Transcription of Freedom, #65
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Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show number 65: Freedom, airing for the first time on December 9, 2012 on WLOB and WPEI Radio, Portland, Maine.
This Freedom show came out of an experience I had early on in my medical career, when I was the medical director for the Cumberland County Jail. It also came out of my experience working as a resident on Portland’s Munjoy Hill with families of diverse economic backgrounds. In my life, growing up in suburban Portland, Yarmouth Maine area, it wasn’t a common thing to have people in your family be incarcerated.
What I found when I worked on Munjoy Hill at the time and what I found when I worked in the Cumberland County Jail, was that for many families this was indeed a rite of passage; it was part of the culture. It’s something that I thought about as I was going through my early years as a physician because I realized that it’s not really about us and them. It’s not really about people who have been bad and people who are good. So much of it has to do with where we’re raised, how we’re raised, what we have access to and the type of resilience that maybe you’re born with or maybe develop over the course of our lives.
I think that when we look at freedom and how we get into situations and how we get out of them, there are many important lessons to be learned. On today’s Freedom show, we’ll be speaking with author Monica Wood, former Sheriff and current State Representative, Mark Dion, and John Williams & Kate Beever of the 317 Main Street Community Music Center program, who will be speaking about the Long Creek Youth Development Center in South Portland.
We hope you learn something about freedom, as it relates to your life and the lives that we’re describing on today’s show. Thank you for joining us.
Many people come to my medical practice seeking freedom from things that limit them, such as pain, difficulty with weight, chronic disease, relationship problems and job transitions. One of my first suggestions for self healing is to learn how to breathe. Considering that each of us has been breathing since we were born, we seem to forget how very easy and how important this is. Try this: before getting out of bed in the morning, lie on your back with both hands on your abdomen, take a deep breath in counting to 5 in your head, pause very briefly and breathe out again, again counting to 5. When you bring the breath deeply into into your body, your abdomen will rise and your hands will move towards the ceiling. Practice this for at least 5 minutes each day.
For more help on finding freedom, physically, emotionally or spiritually, contact me Dr. Lisa, at the Body Architect 207-774-2196 or visit our website doctorlisa.org.
The topic of today’s show is freedom. We’re going to spend time with people who represent different ways of looking at this notion “freedom” and what it means as an individual and maybe within the culture. Today, we have Monica Wood, author of Any Bitter Thing and also When We Were the Kennedys. The way that I became interested in having Monica come and speak was because she does work with the Maine Correctional Center in Windham.
I appreciate your coming in to talk to us today about all the things that you do Monica.
Monica Wood: You’re very welcome.
Dr. Lisa: Monica, I finished When We Were the Kennedys and I was really struck by the fact that I think there’s so much shared culture that you are describing that so many of us in Maine have felt. This sort of mill town, Mexico, paper mill … My family is from Biddeford, and I know that this culture was there for us and the Catholicism. Why was it important for you to write about that particular topic?
Monica Wood: Well, it’s funny that freedom is the topic today because writing non-fiction was a big jump out of the corral for me because I am known as a novelist. I’ve got 4 novels. Everybody, my editors, my agent, my readers, everybody was expecting another novel which I mightily tried to do and left it abandoned. I probably will get back to it, but I was in a real trough. Not just a writing trough, but a trough of … Despair is maybe too strong a word, but I had had 2 friends had died, my father-in-law died. This was all within about 4 months and then, I know this sounds silly, but cat lovers will know, and also a very beloved old cat died. That just felt like the last straw.
It’s just one of those places you end up in in life; everybody does. It just happened that all these things seemed to be converging at once and I didn’t write for a while. I was simply not in a place to do that, especially something that I was struggling with so mightily. Finally … What I always do when I’m in despair, is I went home, but I went home metaphorically this time. I started writing about my childhood and there was something so palliative for me about doing that. It felt good to be back with my family, even though I’m writing about a sad year in my family’s life. I was 9 years old and my father dropped dead on his way to work at the Oxford Paper Company, which was the mill in town, but there was something about going back and in a way being back with my family. That was extremely calming to me. I just felt that I’d been drawn back into the bosom of all those things that made me who I am.
I grew up feeling cherished and special and loved, so there was that way of getting back to that feeling again. At the same time, there was something a little bold about it because I was working on non-fiction, which I had never intended to do. I thought there was zero audience for this book, starting with my agent, who is kind of the troll under the bridge. You have to get past her to get anywhere else. She’s wonderful. We’ve been together for a long time, but we have our moments. So it was … You know, talk about freedom … I felt like I’d kind of went busting out of a little box that I’d been in for quite a while.
