“Dreams.” That’s the prompt I give them today. I’ve decided that rather than begin our sessions by launching into some “lesson” or discussion about writing, I should instead offer a single-word prompt, a chance for them to write extemporaneously and freely. I am hoping that these five or ten minutes of writing set a mood in the room that my own words, my “lesson” cannot. I am hoping to create an immediate and dramatic break between whatever they were doing and thinking about before they entered the room and what I’d like them to be thinking about now: stories and the power we have when we tell them.  And, of course, I am hoping these free-form responses give me a window into their lives.It’s 7:30 on a Saturday morning, the only time Steven could find for me on the activities schedule. Our proposal for an official writing group is still going through channels. It means waking up at 5 am. The drive to the prison from my house takes close to an hour and a half. And there’s almost always a jam going through the line once I’m there. I am still—now two months after completing my final training session—waiting for my ID badge. Entering the prison continues to be a laborious process that involves not only going through all the usual steps I’ve become accustomed to but also waiting for an officer escort, which means waiting for a group of non-badgers like myself to be processed. If the group is big, this can take a while. If the officer is otherwise engaged, we wait. But if I am to build something, if I am to gain the trust of the guys, and show Steven that I can be counted on, and show those above Steven that I might be an asset, I have to seize every opportunity presented to me. I have to be dependable. And I have to be patient as the proposal makes its way through the bureaucracy. Patience is a virtue. Just not one of mine.We meet in our usual place, a cavernous room that must be the size of half a basketball court, an odd space to find in a place where everyone lives in six-by-eight cells. But this part of the prison was built close to a hundred years ago, and this floor, now the activities floor, used to be the chow hall. The room is windowless and bare except for one wooden table (made in the prison furniture shop) and some past-their-prime folding chairs. I see when I walk through the doorway that a new guy has joined us this morning. His name is Lee. Lee is a Lifer serving without the possibility of parole. He is only forty—a decade and a half younger than the next youngest man in the group—but he has spent close to twenty of those forty years behind bars. His face, pale, unlined, looks like a boy’s face. He sits almost motionless, a study in self-containment. Steven has told me about Lee, praised his intellect and his deep reading of philosophy. I also know that Lee has been trying to get various writing projects going in the prison and sees this group as a way to help make that happen.  Don isn’t here this morning. The guys say they haven’t seen him. Jimmie is still MIA. Eric comes in a little late, wound tight. His face seems thinner and more deeply lined than the last time I saw him. He tells us, his voice so quiet I have to strain to hear him, that he has a visitor coming later today, Michelle, the girlfriend he hasn’t seen in eleven years, the girlfriend who has just recently been released from her own term in prison. “You earned this visit, buddy,” Jann says to him. Eric attempts but fails at a smile. Jann focuses on eating an enormous apple fritter with one hand and writing with the other. (Donuts are the perk of the every-other-month Lifer Club meetings the writing group is piggybacking on today.) Michael is distracted this morning. He starts to write, stops, gets up, leaves, comes back, sits down to write again. The guys can move freely from our room out to the even larger activities space where, this morning, there are a few coffee urns and boxes of donuts. I watch Michael, and it surprises me how easy it is to see him as he is now—an open, friendly, thoughtful, quick with a little joke now and then, hefty-around-the-middle middle-aged man—and not the man he was when he committed his crime, not a murderer. I thought that his ugly backstory would be the lens through which I saw him. And in a way it is, but not as I expected. I expected to feel fear, or anger, even revulsion. What I feel borders on respect. He took a life. He ruined his life. But he seems to be re-making it. “I’m just not all here,” Michael says. He’s preparing for a parole board hearing. It is many months away, but he is already consumed by it. Of course he is. His future may rest on this hearing. He puts his pencil down, shakes his head. He just can’t concentrate. He apologizes. Wil shifts uncomfortably in his chair and then gets up. “I can’t do this prompt,” he says, not so much to me but to the other men. “I can’t write about my dreams. You wouldn’t want to know what I dream about.” Wil has written about his crisis companion work with inmates in the throes of psychotic episodes and PTSD panics. Maybe these encounters make their way into his dreams. I also know that Wil is an early 1960s Vietnam vet. I heard from one of the guys in the group that, after his service, Wil hired on as a private military contractor, a “soldier of fortune”—in other words, a mercenary--fighting for armies in Africa and the Middle East. I don’t know if that’s true, but his tough, cold, flinty military bearing makes me think it is. He stands, tall and silent. It’s as if he is pausing for effect—certain his silence has an effect—but I think maybe he is just considering if he wants to say anything more. Wil is a man of few words, which he carefully chooses.  “My dreams are too violent,” he says. Then he walks out of the room to get another cup of coffee. Eric, Jann and Lee continue to write.