Corrections in Ink: A Memoir by Keri Blakinger
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I love reading memoirs because they are a glimpse into the writer’s brain, the section that decides what part of themselves to mine for a story and what part they believe fits into the world in a meaningful enough way to fill a book.
I was drawn to Keri Blakinger‘s memoir-ish (memoir-adjacent?!? Corrections in Ink: A Memoir for two reasons.
The first was that I’ve been mentored, edited, and befriended by people who have done great work with prisons and literacy. William J. Drummond was my graduate school mentor, who went on to help run the San Quentin News and wrote Prison Truth: The Story of the San Quentin News. My friend Katie Ford was the executive director of Truth By Told, a women’s literacy program in Texas. And, Larry Smith (known to others as Piper’s husband) and I have run in the same circles for many years.
The second reason followed from the first because I was interested in how Blakinger would contextualize her story because (as she so deftly does in the book) she was both a prisoner, but a prisoner with more privilege than so many others.
Let me tell you, she pulled off a damn high-wire act. She spun a really compelling tale that both centered her story and used that centering to shine a light on the horrific conditions and inequities that make up the prison system. (Hence memoir-ish or memoir-adjacent.)
She also did that without dragging the narrative down in a boatload of statistics and studies. Yeah, it’s great to have science and research, but we already know that prison is a man-created nightmare. Certainly she peppered those in (because you’re going to learn some things if you get the writer’s story!), but they were almost asides, little nuggets attached to the so-very-real humans she met along the way.
Instead, we got portraits of people, sometimes sketches, and sometimes just blurry photos from a distance. But they all felt alive and real, because they were and are.
It’s a bit like Nina Renata Aron and her brilliant book Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love. Nina pulled off a similar feat examining the twelve-step program culture.
This is a fantastic book (but be ready for some hard-to-read sections because it’s about prison and addiction and so many other topics that follow those two), and I think, an important book.
You can listen to my interview at The Downtown Writers Jam podcast in July 2022.