Dr. Lisa: Well, I would think that it would be very different because I’ve read all of your works of fiction and that’s something that you’re creating, something that you’re pulling together out of somewhere, your mind and things around you, but this is something that has to come from within you. The non-fiction, the autobiographical aspect, and you’re talking about really difficult times. Your father died and then you eventually talk about the fact that your mother died. You talk about this sort of re-jiggering of the family trying to understand itself better after what was known to be ceased to exist anymore. What did that bring up for you as you were writing?
Monica Wood: People ask me “Was it hard to write? Did you cry all the way through it?” Honestly, I never shed a tear. It was probably the most joyful writing I have ever done and probably because what I’m writing about is a transformation of a family. It was, I cannot even possibly overestimate the blow Dad’s death was to all of us and yet we ended up being … This very traditional mill family and, just like every other family in town, completely connected to the mill through Dad’s work. then he’s gone and so we’re something else. We don’t really know what. A family of women, 4 daughters … My brother was married with children of his own at that point, so here was my mother and these 4 girls.
In the last scene of the book, before the epilogue, I have my sister Anne, who is at the time a 21-year-old schoolteacher and then there’s the 3 little girls. There’s my little sister Betty who is mentally disabled. I’m 9 at the time and my sister Cathy is 8. The big thing is Anne getting her driver’s license so we can finally get Dad’s car going. This is a year and a half later. She finally gets her license. Back then it was just a big deal. We all piled into the car and were driving around town and tooting the horn at this one and that one. It’s sort of a culmination of all the things that you’ve seen in the town and in the story, but at the end, she pulls into the driveway and we’re singing the car trip song. We had this song we always sang when we were in the car and the last line is “There is no journey we cannot make this way”. In other words, here we are now as this other kind of family and we’re going to be okay.
Even though the reader knows in not too many years my mother will also die, but it prepares them, even though that’s not part of the story. They know we’re going to be okay with that too because we have become this very tight, close family of girls that can manage anything.
Dr. Lisa: Some of the way that your family was able to be okay was through this national tragedy that occurred not too long after your father died.
Monica Wood: Yes, the Kennedy assassination resonated very deeply in my family. My mother at first … And this I picked up on even as a 9-year-old child … My sister Cathy teases me. She says “You know, you were the one who was always listening to what people weren’t saying, the things nobody else noticed”, and I thought that’s pretty much the definition of a child who grows up to be a writer. Every writer I know had that kind childhood, kind of anxious, always looking between the lines wondering “What did they mean by that?”.
What I picked up from my mother is that she was ashamed to be a widow. When the national tragedy happened, we have Jackie Kennedy, the most beautiful, glamorous woman on the face of the earth, who has suffered exactly the same tragedy my mother suffered a few months earlier than that. I could see how watching the televised grace of Jackie Kennedy showing the whole world that this kind of sorrow A) can be borne and B) can be beautiful. It elevated my mother’s status in her own heart, I think, and as a result, mine too. I was mortified to be fatherless, absolutely mortified, and I don’t think that’s an uncommon feeling, but the idea that Caroline Kennedy also had this exact same thing happen. It was just a funny sort of comforting idea that we weren’t … That God hadn’t kind of picked us out for this, that these things happen to all kinds of families, including, of all families, the Kennedy family.
Dr. Lisa: This idea of loss carried through as a theme because you talk about the mill and people losing their jobs and things getting reconfigured there and the sense of some enormous institution that had always been there also having to be restructured.
Monica Wood: Right. The book really has 3 threads and 3 themes. One is this family that’s going through this enormous transition. The nation also of course is going through an enormous transition and also the American manufacturing, in the form of the Oxford Paper Company, is also going through a transition because that same year the towns were bracing for a protracted labor strike that would change the relationship between the mill and the town forever more. That’s what’s happening in the book; these 3 institutions on the cusp of enormous change.
Dr. Lisa: You also describe the shoe manufacturing business and how things are pulled together and how things used to be so hands-on at that time in Maine history.
Monica Wood: Yes, we had a next-door neighbor Mrs. Gagnon who we all had a huge crush on. She was absolutely gorgeous. She had this beautiful auburn hair rippling down her back … Didn’t really look like the other mothers. She wore kind of that French eyeliner back then. She was a lovely woman and she used to take in piecework from the shoe … We called them the shoe shops … The shoe factories. From Biddeford, you know exactly what I mean. She had 3 little girls the same age as our youngest 3, and my sister Cathy and I used to go over there and help Mrs. Gagnon and her 3 daughters sew shoes.
