Michael Kleber-Diggs on why some of Minnesota's best poets happen to be in prison

CARTHY WURZER: Stillwater is the oldest. Faribault is the largest. St. Cloud has the longest wall, one-and-a-half miles long. Shakopee houses women. Oak Park Heights is a maximum security facility. These are prisons in Minnesota that I'm talking about.

But Michael Kleber Diggs calls them classrooms. He's a poet, an essayist. And he works with inmates who are part of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Some of their work will be featured this weekend. So we wanted to talk with Michael about the work in the upcoming event this weekend. Welcome to Minnesota Now, Michael.

MICHAEL KLEBER DIGGS: Hi, Cathy. Thanks for having me on.

CARTHY WURZER: Thanks for being here. So I understand you've been an instructor with the prison writing workshops since 2016. Do you remember the first time you walked into a prison? What was it like?

MICHAEL KLEBER DIGGS: Yeah. I mean, the first time I walked into a prison was like tied to school. But the first time I walked in as a teacher, I was teaching a class at Oak Park Heights, it was my first time teaching a creative writing class also.

And it's a different world. It's a different setting in a lot of ways. The classroom can be a lot like any other classroom. But within the facility, of course, there are a lot of rules and a lot of things that are different in terms of how we normally live in the community.

CARTHY WURZER: Oak Park Heights, of course, is a very tough place. The folks who are there have done some pretty serious crime. I'm wondering, do you remember the first few people you might have worked with and what that was like?

MICHAEL KLEBER DIGGS: Yeah. So overall, it was a great class. I do remember having a wide range of ages in the room. A wide range of backgrounds, racial and ethnic backgrounds. A lot of really, really talented writers. The thing that I want to stress most is just--

CARTHY WURZER: Michael, are you still with us?

MICHAEL KLEBER DIGGS: Can you hear me?

CARTHY WURZER: There you are. Sorry, we just lost you there. Go ahead.

MICHAEL KLEBER DIGGS: So a wide range of people and backgrounds, but we all were united by a love of writing. And I remember having a couple of students who had white supremacy tattoos on. And then as a Black teacher, that was something that I had to reconcile. But we were all united in that class by a love of literary art and writing.

CARTHY WURZER: What do inmates write about? Are there common themes?

MICHAEL KLEBER DIGGS: Not really. I mean, if I were to say one thing in general, I would say the past. And that could take a variety of forms. Students write about gardening, about their first love, their first kiss, about difficult moments in their life, either in their family or outside of their family.

There's no real dominant theme. We have writers who are super into sci-fi and fantasy and speculative fiction and a wide range. And of course, we do have students who write about their lived experience, including what their lives are like in prison. I think about poems about the yard and poems about prison in general. And I wouldn't necessarily say those dominate, but they're definitely present.

CARTHY WURZER: Is there a piece of writing you'd like to read right now for us?

MICHAEL KLEBER DIGGS: Sure One of the artists we work with, his name is Brian, a tremendously accomplished poet. In fact, he has a poetry collection that he's sending around for publication consideration right now that was a finalist for a prestigious contest just earlier this year.

And he has a collection called from-- it's called Disfigured Hours. And I'd love to share one of the poems from that collection called Disfigured Hours. "A road coils a moat around this old prison. Your eyes, outsider, invent spires, parapet, portcullis. Keeper a brick and stone heaped here. Gray wreckage on your green land. You who won't uncastle the shame witness gallows, dungeon, chambers of what is kept in."

CARTHY WURZER: "Uncastle the shame," I like that line. In an interview, you said that some of the best poets in Minnesota happen to be in prisons. That's interesting.

MICHAEL KLEBER DIGGS: Yeah. We had this reading series before the pandemic where we would bring writers from the community into correctional facilities, and we'd just read poems with artists that we work with through MPWW.

And it's difficult to explain it. But honestly, for me as a listener, as someone who attended a number of those readings, over time, even though we're all wearing different things, so all of the people who are housed in correctional facilities are wearing jeans and buttoned-down shirts, you start to forget who's an incarcerated writer and who isn't. Because you're so transported by the work and you just start to see that we're all a community of writers bonding around our love of literary art.

CARTHY WURZER: By the way, what do you teach your students?

MICHAEL KLEBER DIGGS: So I teach poetry and creative non-fiction for the most part. And I, in that classroom, would teach that class like I would teach a class anywhere, at the loft or at a university. We look at form and technique. We study poems and collections of poems. We go through writing exercises and share the things that we're making with each other for constructive feedback.

CARTHY WURZER: And consequently, what do your students teach you?

MICHAEL KLEBER DIGGS: I mean, as a teacher, I'd like to think of myself as guiding a group of people toward discoveries that we make together. And I definitely learn a lot when I'm teaching in correctional facilities.

As we've noted, some of the best writers in the state happen to be housed in correctional facilities. And so as we're sharing ideas, as we're reading poems together, their insights affect me profoundly. But I also gain a lot from their dedication to writing, their admiration for it. How hard they work to allow time for that in their lives, in their structured lives and busy lives.

I know for me personally, some of the work that I've had to do as a writer is think of ways to compel myself to go into my most difficult room to think about moments that have been challenging or difficult. And being around people and students and writers who are doing that work has been an inspiration to me. It's helped me write about adversity in ways that I think might have taken me longer without that experience.

CARTHY WURZER: I wish I could talk to you more. We have about a minute left. The writing workshop has its annual behind beyond bars, Voices of Incarceration coming up. Can you tell us briefly about that?

MICHAEL KLEBER DIGGS: Yeah. So every year, we gather together and celebrate the work that our artists have made. And we've been doing it in-person since we started. And we're celebrating our 11th birthday on Saturday as well.

We'll be gathered back in-person again and also live streaming at Hamline University. And we'll share pieces that our artists have written. And we'll also be able to celebrate artists who have returned home and we'll be able to gather with this in-person.

We also did this really cool thing. We worked with some animators to make short films based on things that our students have written, and we'll be able to share some of those as well. So it's a great celebration, a way to honor their work.

CARTHY WURZER: Excellent. Michael, thank you for your time and for your talent.

MICHAEL KLEBER DIGGS: Thank you for having me.

CARTHY WURZER: Michael Kleber Diggs has been with us. He's an instructor with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. That organization is holding its annual event October 22nd in St. Paul. You can find out more at mnprisonwriting.org.