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Lee: Tell us about your involvement with The Beat Within, and how long have you been working with the program.

Michael Kroll: I actually have a very long involvement in the criminal justice system, I've been writing about it for about 25 to 30 years. I'm the oldest person in The Beat Within family and I sort of moved into it while I was doing other work, that is, I started way back at the very beginning, I was in the very fist workshop we did at Alameda County, the Oakland Juvenile hall, which I think was in 1997. And I ran workshops in that county for a while, for a couple of years, as a volunteer, not as a staff of The Beat Within. I was also doing death penalty mitigation work...that is what I do, as well as write, as well as do this... that means I actually get involved in real cases in which my job is to find the kind of information and evidence that would spare a man's life... that would tell a jury why this guilty man should live and not die, that is my job. And it is a very, very all consuming job, so when you take a case like that you really can't do anything, BUT that. So in 1999 I got involved in a very high profile murder case involving multiple victims and lots of newspaper, television, etc. and so I was completely taken in by that and for the next 3 years, between 1999 and 2002, I did that case only, so I was no longer doing The Beat. But at the end of that case, David Inocencio, the director of The Beat, called on me and asked if I'd be willing to come back in any capacity, and I said I would be willing to come back in ANY capacity and so I was hired full time as an associate editor, and that is what I have been doing. Everyone here does everything here, so I do everything here too, workshops, writing, editing, etc.

L: What experience did you bring to The Beat Within and what experience have you acquired?

M: The experience I brought to The Beat Within, primarily is having written extensively on the criminal justice system for all those years, 25 or more. Including having written fairly extensively on juvenile justice, and including having a pretty major...a magazine cover story on the CYA itself. So I was pretty familiar with the state wide system when this program started. I also had been writing for Pacific News Service, for many years, 20 years, which is the parent organization in the office in which The Beat is housed, so it was kind of a natural bridge for me to have one foot in the PNF (Pacific News Service) family, the writing family, and one foot in The Beat family, because of the subject I wrote about. And what have I learned?... I've learned things that, in a way, all of us already know, but they have been reconfirmed and reemphasized, which is that, every human being is worth something. That if people as children are not valued and their voices are not valued, and they are seen and received as kind of invaluable, they begin to incorporate that view of themselves, and they find themselves invaluable, and having nothing about you to say since no one credits their having anything to say, so what you learn of course very quickly, is "oh that's bullshit". That young people have a lot of things that are very important to say, not just about the system, but about themselves, their lives, their souls, their aspirations, their hopes, and their children's kind of view of the world. You learn that you are dealing with children and they are not adults, whatever the system calls them, all those things you learn. And I think anyone that does this work would learn those things as if they didn't know them already.

L: As a staff member, what challenges do you face when you walk into these workshops and your hoping to encourage the youth to write?

M: I think, some of the challenges are just sort of basic 7th grade kind of challenges, that is, sometimes these young people...they are Young People, they are still young and they are very exuberant and full of energy. So one of the problems you run into is a very basic classroom problem, which is just keeping order and telling people that this is a serious operation, and we don't have to be here and if you don't want to take it seriously that's fine but please leave because other people do want to take it seriously. So there's that policing function of saying please be quiet, please shut up, please have some respect, someone's talking please listen, those kind of problems. And then there are problems with staff, certainly by no means all, there are some very, very dedicated staff who work with the program, but there are also staff who are just there for their paycheck and it doesn't matter what program, they view all programs as kind of bothersome to them, as out of the routine, and they will talk during the workshop, or play the television during a workshop or yell back and forth to other staff during a workshop, and though I can tell a young person be quiet, be respectful, I can't tell a staff person that way. So there are times where you have to bite your tongue, where you in other context might speak up and say, "wait, there is something going on here", and because we are a guest in the system and it's easy for them to ban us. I have had one incident in the years I've been working with The Beat Within in which a young person, offensively threatened me, seemed to try to take me hostage using a pencil to the neck as a weapon, but to be fair, and the staff was very eager for me to prosecute this kid, I refused to do that because I never felt it was serious, I never felt seriously threatened. It wasn't a joke, but I knew from the beginning that he certainly wasn't going to do me any harm; it was some stupid scheme of his to escape. As I was saying we are dealing with kids here, thought is not necessarily their strong point, or they wouldn't be where they are often, but anyway, that is the only incident that might be described as the kind of thing that the general public would fear going into any kind of prison or jail, but, as I said, I thought it was just a gesture, and in all the years that I have done it, it is the only thing that falls in that category of criminal activity. Other than that, I have no problems, it is the high point of the week going into the workshops, the real problems are just in the production of the magazines, not in dealing with the young people.