There was a pickup/dropoff in Rumford, on Waldo Street, and she’d come home once a week with 2 giant cartons with uppers and lowers. They were just loose flaps of leather, and she taught us to sew the toe end of the shoe with the rawhide pie-crust stitch. We would help her do that. It was my first skill, my first job, and I was very, very proud of it because it wasn’t the kind of thing that you said “Oh well, let’s let the kids try it”. You had to do it correctly or she didn’t get paid for the work, so it was a very interesting thing. Very shortly there after, even that went away. The shoe industry was kind of on its last legs at the point, and by the end of the decade, it was virtually gone. This was a booming industry that within 10 years disappeared entirely.
Dr. Lisa: Do you think that there’s some larger lesson that could be learned from the experiences that you describe in the book? Obviously, our country has been going through economic reconfigurations over the last several years, and some people are feeling hopeless, as if it’s never going to end, as if nothing is going to change, as if everything that they’ve ever known has been sort of thrown out of the window. Yet, you went through this yourself as an individual, as a family, as a town. What lessons do you think can be learned from your experience that possibly could be extrapolated to the experience of those who are listening?
Monica Wood: I don’t know about lessons. I’m not a good lesson person, but I have to say that I thoroughly believe that the human animal is built for resilience. We just are, and there is no journey we cannot make, no matter what befalls us. We see it all the time. The “tragedy” that I suffered as a child is nothing compared to the tragedies that children in say Iraq over the last 10 years, and yet they too I assume have some resilience, some way to overcome what is befalling them right now.
The other thing is the idea of the creative impulse as a way of, not curing any of this stuff, but retaining your humanity in the face of the something that may feel as if it’s about the destroy you. When you think of in the Holocaust, when they went and visited the camps, that they found poems rolled up and papers stuffed into pipes. I find stories like that, not only hair raising, but also unbelievably comforting, that, yes, no matter what happens, it’s still the human impulse for creating, for preserving our humanity, even in the most inhumane circumstances.
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Tom Shepard: What makes a person feel enslaved by their finances? I guess that depends on your relationship to money. If you’re prone to react and manage your money based on instincts, that freedom might be found by just sitting down with a pen and paper and mapping out a plan. If you are prone to overwork and see your job as a reason for living, then maybe you need to create enough savings to lower your stress and redirect it toward a healthy pursuit outside of work. If you are prone to speculate, instead of invest, or think that leverage is supposed to help you do more, instead of less, then maybe freedom will be delivered in the form of a crisis or health event.
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Dr. Lisa: As far as humanity is concerned, you’ve chosen to work with a group that really is pretty down on its luck, and this was profiled in a Maine Magazine story not so long ago. This is work you do through the Maine Correctional Center in Windham. Why were you drawn to that?
Monica Wood: Oh my gosh, Lisa, I honestly can’t answer it except to say that I started out … I was asked to visit a book group that a volunteer was running at the Maine Correctional Center. This was in the women’s unit. There are about 80 women in the unit, out of a prison that holds about 600 inmates; most of them are male. They were reading one of my books, Ernie’s Ark. I went in … She called me through … Or emailed me or something and asked if I would come and visit their group and I said “Sure”. Went over, walked in and the second I walked in that room … There were 12 women in the group, all in their blue prison garb and this volunteer. The second I walked in there, something just came over me. I can’t explain it. I’ve never had this experience about anything, including writing, in my life, but I thought “I completely belong here and I have to come back”.
I had a wonderful 2 hours. It was the best book group I’ve ever visited. It was all about the book and the characters and the stories and very insightful and interesting and funny. So I left and I immediately wrote up a proposal for something. I brought it over to the Maine Humanities Council and they gave me money to buy books, and I started this program. It’s called Meet The Authors. I kind of dragged in 3 of my women-writer friends into doing this with me, Hannah Holmes, who is a science writer, my friend Amy MacDonald who writes for children and that first time it was Betsy Scholl who at the time was our poet laureate. She’s a poet. I asked them if they would do this with me. The format is it’s 12 weeks, I’m there every week and we talk about the writing of the writer who is about to come in and visit. We have 2 sessions. We read the book, talk about the book and then the writer comes in for a Q&A and like a mini-workshop on that type of writing.
Hannah had them doing close personal observation of human beings basically as any animal species, which was hilarious, to say the least, because these are caged animals really, who have territory issues and all kinds of stuff like that. Her work really resonated with them very much. She’s also hilariously funny, so they appreciated her, and also has no … When I choose people for this, I have to think in terms of 3 things. One is will their writing resonate with the women, and I want to pick somebody who has very few barriers, very open people, and also, somebody with not even a whiff of noblesse oblige. People who are just there to meet some great gals and have some fun and do a little teaching and some back and forth.
