MS Visiting Author: 'Write What You Want to Know'

It’s like clockwork.

 

Led by armed guards, prisoners trudge into their individual cells, steel-barred doors slamming securely behind them every day at 4:30 p.m. They are not seen (or heard from) for 14 hours, each locked up in solitary confinement until sunrise the next morning.

 

Surely, the inmates have earned their sentences at the medium-security facility for juveniles in Northern Michigan. Armed robbery, attempted murder, possession with intent to distribute: The list goes on.  

 

They’re hardened and defensive young teenagers with (often) disturbing and devilish pasts. Not one of them has been visited by a family member since being incarcerated.

 

But at their very core, they are human beings. Each has a name — Jack, Joseph, or Jamal, for example.

 

And they all have stories to tell.

 

Two-time Newbery Honor Medal-winning author Gary Schmidt is a willing listener.

 

After a chance visit to the facility years ago — at the impromptu request of three local librarians —  Schmidt returns regularly to engage the prisoners in writing exercises and conversations, even using one (a writer himself) as the inspiration for the lead character in his latest novel, Orbiting Jupiter.

 

They give him reason to hunker down in the small, one-room outbuilding away from his house on a 150-year-old farm in Alto, Michigan — fully equipped with a desk, a lamp, stacks of books, a wood-burning stove, and a 1953 Royal typewriter.

 

“I write for those who have nobody to talk to, for those who have nobody to share ideas with,” Schmidt said. “All forms of art give you more with which to be a human being. They tell you that you’re not alone.”

 

Schmidt, a professor of English at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, visited with Brunswick Middle School students in November to share stories, run writing workshops, and lead a parent-son book club session about his young adult, historical fiction novel The Wednesday Wars.

 

He encouraged his captive audience to move outside the margins of the popular old writing adage: Write what you know.

 

“Write what you want to know,” Schmidt said. “Everything else is just reporting.

 

“Writing is all about questions — every good story begins and ends with questions.”