L: What approach do you take to try to appeal to the audience that you work with?

M: I think that to me... it's the strength of The Beat Within….. is that each of us is an individual and so my approach is simply to be myself and respond to people in my own voice and with my own opinions. As long as they know that I am not saying that my opinion is better than their opinion, its really a dialogue, so my approach really is to...when I hear something that I think is absurd, or doesn't have the justification or...the justification hasn't been provided I'll challenge the kid and say, well you said that but I don't hear any argument that supports that view, how do you come to that view? And so we will have this little dialogue, and that dialogue continues in The Beat itself because we respond to each piece. So it may well be that a dialogue I have with a kid in the unit gets repeated or amplified on in a written response, and then it goes on the next week, where the kid would have thought about what I have said, and challenge it or challenge me or say "I see what you are talking about" or "I didn't explain myself well enough, this is what I really meant"...so it becomes a kind of...it takes time to develop relationships and the strength of The Beat Within is its relationships so a lot of the young people that I deal with...a lot of my dealings with them in the beginning are quite different from my dealings with them in the end...because in the beginning they naturally don't trust me, I'm just another white man in their lives, another adult that is going to betray them and I can understand why it takes a while for them to realize that we are going to come back each week and they are not going to be able to scare us off. And we are going to be able to hear that they are "posted on the block, and we're packing a glock and we smoked a rock", and all those flows... and we are not going to get turned off and we are not going to say "geeze, how could you do that?"...but we are going to engage them as people, and I think ultimately that pays off in a sense that they then engage you as a person, and you and I are no longer, or each of us no longer become a kind of stereotype because we all have our stereotypes. We go in with our views, we being the general public, of who young people are that are locked up, but of course young people that are locked up have their own stereotypes of who we are. And I think that those stereotypes get broken down over time as people get to know one another.

L: From those that you have worked with, are people more prone to volunteer, or volunteer after encouragement?

M: My experience with that is that you don't need a lot of prompting to get them to ask, "is there a place for me, I'm getting out in a month, I'm getting out next week, can you hire me, can you put me to work." And often its not even hiring, often I will say to these young people, "well there is always work to do but we don't know if from day to day, if whether we will have money. So you might come in and be told, geeze we can't pay you anything." But there is work to be done, and most of the time...I guess this is a vision, so kids will say, "hell no I can work for McDonalds and make more money", and other kids will say, "I don't need money, I just need a place, I just need to go somewhere." And so those people come in and they are family. So I don't think it takes much encouragement, sometimes it takes encouragement to get kids to write about particular things...some kid might be having a particular problem and I'll suggest a strategy for writing about in a way that they can write about it. Maybe not directly but indirectly, that's where encouragement is important and sticking to it with a particular individual who has a particular problem, but in general, no, I think this is a very popular program and I think it is based on that sense that you are part of a family.

L: As an editor of the work that is submitted from the contributors, what do you look for when determining what will "not" be published?

M: We have some basic rules, although those basic rules sometimes require, well often require subjectivity, sort of contextual...but pieces that really say nothing, that just are words for the sake of words, and you can find them quickly, I mean, they are just nonsense...they don't make any point at all except, "here I am and here's my name, I want to see my name in The Beat", those pieces I'll take back and say, "what did you say, who is going to read this, what are you teaching, what is anyone going to get out of this?" And they will sheepishly smile and write another one. Or people that strictly want to write about, not just write about, but extol the virtues of their street life, which is to say, "I'm posted on the block till I die, my gang is...blue is better than red, Norteno is better than Sureno, I'll kill you when I see you", and they'll make a nice flow out of it, but it has nothing but threat, and it sort of elevates the gang life as if it is the goal of itself. We won't put that in. Now they can write about their gang life, they can write about guns, drugs, colors, any of that stuff, as long as it gets under the surface, isn't just slogans and clichés and teaches something, so that someone learns something. And then hating pieces that are either hating in general, such as, "all them bitches need to get off the street...all them ho's need to...", that we won't put in. Or the word "nigger" we won't put in ever. Unless, I won't say never, we have actually made exceptions to that rule if it has a contextual purposes. If someone is writing about how words can hurt and they use the word "nigger" or "bitch", or whatever, all those hurtful words, yes, we will leave that in because they are making a point about those words. But just in general, no...we don't let those words in. "Bitch", we don't let in, those kinds of words...in general that would be our standard, and of course we also look for plagiarism. Access to the internet has lead a lot of young people to think they can get a lot of these poems and other stories in under their names, but generally they are pretty easy to spot.

L: Tell us about the responses that you all provide as staff members to the pieces in The Beat.