It’s worked out really, really well. I’ve never done anything like it before. I didn’t know whether it was going to work. I have to say that I made very few adjustments the second time around. I’ve done it now 3 times, and I’m about to start a new one. What I have found is … What we do in the … This is I guess about freedom. Prison is not an easy place to live. We’re in this room and the first thing we did … I thought this was going to go over like a lead balloon. I thought “Well, I’ll just try it”. I had us all raise our arms over our head and create a metaphorical bubble around us, and that inside this bubble our only identity is as readers and writers, that’s it. They completely went with it. In fact, if I forget, they remind me.
We also did … Sometimes, a guard would come in to do something or the education director would come in just to sit in for a little while, and we would say, “Well, I’m sorry you have to come inside our bubble”. They were so disarmed by it, they’d just say “Uh, okay”, and they would do it. It gave the women, not only autonomy within this circumscribed metaphorical place we had invented, but it gave them a little bit of authority, that “You can’t come in here unless you do this”. It was very, very interesting, and the writing they have produced has been sometimes utterly astonishing.
I have a friend who’s a DA. We obviously have very different views about prisoners. What I tell him though is that the person that he prosecutes in court is not the person I see coming into my class. That person is now clean and sober, for one thing, and that’s huge. A lot of these horrible crimes were committed under the influence of very bad drugs. Again, those are all choices, but … I’m not saying it’s an excuse for behavior, but it is part of the package. The women that I’m seeing are clean and sober, and you’re a different person when you’re clean and sober. You’re more the person you might have been, or hoped you would be, before all of this happened.
It’s really given me a … I never thought at all about people in prison. I wasn’t interested in them. I didn’t give a thought to them in any way. Now, I think about them all the time. I think about them all the time. If I’m having a glass of wine in the evening … I joked to them, I said “You know I think I could do okay in prison because I actually like small spaces and I like structure”. They’re the ones who told me … They said “You’d do great in here”. I said “I would do great, except I couldn’t stand going without a glass of wine in the evening. That would be my worst thing. And lousy coffee”. I do think of them sometimes. I think “Well, here I am in my house with my glass of wine” and I know exactly where they are at that same time because everything is so regimented, but most of them are getting out, sooner or later, some sooner, some much later. I think that if I can have any role in sending them back out there with their creativity ignited, then I think that can’t be a bad thing.
Dr. Lisa: Monica, how can people find out about the work that you’re doing? About the books that you’re writing and the things that you’re out in the world contributing?
Monica Wood: I have a website, monicawood.com and I try to keep it up. I’m on Facebook and anybody can friend me on Facebook if they want to see what’s going on there. And that’s about it. I don’t Twitter, Tweet whatever at all. Facebook is enough of a timesuck as it is, so I try to keep as low a profile as I can while still fulfilling my obligations of book promotion, etc.
Dr. Lisa: We are so grateful to you for coming in and being part of what we’re trying to do with encouraging people to find their own creativity and perhaps use this to engage in their own freedom activities.
Monica Wood: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: So thank you for coming in and talking to us today.
Monica Wood: You’re welcome. I really enjoyed myself, Lisa, thanks.
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Dr. Lisa: In the studio with us today, we have former Sheriff Mark Dion, who is all the current State Representative from District 113 here in Maine and a friend of mine from I think maybe about a decade back, when I was working at the Cumberland County Jail and you were the sheriff for Cumberland County. You’ve had so many different lives, before that point and since that point. I’m really glad that you’re here today to share some of those experiences.
Mark Dion: Thanks for inviting me. I hope our conversation is helpful.
Dr. Lisa: I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be. Even when I met you … I was the medical director for the Cumberland County Jail and think that anybody who has never been inside a jail setting, there’s just no way to completely describe it, but it’s like its own little society, its own little universe with its own little set of rules. Even from a medical standpoint, its own …
Mark Dion: It’s a village behind a fence. I think a lot of the general community would like to hope they don’t need to know about it, but it exists and it has consequences for the broader community, in terms of how people leave that village, what state they’re in and moreover why we send people to live in that village for pre-determined sets of time. I always thought I was the mayor of a unique community.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve had a chance to be a member of many different unique communities. You grew up in Lewiston, and you were just saying, before we got on the air, you grew up the same time as Governor LePage in Lewiston, and Lewiston is its own little unique community. What are some of the things you learned about growing up in Lewiston?
Mark Dion: Growing up in Lewiston, family was central. This idea of a bilingual community was core to who we were. I grew up in a Franco-American household and English was seen as a secondary language. French was what we spoke at home. There was this idea there was us and the Americans. It was an idea of my parents and their generation, especially their parents that whatever was going on in Lewiston was temporary, that eventually we would return to Canada. We sent resources to Canada. We had to make our annual pilgrimage there to be reminded that that was home and Maine was temporary. Then by the time my generation grew up, we saw ourselves as the true American generation.
