up being a lot more beneficial to you. In academe, we are so busy with jobs that take up every nook of our waking time that building a habitat for humanity can seem like a luxury. But how often do we get to offer up the best, most professional skills we have to people who really want to take advantage of what we can offer?

Sure, some of the prisoners—who weren't earning either credit or grades for the course—still tried to worm out of work they didn't want to do. They carped when they didn't like an author, but when they did, they would tell me how they'd passed the essay along to prisoners who weren't taking the class. Wouldn't it be great if a copy of Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" became a unit of currency, like jailhouse cigarettes?

The inmates in my course represented diversity across a spectrum that's hard to imagine. Finding the right ways to teach and reach them was a challenge, and to be sure, there were students who showed up for a few classes and then stopped coming. For students who only want affirmation, I am not a good teacher. But those "offenders" who wanted to be pushed intellectually—who came to understand that being able to read carefully and write clearly are the most important skills they can master—made this one of my best teaching experiences ever.

Most prisons offer courses in a vast array of academic areas, sometimes for credit, sometimes not. Aside from the warm fuzzies of doing a good deed, volunteering to teach a group of adults with vastly different backgrounds is not only a way to broaden and thicken your CV, but will force you to reflect on your own work, skills, and place in the world.

Everyone has a story; some are more exciting and unusual than others. That doesn't matter. What matters is helping the students acquire the skills to communicate clearly, make an effective argument, and control diction and tone.

Many prisoners are people who have not excelled at those skills but understand their importance. Helping them develop will challenge you in ways that will not only make you a better teacher, but force you to articulate why good writing matters.

That, in turn, will require you to look at your own writing, to examine your own bad habits and tics of mind.

The prisoners I met took little at face value. They questioned everything—though in ways that were more polite and respectful than most of the graduate students I teach. They challenged me personally—my assumptions, my stereotypes—and took me to task intellectually when I hadn't been clear enough or said something they didn't agree with. They forced me to think about education, literacy, and cultural values, and yes, the unfairness of the penal system.

And, like all good students, they taught me as much as I taught them.

Rachel Toor is an assistant professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University, in Spokane.