This thesis is an arrangement of essays, poems, and journal entries expressing and
exploring experiences from the author's six years in a medium security women's
prison. They are collected around the themes of longing and grief, of despair, of
survival, of joy, and of the complexity of homecoming.
This quasi-ethnographic research documents the autobiographical utterances of incarcerated women taking part in a narrative writing course, Life Writing, at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility. The purpose of this research was to cultivate a better understanding of how incarcerated women move through different discourses of identity via narrative writing, and how,...