I see that same parallel occurring now in other communities, whether it’s families from North Africa or South East Asia who have come into Maine. There’s a transition. It will take 3 generations. You have Cambodians in America, then you’ll have Afghan-Americans, then eventually you’ll have Americans who say they’re of Somali descent. There’s a journey there and it comes with blessing and frustration because the broader community expects that transition to be sometimes more quickly achieved than what’s possible.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me about some of the friction that can take place when you’re undergoing this journey, whether you’re an individual or a community.
Mark Dion: I think it surfaced in recent comments by the major in Lewiston, which is this idea of when do you adopt one culture and abandon another one. I think if you were asked from my opinion, I would gently suggest to him that it’s a melding. It’s a transformation. His culture will never be the same and neither will theirs. There’ll be a new culture in Lewiston that will incorporate elements of both and he should do what he can to encourage that because I think it will give Lewiston a better worldview of itself and others.
Dr. Lisa: Do you think that 1 of the reasons that people hold onto whatever they grew up with is a fear, a fear of moving into something unknown in the future?
Mark Dion: I think fear drives mostly everything we do. To be honest, whether it’s having to do with culture or even your own individual growth. If I look back at my life and I’m absolutely honest with myself, often times I held back because I was fearful. I wanted to plan everything out. I wanted to make sure that I minimized any potential risk and I forgot to enjoy the leap into something new. There’s a certain freefall that occurs in your life, whether it’s professional or personal and, rather than fear it, we should welcome it. When I go to Augusta, a lot of the conflict there is fear-based, trying to hold onto something that feels safe and comfortable. This resistance to change, and being torn by the idea that some part of your brain and your heart recognizes change has to occur. It’s a real struggle.
When you mention fear, I think it’s one of the driving elements in how we see ourselves, and how we engage others.
Dr. Lisa: My experience with you when I was the medical director at the county jail and we were going through a lot of difficulty with financing the medical care for the inmates because it was expensive and probably still is expensive, but there was a lot of friction at that time … Is that you always maintain a very pragmatic, yet positive view. Really, I always had the sense that you weren’t kind of locked down in your thinking, that you were open to trying to bring people in and experience their thoughts. Is that part of what’s enabled you to be successful?
Mark Dion: I think so. I think success is something I judge internally, so I feel if I can bring as many people to the issue as I can and we all learn something from their process, then that’s success. I don’t try to get caught up in stereotypes. Part of the problem with the jail was the idea that everybody should be punished and everybody is consistently evil, makes it easier to say no, as opposed to saying “Look, these are fellow human beings. They have needs. We have to meet those needs. We have to demonstrate the very behavior that we suspect is not existent in them”. In these 30 years dealing with “criminals”, I’ve found that there are people that can do incredibly good things and good people have done some incredibly bad things. Evil moves like an infection back and forth across many different individuals. I’m not so quick to judge. I think in 30 years, I would look back and say “Thank God I’ve deferred to Her to judge in the final analysis. My job is to try to respect and engage. I may learn something and they may learn something in the process too”.
So fighting or advocating for proper medical care, whether it was for physical disease or mental health, seemed to be what my duty was. It’s how you define responsibility, then once you do that for yourself, you get a lot of clarity. That’s something that really bothers me. You know from our prior lives at the jail. We’re quick to build jail cells. We’re not so quick to build therapeutic beds or we’re really reluctant to define many of our problems as they truly are, which are public health issues and not necessarily crime issues. We want to punish. We want to believe that people that are in the grips of addiction have a choice. Yet if you put a time line of an addict, there comes a point where rational decision making went out the window. It’s not fun anymore. They don’t want to do what they’re doing, but they’re absolutely compelled biologically and psychologically to do that. We don’t recognize that.
I’m not sure that a jail or prison is very therapeutic in the way it approaches those problems. If I was king of the world, for every jail cell, we need 10 beds in a hospital or medical setting. That truly looks at what’s going on out there. If we want to stop crime, we need to control and provide resources for addicted individuals. It’s the same with mental health. We put a lot of people that are mentally ill in jail and we think “That will work”, and you know and I know it doesn’t work; it aggravates the situation, but some parts of our community feel there’s been a victory there. We need to discuss with them and challenge them to revisit their thinking. Again, it’s fear: “I’m not like that. I don’t want to be like that. I want to make sure my children are not exposed to that because they may become like that”.
This is not a place that’s comfortable for them either. They’re as trapped as the addict. One is trapped by chemistry; the other one is trapped by their own thinking. We need to break it down on both sides.