M: Every piece in The Beat gets a response, 100 percent. Nothing goes in The Beat without a response. Each of us is responsible for particular units, the units that we are the chief facilitator in...so I respond to four different units in The Beat every week and other people respond to other numbers of units. My responses tend to be very much like my conversations and dialogues in the units, they are very honest...if a young person says, "I had to rob because their wasn't enough food and my younger brother deserves to eat so I robbed all those people", I will respond but I can understand why hunger will drive people to do desperate things but then who is putting food on the table for your little brother now, whose stacking the chips now? So, I try to make them see that there is a reality here, and just to say, "when I'm on the street, I'm going to do...I'm the boss and no one tells the boss what to do"...alright, really? How many bosses are around you right now? Are you the boss here, are you telling other people what to do, or are they telling you what to do? In other words try to bring a little reality into what they write, and say sometimes, keep it real...and in the other end maybe I should of said this first, is I try very hard to be as supportive as I can and I will often say, "this is a very terrific piece of writing, you made a statement in the beginning and you backed it up with good argument and good facts, we would like to know more about such and such can you expand on that"...Or, "I have watched you..."...no, we never say I..."We have watched your writing over the past year and you have matured from a child into a young man right before our eyes". And that kind of thing, encouragement that is based on some reality, its not just slogan...I don't say it to everybody, the ones that I think haven't matured I'll say, "this is the idea of a child", and I'll call them on something, and my responses can be quite mean, and I don't think of them as mean at all, I think of them as real. And they will come back to me too, they don't just take what I say as gospel, they will challenge me the next week. They'll say, "but you don't understand nothing you don't walk in my shoes", okay, that's fair enough, that's a fair enough comment. So my comments tend to be encouraging where I can be, on point as to what they are saying where I can be, ummm, on point as to what they are saying where I can be, that's to say challenging what they say, reminding them that freedom is not paradise, that there are problems they are going to meet when they walk out the door, that its not all gonna be sunshine and light, and that they got to have a plan to deal with that. And I very often talk about plans, and I very often say, "what is your one, two, three step plan, tell me the first thing your going to do", and some will respond, "when I get out, I'm going to do good, I'm not going to hang out with my friends", okay, and I'll write back and say, "that is a great general goal, but what are the specific things you are going to do to achieve that goal, just wishing it to happen is not going to make it happen". So I try to force them to think in real concrete terms rather than just generalizations. That would be generally how I respond.

L: How can The Beat Within's influence apply to the classroom setting in grade school and college?

M: Well I have been a high school teacher for a fair amount of my life. So I can tell you that one of the things I think that is essential that often is missing in high school classes is simply listening, that is, teachers listening to their students. Rather than having their preconceptions to impose on their students and you just repeat, you parrot back what I tell you as a teacher, and you get an A. Rather than that I think the most important thing they can learn is the notion that there are things "they", they the teachers can learn from their students, just as there are things that the students can learn from their teachers. In other words, I think that the application is, that everyone is a teacher, everyone has something to teach, and professional teachers often don't take that approach with students. They want you to be quiet, I'll stuff the information into your head, you regurgitate it and you'll get the grade and move on to the next level. That is not what I call teaching, but it is what I think generally goes on in many, many classrooms.

L: Could you provide some information on how a creative writing program improves literacy?

M: In any writing program that has a consistency over time, it can improve literacy because people make mistakes and they get corrected, and if they spend any time reading the correction, especially if they make the same mistake two or three or four or five times...sooner or later they are not going to make it because they will see it corrected two, three four, five times. And in that sense, there is a kind of grammatical literacy that gets improved, although we in The Beat, we don't correct for grammar, we try to keep the voice as natural as we can, we do correct for mistakes where those mistakes are confusing. But for grammar we don't correct, so you know, the kind of literacy that generally, that English teachers are talking about, we don't get to in The Beat Within, because we are much more eager to preserve their voice then to correct their English. On the other hand we have a discussion every week and discussion itself increases...literacy and...kind of fluidity of thought, and I think that for The Beat, it's a hard question to answer because it is a bi-product...and not a bi-product with everybody but some people. And you can clearly see it with some writers. We have had some writers that started with us in the hall, and have gone into the YA and then finally the state prison, because of the seriousness of their crime...and have been writing for us for maybe five, six, seven years, and it is very obvious when you read their most recent pieces versus their very early pieces, in not only have they become more literate in the manner of expressing themselves, they can write full sentences, with periods and commas and capital letters...but they have become much more literate in their thinking, they actually examine what they say in their writing...they will say something and then they will delve into what they have said in more detail things that they did not do when they were younger both because they have matured in years and they have matured as writers, and have written more. Any task that you do will be improved by practice. Even speaking English, even for us English speakers; the more you do it the more easier it is to do.

