"What I Want My Words to Do to You": an uprecedented look into the hearts and minds of women in a maximum security prison.

Executive producers: Eve Ensler, Carol Jenkim, and Judith Katz. Burbank, California: PBS/Warner Home Video, 2003. $24.98 (DVD or VHS).

It's no secret that media presentations can sometimes reach students in ways that readings alone do not. The challenge for teachers, often enough, is to discover materials of sufficient quality, compactness, and richness to prove apt in the classroom setting.

Winner of the 2003 Freedom of Expression Award at the Sundance Film Festival, this documentary chronicles the experiences of a writing group composed of female inmates at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Convening the group is Eve Ensler, best known as the author of The Vagina Monologues. Her students are a diverse group of fifteen women, including a few high-profile prisoners, such as Judith Clark and Kathy Boudin of the Weather Underground Organization.

As such facilities go, Bedford is relatively progressive in its programs for inmates, and this writing initiative provides one vivid example of efforts to support women in their attempts to gain insight into their past lives and their future options.

Participants in the workshop respond to a series of writing prompts, as follows:

Exercise 1: Describe the facts of your crime.

Exercise 2: Write a piece about a scar on your body.

Exercise 3: Think of a question someone has asked you that you've never answered. Answer it.

Exercise 4: (a) Write a letter to someone you love. Tell them why you are in prison. (b) Rewrite the letter you wrote explaining why you're in prison. Go deeper.

Exercise 5: Describe an experience in prison when someone surprised you with kindness.

Exercise 6: Name one thing that's changed about you since you got to prison.

Viewers of the film witness both the process of the workshop meetings and its culminating result. The documentary concludes with professional actresses (Mary Alice, Glenn Close, Hazelle Goodman, Rosie Perez, and Marisa Tomei) performing readings of the inmate texts in an appearance at the Bedford facility, with workshop writers present in the audience. The DVD includes such "extras" as additional performances by the actresses and interviews with two of the film's producers, Eve Ensler and Judith Katz.

Not only is the DVD affordable for most campus media collections, it has wide potential for course relevance. In composition classes, the documentary could help student writers see for themselves the power of writing as medium. In sociology classes, students could use the film to consider the impact of incarceration on women and their families. Courses dealing with autobiography might draw from the viewing fresh insights into the process of introspective writing. Students of performance studies might focus on the documentary as an example of how community-based writing/scripting can prove effective.

Alternatively, a class engaged in service learning could use the above assignment as a starting point for work they might help conduct in community settings. I might begin by inviting students to talk about the concepts behind the writing exercises shown in the film. I might then ask the class to do some brainstorming in small groups. The goal for these small-group consultations would be to imagine what a seventh exercise might look like and accomplish for the very group of writers depicted in the film. Finally, after we had discussed the results and implications of this group activity, I might challenge individual members to propose a comparable writing workshop, one each class member might be able to explore with a population in another setting (ideally, one coinciding with their service placements). I would then ask students to prepare that series of exercises and, once they have finished devising the prompts, to write a reflective essay illuminating the logic behind that assignment sequence design. What would be the objectives, and how specifically would the writing exercises contribute uniquely to that set of outcomes?

Linda S. Watts

University of Washington,

Bothell