Dr. Lisa: My experience is that, if you really dig deep, that it’s more the fear that they are like that that drives them or that they are, as John McCain has said multiple times and he has done work at Long Creek … And we had another interview where people were talking about those are just the people who get caught. My experience of people is that it’s their fear that they’re just 1 step away from getting caught, that there’s something underneath many times that they’re worried that they already are manifesting.
Mark Dion: I don’t disagree with that. I think we are most fearful of those individuals that display the very weakness that we have within ourselves and it’s a recognition of that, so we’re repulsed by who we are, not necessarily who they are. That’s what I’m saying, they don’t feel safe. The accuser doesn’t feel safe to look in the mirror either, but damn they want to make sure the offender does. I’m okay with that, but we need to turn the mirror on the community and start asking hard questions and give them a way to find an answer, so we do get justice.
Dr. Lisa: My experience also was that there is, I would say the vast majority of people that just made bad choices and really had bad family situations and had addictions and things going on, but there was this sliver of people that I encountered that I was truly concerned about because I think I did sense that there was some strange biological or psychological evil that existed. Something had turned in their brains. Is there room for that thinking in your paradigm?
Mark Dion: Sure. I’m a realist. There is a small number of men and women out there who pose a real risk to themselves first by their decision making and to all of us in the general community. Unfortunately, we may have to contain those individuals. That’s a whole other talk in how we do that, but the vast majority of people don’t fall in that category. Here’s an example. A few weeks ago, I went up to the state prison to visit with the men who are part of the hospice program there. When I walked in, one of the volunteers was somebody I helped to put in prison many years, so it was like a reunion. I saw immediately he had had a dramatic change. We would have said back then “He’s a sociopath. Had no conscience, no feeling for others and a true predator in every sense of the word”. I’ve helped put men like that in prison and I felt that I’d done my job at the time, so I’m conscious of that.
We spent some time talking and the changes I saw is he’s developed a capacity now for empathy. He, by seeing dying and actually embracing the reality of our own individual mortality, he’s come to appreciate what life is and how sacred it is. That’s done more for him being in this process than the idea that he’s got to do 10 or 15 years in a cage. We’ve achieved, not rehabilitation because there was no good to bring him back to because of the trajectory of his life, but we have achieved, with the hospice program, I think, a transformation. There’s always hope. It reinforced in me that even when I’ve concluded somebody is bad, incorrigible, that speaks to my own failing, that I’m still not willing on some level to talk the possibility that there is hope. This program provided hope and it’s provided some substantial transformation for this gentleman.
All the men in this were in for heinous crimes. One is serving a 62-year sentence, so we know the community said “You’re irretrievable and we’re going to put you in this box forever”, but in spite of that he has found a way to connect with humans on a level many of us will never connect with and because of that I think has been granted a gift that we can’t enjoy in terms of appreciating what life is. He’s learned that in a cage; maybe there’s a lesson there for us.
Dr. Lisa: It does seem very interesting that sometimes in order to find freedom, we have to be first confined.
Mark Dion: Yeah, they are free. Those men … They formed a little band. That’s how they decompress with the sick and dying in prison and their lyrics spoke to that. This role is connected to something greater than those walls. We can’t contain that. You can’t punish that. You can’t restrain that. They know that and I think they walk much more wracked emotionally than when they walked into that building the first time round. I think it’s a blessing for them and for the institution. The institution could learn a lot from them.
They had some PhD in Nursing study them and some men that do similar work in Louisiana. The consequence for the patients for them were better than those we paid to do the work out in the free world because out in the free world, on many levels it’s just a job. Even though you’re committed to the job, you go in, you’re done, you go home, you shut it down, for most of those types of professionals or employees. But these men live it. These are men that they’re caged with. The connection, the bond, goes on forever. They will stand at the graveside at the prison farm and put them in the ground. It was very powerful. I felt good. They made me feel good.
I went to a place where we think evil lives to learn something that was very, very good.
Dr. Lisa: I appreciate your spending the time talking with us today on the subject of freedom and the things that that has meant in the different errations of your life. We’ve been talking with former Sheriff and current State Representative and attorney Mark Dion. Thank you for coming in.
Mark Dion: Thank you, Lisa, very much.
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Dr. Lisa: Last spring, we had on our show 2 very talented individuals who are connected within the community doing good work in the area of music. We called the show Healing With Sound. We were joined by John Williams of 317 Main in Yarmouth and music therapist Kate Beever. We’re still fortunate to have them back in the studio today to talk with us about an interesting program that came up. Well, I’m going to let you tell us a little bit about, but the reason I knew about it was because John McCain, who is our audio guru and also musician within the community, started teaching with this program.
