Thread by @keribla

THREAD: When I got arrested, a woman I met my first day in jail told me I should take notes on everything and someday write a book. A decade later, I FINALLY have – and now you can buy it here.

I wish she had lived to see this. read.macmillan.com/lp/corrections…

I can tell you more about the book, but first I want to tell you more about that woman – Susan. She was a foul-mouthed pagan lesbian, and I liked her from the start. She was in her early 60s when we met, and her graying hair stood out on a cellblock filled with 20-somethings.

Unlike most of us, she wasn’t in for drugs; it was a DUI. And unlike most of us, she was single, had no kids and actually had a long employment history – she’d been a veterinarian and a firefighter and in the merchant marines.

The first interaction I remember with her was on probably my 2nd day there. She was the only one who consistently read the paper – to do the crossword – and watched the news.

So she was the one who spotted my scabby-faced mugshot on TV. When the other women got excited and woke me up, she raised an eyebrow and said: “You’re famous.”

I couldn’t tell if that was friendly or unfriendly and I was too high to care. But over the next few weeks I got to know her, and I asked her about her life as we sat at the metal cellblock tables and did crosswords together.

I had a long history of crosswording before jail, but had gotten away from it in all the years of drug use. Sitting down with Susan, I remembered how much I loved those puzzles - it felt like the one place I, a fuck-up, still knew the answers in black and white.

Over x-words, she told me about growing up as a Navy brat, and going to Smith and getting into drinking. By 2011, she was on something like her 7th DUI & more than anything she wanted help. She seemed so earnest and calm and full of acceptance - such rare traits in county jail.

She gave me a poetry anthology that I carried with me through my bid, and still have today. I read these poems again and again to make it through. Some I knew from English classes, but some I was learning for the first time.

One - Not Waving But Drowning - I already had memorized, and I wrote it out by hand and pasted it with toothpaste to the bunk above me. It ended up being the epigraph for the book.

A few days after I got there, she told me to start journaling about everything I saw in jail: “It could be a book,” she said. “At the least, it’s too weird not to write down.”

I bought yellow legal pads on the commissary and took her advice.

Because she’d had so many DUIs, Susan absolutely knew she was going to prison – but she wanted rehab first. So she begged the judge to let her go to rehab for a few months before prison, even though it wouldn’t take any time off her sentence. The judge agreed.

On the last night before she left, we played goodbye trivia. We had the A for Assholes team vs the B is for Bitches Team.

She raffled off commissary & we played for a Kit Kat bar. We laughed so hard we turned red. I think it's the first time I clearly remember laughing in jail.

But of course, a few months later she was back – she’d finished rehab and was now headed to prison, just a few weeks before I was headed there myself. I was excited to see her, despite the circumstances. Plus, I knew this was another person I’d see upstate.

When I got there, it turned out that most of the time we weren’t at the same prison. In fact, I didn’t really get to see much of her again until I got out. By the time I moved back to town, she was already there and ~THRIVING~

She was a real part of the community, seemed to know everyone, & followed all the local criminal justice issues - like whether to expand the jail & debates over alternatives to incarceration. We ran into each other some at meetings, then realized we lived close.

“What is up with all the jogging around the neighborhood?” she emailed me. “Hope you run by sometime, with your little dog, when I am just lounging about or sweeping the sidewalk, so we can have a brief chat.”

I did, of course. And she would send me story ideas about mass incarceration, and ask if I was following the latest body camera policies. She made that one Dostoevsky quote her email signature, and she read my articles and sometimes sent her two cents.

We ended up being on the same nonprofit board of directors together, and running into each other at county legislature meetings and we tried coordinating prison visits to see our friends.

It felt like we’d somehow both come through it all in one piece.

But after I moved to work at @NYDailyNews we didn’t keep in touch as much. She was less responsive, and I later found out that she’d been struggling with dementia.

The last we communicated was when I was when I sent her one of my stories and she read it and responded, “Nice work Keri, great article.”

After that, when I couldn’t get in touch with her during a visit back to town, a mutual friend told me she’d started drinking again. She lived alone and had been found wandering around the street. Things kept going downhill.

Two years ago this week, she died. This is her obituary. legacy.com/us/obituaries/…

When we were in jail, Susan seemed like such an unflappable force of calm, like someone so committed to change. That was what I wanted for myself - I think I got there with the 2nd at least.

I was going to tell you more about the book but got sidetracked. There are so many ppl to thank: @cltomlinson @hanyanphil @rshields37 @ReuvenBlau @Piper @pamelacolloff

But I wish Susan were here to see the result of her advice in county jail 10 yrs ago
read.macmillan.com/lp/corrections…