Last year, as part of our “Rereading the Past” group, we read Jennifer Egan’s The Keep. A good portion of the novel takes place inside of a prison, specifically a creative writing program behind bars. When the readers read it, they were struck with the accuracy of the scenes described. They genuinely wondered if the author had done time! Well, a few weeks ago, I contacted the author to let her know our group’s reaction, as well as ask how she pulled it off. Jennifer Egan was kind enough to get back, and her response is below:
“I’m honored and flattered that your students thought it possible that I had done time. I have not, I’m happy to say, and it did take a fair amount of research to get a handle on the prison stuff. Here is how I proceeded:
As a journalist I was assigned a story in 2001 for the NYT about women giving birth in prison, and I made several visits to the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in New Jersey. That story never happened as all of my subjects were released before they gave birth! I had thought that experience of an actual prison would be enough, combined with reading, to “get” the prison stuff, so I dove into reading books, which ran the gamut from journalism (for example, NEWJACK by Ted Conover) to books about prison architecture to prison memoirs (this was before the days of ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK) to “how to”s like YOU ARE GOING TO PRISON. I also conducted a number of interviews by phone with people who were teaching writing in prisons (one woman in particular was extremely helpful), and also several COs from an array of places, including Sing Sing. I was especially interested in learning of successful escapes, and heard some very wild stories which led directly to some of the details I used for my characters’ escape.
I found, however, that all of that was still not enough, and I felt very wobbly when I tried to write scenes in prison. I realized that I needed some actual experience of a men’s prison. I had incredibly good luck, in that a female Lieutenant at the Marion Correctional Facility in Ohio, whom I had already interviewed by phone, agreed to spend one of her vacation days showing me around the prison. I arrived at the crack of dawn and spent about eight hours at the prison with her. It is a rather amazing place—or was, then—for a couple of reasons: there is a high proportion of sex offenders and they are largely mixed with the general population. There is also a lot of racial integration there, far beyond what I understand to be the norm at most American prisons. At Marion, I went into cells, held lizards some of the men were raising, chatted with inmates working on a radio program, went to the gym, the outdoor yards, visiting areas, the surrounding farms where some inmates work. Mostly I was just THERE for many hours, and the sights, sounds, and atmosphere became familiar to me. I found that that one very full day at Marion was enough to animate all of the research and interviews I had conducted. It was the essential ingredient I had been missing.
I pretty much used the architectural plan of Marion in THE KEEP, and imagined my characters as racially mixed, although I did not identify them that way. In general, I find that my many years of working as a journalist has helped me with research for my fiction; you have to be willing to enter environments that are potentially uncomfortable, and ask direct questions. I am used to that, in fact I love it, so all of that helped me.
Thank you SO MUCH for assigning my book to your class, and thanks to your students for reading it. I am honored and delighted, and so appreciate your reaching out to me. Your [response] made my mom very happy, as THE KEEP is her favorite of my books.”