Thank you for coming back and joining us, John and Kate.
Kate Beever: Thank you.
John Williams: Thanks for having us.
Dr. Lisa: The program that you’re doing is with the Long Creek Youth Development Center, which has been out in the community a long time, known as something else … I can’t remember, but it was always sort of more of a … We thought of it as more of a sort of a “prison” kind of place of children, but what we’re learning more and more is that this a stage that doesn’t necessarily have to be perpetuated. Children can get out of the system and can move out into productive lives. You’re helping them do this through music.
John Williams: That’s correct. Yeah, that’s correct. Our understanding is that it has been around for a long time and I believe it’s the only correctional facility in the state for kids. They’ve really gone through a transition in terms of how their working with kids and absolutely that’s the goal to give these kids opportunities to see that there are other ways to live their lives and be productive in society.
Kate Beever: The facility is really structured, so it’s kind of a good thing for them to go in and get an education in a safe space and do some sort of therapy work in addition to their learning.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me, for those who haven’t listened to the interview that we had with you, Kate … Which of course everybody is going to go back now and listen to the podcast on Healing With Sound because it was a great podcast. Tell us a little bit about music therapy, Kate. Give us background in why is this helpful for kids.
Kate Beever: Music therapy is a way to use music as a way to heal in sort of an indirect way. It addresses non-musical goals, so if you have goals of trying to grow as a person or regaining speech if you’ve been brain injured or general therapy goals, just trying to improve your wellbeing, you can do that through music. Instead of trying to address things verbally, you address things musically.
Dr. Lisa: Give me an example of something that you might do with somebody that can help them.
Kate Beever: Okay. I’m trying to think of an example from Long Creek. 1 thing that we did is we would find out what kind of music the kids liked. We’d choose a song that they knew really well and then we would teach them to play it on an instrument, but then we would change the words. They would write their own words to that song, so even through they weren’t comfortable yet just making up a song on their own, this was kind of an easy way for them to express themselves through music just by changing words to an already familiar song.
Dr. Lisa: John, why did this fall under the umbrella of 317 Main? You offer I know a lot of lessons. You do group lessons, you have Henry Fest every year, but this is something where you actually take instructors, including John McCain from our radio show and others from your school, into Long Creek. Why was this an important thing to do?
John Williams: So, we’ve been around for about 7 or 8 years now with our teaching facilities up in Yarmouth and we also have a teaching facility in Portland. We feel so strongly that music is such an incredible vehicle to bring community together that we wanted to make sure that we brought music to all communities that we’re able to reach. Our facility up in Yarmouth, we have about 400 people that come and join that community and take lessons and participate in music. We wanted to really figure out other populations that we could serve in the greater Portland area that may not have access to music in the same way, that may not be able to come to a weekly lesson per se.
We were given an opportunity to go into Long Creek working with the folks at Seeds Of Independence, another non-profit in the area that works with at risk youth. This was about a year and a half or so ago. We went and talked to folks at Long Creek and the more we talked to them and the more we heard what their philosophy was, we felt that there was a great possible fit between what we could bring in terms of music and community building and personal growth and what Long Creek is trying to do with the kids that are there.
Dr. Lisa: Seeds Of Independence. Why has this become a hot topic of late?
John Williams: I think that there are those that have seen these kids and every person has their special part … And there are a number of kids in Southern Maine and probably throughout the state, I’m sure, as well as throughout the country, that don’t have the same opportunity, the same privileges, as other kids. The folks at Seeds Of Independence really saw that and their goal is to … Even if they can help 1 or 2 kids find a way out from the situation that they’re in, that’s their hope and their target for doing that.
I have to say … one of our early visits to Long Creek, we brought a couple of our musicians and we were given an opportunity to each go into 5 different pods. They call the different units at the center pods and we weren’t quite sure what to expect, but we asked the kids did they like music, what kind of music did they want to hear. It was very quiet. Most of the kids had a fairly distant look in their eye, not really sure why we were there or what this was all about, so we just started to play some tunes and it was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever observed. It went from kind of a complete expressionless, almost lifeless look to full engagement, interest and engagement. It was so powerful that it was so clear to us at that time that music really is this amazing thing that can reach people’s hearts and can be a real vehicle to awakening in ourself that that’s what really made us realize that this was a great partnership and something that we wanted to do.
Dr. Lisa: Kate, describe what the program is actually like.
