NEW
Library Project
Volume 4, Number 1 - Fall 2005
Listening to a Participant
from People & Stories:
Interview with John Conner
John
Conner started going to People and Stories because he didn’t want to
dance. Each Friday at the Bo Robinson Education and Training Center in
Trenton is “Freaky Friday,” a community-building activity in which
residents have to dance their way up the cafeteria walkway. Conner figured
he’d rather read.
So he took his place in the conference
room where Patricia Andres was leading a discussion of “Abalone Abalone
Abalone” by Toshio Mori. “I’ll never forget that story,” Conner,
40, says now. When Andres first asked, “What’s abalone?”—an item
that, in the story, becomes symbolic of persistence and beauty—Conner
was able to respond with knowledge from his own life experience. “They
use it as inlays on guitar necks,” he said.
Books
have always been part of Conner’s life: his aunt read to him from Petey
the Peanut Man, and his father purposely changed the words of books just
to hear Conner and his sister shout out, “Daddy, that’s not right!”
In high school, after turning in an essay on “disco versus rock n’
roll,” Conner’s English teacher told him, “You really hit the nail
on the head. You should be a writer.”
“One teacher introduced me to C.S. Lewis, who took me to a place where knights, dragons and animals talked,” Conner recalls. “Another introduced me to Kurt Vonnegut, and I fell in love with his dry humor. Now Pat. I’d never heard of Kate Chopin before [reading ‘The Story of an Hour’ in People and Stories].”
In September 2004, Conner came from
Southwoods State Prison to Bo Robinson. “It’s hard to read in here,”
he says, because of the noise and because his daytime job—tutoring GED
students from 7:30 to 3:30—leaves little time for leisure. “My
favorite books are almanacs and encyclopedias. I have a chiffarobe at home
stacked with biographies of musicians and artists.”
Conner left Bo Robinson in March 2005,
but returned a month later because of a parole violation. “I felt like I
let my family down,” he says. “I feel terrible. Hopefully I won’t
screw up this time. I have 26 more days.”
In this second stay at Bo Robinson,
Conner has rediscovered himself as a writer, through occasional writing
circles led by People and Stories coordinator Scott Feifer. Once he wrote
about how much he cherishes a strand of hair belonging to his girlfriend,
which he found on some clothes she sent him. Another time he wrote about
his daughter, now 17.
“I was in a halfway house when she
was born. I called her mother on the phone and she said, ‘She’s born.
She’s right here.’ I could hear these little sniffles. I’ll never
forget the way that felt.”
Perhaps because of his own life
experience, Conner has been especially affected by stories that speak of
abandonment, trust and the vulnerability of children; he mentions
“Mother Dear and Daddy” with its ominous image of cars “like big
cats crouching” and “The Man Who Found You in the Woods” as pieces
that touched him deeply.
“Because [this group] is all people
coming from prison, a lot of them have this over-aggressive attitude…In
[People and Stories], you see where they’re really coming from. You see
that people are basically really all the same. The little jewels you get
from people…you just never know.”