HOW I FOUND MYSELF WORKING AS A WRITER IN RESIDENCE OF A HIGH-SECURITY MALE PRISON

by Hannah Dennison

I’m excited to introduce our special guest today Sunday Times bestselling thriller author Jane Corry. As you’ll soon learn, Jane’s writer-in-residence experience is quite simply extraordinary.

Jane – welcome! 

My novelist career took off when I went from being a features writer on a well-known women’s magazine to prison.

I’m not joking. But I should add that I was a writer in residence at a prison rather than being a prisoner myself.

My story started the month I got divorced from my first husband after 27 years of marriage. Two weeks later, my weekly magazine column ended due to a staff shake-up. Although I had maintenance, I found myself in need of extra income in order to bring up my three children.

After moving house, my new neighbor suggested that I look in the papers for work. I hadn’t applied for a job for 27 years—I’d been a freelancer since my children were born. But there it was—an advert saying, ‘Wanted! A writer in residence of a high-security male prison.’

Frankly, I didn’t think I had a chance. After all, I didn’t have any experience of prison, either from the outside or in.  Indeed, the only crime I’d ever committed was to park on a double yellow line.

But the money they offered was exactly what I needed to pay my mortgage – to a penny.

My sister and friends didn’t think I should apply. In fact, they thought I was crazy even to consider it.  I was, as they pointed out, in a bad place emotionally. How was it going to help me to work in a prison? I like to think it helped both me and my students, but I’ll come onto that in a moment.

I was very surprised to get an interview and not at all surprised to fluff it up. The governor asked what I would do if a prison officer came into the room where I was running a writing class and told everyone to get out. I said that I would get them to stop in the middle of the sentence so it would make it easier for them to come back to it – it’s a good writing technique. He looked at me, his eyebrows raised. ‘And by that stage,’ he pointed out drily, ‘half the prison would have escaped.’

He had a point. From that moment, I relaxed because I knew I’d blown it. So you can imagine his surprise when he rang that evening and offered me the job.

On my first day, I was given the keys to the prison. To be precise, I was handed a key belt and told that I had to lock any doors that I unlocked and went through, otherwise I’d be out on my heels. I also had to make sure that I signed in every night and handed the key back.

My role was to be a sort of literary Pied Piper. I wasn’t part of the education department, where people had to come to my lessons. I had to woo them in through notices which I put up round the prison.  I printed them out with titles such as ‘Come and join my workshop to write a letter, novel, short story, life story.’

Life stories were particularly popular. I learnt more about crime than I care to talk about. I will say, however, that I was reduced to tears of shock and horror by one man’s story. He then apologized for upsetting me and I told him he should be apologizing to the people he had held up and threatened with death.

I entered his life story for the Koestler Awards, given to men and women for art and writing in prison and he won a silver. His behaviour immediately changed for the better and the guards said that it was due to his new-found story telling skills. He told me that if he hadn’t expressed his remorse on paper, he might have banged his head against the wall.

On the whole, I was treated very well in the prison, although there were times when I was scared. I was followed around at one point by a man who – when I looked up his crime – had tried to kill his girlfriend. I didn’t look up any crimes after that apart from the former accountant who had been a rapist. I don’t want to go into that. He seemed such a nice man.

One night, the governor asked if I would spend the night in the prison for a charity drive. I would have turned down the invitation but the money was going to help pay for my next year at the prison. So I felt obliged. It was terrifying being locked in. There was a bowl under the bed for my business. I spent all night typing. The gov had allowed me to bring my typewriter in. In the middle of the night, an officer knocked on my door and asked what I was doing. I told him I had permission to write and reluctantly he went away.

On other occasions, I brought in writer friends to talk, including Colin Dexter. The men asked him how he got his inspiration. He told them that it was a large bottle of malt whiskey. This didn’t go down well with the officers, but the men thought he was wonderful.

When I started my prison job, I was told that the men either spent their leisure  time in the gym or in the chapel. That stayed in my mind. Then as I walked past the gym, with sounds of machinery pounding, a title fell into my head. The Book Of Uncommon Prayer. So I asked both the men and the staff to write down sayings that helped them through life. I’d written something similar for the women’s magazine earlier. It seemed to go down well and also improve relations between some staff and men.

My two year contract was extended to 3 years. They then asked me to stay for a fourth but I thought that I might never leave. By then I’d got married again so I said goodbye but I volunteered to be a judge for the Koestler Awards and have done so now for the past ten years. Every summer, I go up to Wormwood Scrubs and leaf through entries. The winners’ work is displayed at the Southbank in London every autumn.

I gave up romantic fiction and began writing gritty suspense novels about families who’d been affected by crime, either as aggressors or victims. I changed agents and my new one sold me to Penguin. I’ve since had eight top ten Sunday Times best-sellers.

People sometimes ask if I miss my old life. Actually, it haunts me.  You can take the girl out of the prison. But you can’t take the prison out of the girl.

You can buy my new novel ‘I DIED ON A TUESDAY’ in supermarkets, shops and   https://bit.ly/3SE8UVi. Thank you. You can also find out more about my books at www.janecorryauthor.com,   

The book on Amazon