Kate Beever: It’s an 8-week program and we have 6-8 young adults join our group. Each day, we try a little bit of a different kind of music. A lot of the kids tend to like hip hop music or rock music, but we try to introduce them to some other genres, so folk or indie folk, classical music, jazz, just things that they might not have listened to yet. Each week, we learn a little bit and then we also try to do some improvisation activities, so the kids will choose an instrument and just kind of make something up on it. We try to show them that that’s a comfortable way to play music. They don’t have to already know anything about it. We also do song writing. A lot of the kids already are fairly introspective and they write poetry or they write in a journal, so we take some of the writing and we try to turn it into songs that they can later perform for people.
Dr. Lisa: How many sessions have you now had?
Kate Beever: Oh gosh. 3 I think and we have 3 more coming up. Just last night, John McCain and I went and introduced ourselves to the kids and did the same thing you’re talking about where we played for them. It was the same result where they got really excited and interested. We sort of showed that we could just make something up on the spot, just improvising together. Our next session starts 2 weeks from today and goes for 8 weeks.
Dr. Lisa: Are you finding that the numbers of kids who are signing up are increasing?
Kate Beever: Yeah, definitely. Last session, we only had 1-2 girls each time and this time we had almost all the girls sign up, so we might actually be doing it right in their pod. There’s just 1 female pod.
Dr. Lisa: What are the changes that you see in the children between the beginning and the end of the time that you spend with them?
Kate Beever: That’s a great question. At the beginning, the kids are usually pretty shy, which makes sense because they don’t know us so well and they’re very quiet and kind of tough acting, although you get to realize that that’s just a front that they’re putting up. They act sort of rough and gruff and they tease each other and they don’t really want to participate as much, but by the end of the 8 weeks, they’re singing together and they’re working together as a team to create music that they’re going to perform for people. You can see how proud they are of it. Last time, we had some of our donors and some of their volunteers come in and listen to their songs that they had written. The kids were just really excited to be doing it for them and sort of talked about the process and talked about what their song meant to them. There were a lot of tears.
Dr. Lisa: How do people find out more about the work that you’re doing with the Long Creek Youth Development Center?
John Williams: We’d love to have anyone who was interested to learn more to come and just check out 317. Come by and speak to me, talk to Kate or John and we’d be happy to talk about it. Long Creek is always looking for volunteers. I think if folks out there are interested in learning more and perhaps volunteering if they have an interest in music, there’s always stuff to be done. By all means, reach out to us and we can put you in touch with the right people.
Dr. Lisa: Any parting thoughts for those who are listening about the power of music, Kate?
Kate Beever: I was thinking a little bit when you were just asking about how teachers feel about it. It really is a different sort of thing than just giving a music lesson. You have to be prepared to sort of deal with whatever is going to come up because these kids are going through a lot. It can be a really powerful thing to see the changes that come through them and what they bring out of themselves in their music making.
Dr. Lisa: So music is powerful to the individual, but also to the person who is teaching the individual and sort of the reflection back.
Kate Beever: Right, we learn from them as well.
Dr. Lisa: Thank you so much for coming in and talking to us. We have been talking with John Williams of 317 Main and music therapist Kate Beever. I encourage all of our listeners to go back and listen to our Healing With Sound podcast to find out more about 317 Main and also music therapy and get in touch with the people at 317 Main about the Long Creek Youth Development Center program and the work that’s being done. Thanks for coming in.
Kate Beever: Thanks.
John Williams: Thanks for having us.
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show number 65: Freedom, airing for the first time on December 9, 2012. Today’s guests have included author Monica Wood, former Sheriff and current State Representative, Mark Dion, and John Williams & Kate Beever of 317 Main in Yarmouth discussing the outreach program at Long Creek Youth Development Center in South Portland.
We anticipate that many of you who are listening have some experience with incarceration, whether it be an actual incarceration of yourself, a family member or someone you know, or maybe it’s a mental or emotional incarceration. We also know that people have experiences with freedom and the idea that even though you may be confined at some time in your life, physically, emotionally or socially, there is a way out. We hope that some of our guests have provided you with insights as to how you may find your way out of your own incarceration. In fact, we know that some of our guests will be able to positively impact you in this area. For more information on these guests, visit doctorlisa.org. Be sure to like our Facebook page, send us a note and let us know what you think of our shows.
Also, we hope that you’ll take a moment to thank our sponsors and let them know that you heard about them on their show and you appreciate their financial support because without them, none of this would be possible.
This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. Thank you for being part of our world. May you have a bountiful life.
Announcer: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin at ReMax Heritage, Sea Bags, Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists, Marci Booth of Booth Financial Services, Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial, Apothecary By Design and The Body Architect.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded in downtown Portland at the offices of of Maine Magazine on 75 Market Street. It is produced by Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle, audio production and original music by John C McCain. For more information on our hosts, production team, Maine Magazine or any of the guests featured here today, visit us at doctorlisa.org. Download and become a podcast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle through iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.