“I hate my hair!” Who hasn’t heard a woman utter this grievance at one time or another? In prison, it’s a universal complaint, a woeful acknowledgement that, whether curly, straight, kinky, or gray, most women…
Posts published by “Suza Lambert Bowser”
Revenge is an airborne disease in prison, one that seeps beneath the skin and pervades the atmosphere like a deadly fog. An inmate’s honor, once impugned, seems to require action, and the most common method…
In the bad ol' days, when this place was a mental institution, the 15’ by 15’ outdoor space on each wing was called the “Smoke Pit.” Today, the official sobriquet is the “Fresh Air Pit.”…
We can't see the city of Decatur from inside this prison, but at 9:30pm, we hear the city's sirens wailing in the distance, alarms that signal the worst disasters: floods, fires, plagues of locusts, nuclear attacks, and, of course, tornadoes.
Am I wild? Am I a free spirit — a woman who runs with wolves? Or, is it all merely a metaphor, something that can never be realized — a fantasy that can never be…
They left to see Macbeth — not in thunder, lightning, or rain, but… snow! A light blizzard was blowing on the Northern California mountain passes as they cruised past Crescent City, driving an old Ford…
My grandmother loved language; she loved words and, having been blessed with a classic education that included Latin and Greek as well as French, she spent much of her life reading with a handy etymological…