L: Part of the last question, what I meant by literacy... I mean in terms of how it can draw individuals to educating themselves through their interest, cause that's what I'm trying to encourage the students I work with out here is kind of find something they are interested in, read about it...

M: Yeah its kind of a hard thing in a way, it's sort of...which comes first, the cart or the horse. You get people interested and then say can you read about it, but they are not interested in reading, and that's a hard thing to do, but I understand what you are saying. I don't think we get that far too often, to get people to read, to delve into areas, because our time is so limited with them. More likely in sort of what you are talking about I'll get a young person who is just staring at a blank page, and Ill walk over and say, "are you just thinking about what you want to write?"...and they'll often say, "naw I don't know what to write", and then "naw I don't like your topics", I'll ask, "what do you like?"..."nothing"..."what's on your mind?"..."nothing"... well then I'll challenge the kid, and say, "well I don't think so, dead people have nothing on their mind but living people have things on their mind, you know, are you thinking about home, do you want to get out, are you angry, did something happen?" And then sooner or later, or sooner than later, you'll hit on something that appeals to them, either really is on their mind or it will spark something that becomes on their mind. Like, "oh, oh that's a good topic, I'll write about that." One kid I remember, a couple weeks ago, who generally wrote but wasn't writing, said he wasn't feeling it and wasn't going to write that day. And I say, "well you gotta be feeling something"...and he said, "nah, I just wish I was back in the boxing ring"..."well what boxing ring?"..."well I been boxing since I was eight, and it gets out my aggressions"...and I say what a great topic and he immediately turned that sentence into a two page wonderful essay about boxing. But I wouldn't have been able to initiate that conversation because I didn't know he was a boxer, it was just in that little dialogue...that sparked that...and that is much more likely than saying, "If you are interested in prison writing, can I get you a book?", and that does happen, we defnitely do have those conversations...but they are much less likely to happen than that immediate what is on your mind today, question.

L: Yeah, that's one of the challenges I'm facing is time, since we have one month, but one of the other things too, is encouraging them to read from each other. Two years ago for example, I worked with a group that was able to get some poems from a facility and in sharing that back with them in the form of a pamphlet, we hoped it would encourage reading by learning from one another...

M: Yes, and one of the things that we do, not routinely, some units do it routinely, and I find its really good thing when you can pull it off, some units its just, for reasons that are kind of mysterious can't be pulled off. When you build into the workshop for a period at the end for them to read what they have written, its very reinforcing, in the larger units, again the police man's function takes over and I really hate that, you know, "shut up" while someone is reading, respect requires you to listen, you have to say that four or five or six times, it gets very tiresome. And so often, just suspend the reading part cause its not worth telling people you should listen, but when they do, and when it is sort of a routine and they expect it and you don't have to say be quiet, you get a lot of reinforcement amongst the listeners. They recognize what people have written as part of their own lives, they recognize the fact that they are getting recognition for writing about it, we applaud at the end of writing, almost whatever is written. We even allow them in their writing, when they are reading out loud to say the words that we wouldn't allow in the printed publication, if they have fuck in their piece and they want to read that, I don't mind, but I let them know, I'll have to change that when we publish it. So that gives them a certain freedom, and a certain respect in response, and I think that that may be kind of what you are talking about, that importance of reading...and also I am an English teacher and a writer, basically this comes from my writing experience, I will tell people just as a skill, that they will find things they are reading aloud that they missed, they will find mistakes they made, misspellings, left out a word, whatever it is...and I will often say, "you should read aloud everything you ever write, even if it is a letter to your girlfriend, because your ear is a teacher and your eye is not, your eye will miss it 90% of the time, and your ear will catch it 90% of the time"...and it works, I just know from my own experience and they are really like that, because when they do it, they'll find that, "oh, a period goes here because my voice dropped here"...that type of thing, so in that regard, reading becomes another kind of literacy tool.

L: How can they apply these skills into an opportunity? For example with Will Roy...

M: Well, Will Roy is a number of people here that have been through the system. But part of it is that, just sort of the...getting through the system to here, part of it I think is feeling that sense of self esteem, that comes with people coming back every week and saying, "you are worth something", you are teaching something that is important, people out there don't know what you're saying, you got knowledge that other people don't have, you should explain that, you should ensure that, because you are a teacher. These are things that I often say both in the unit and in my responses, that sense of feeling like you are somebody, when you may not have felt that before, I think you can't actually calculate its benefits. You know, you don't know that if because this young person now feels like he can do something, he then goes and applies for a job that he might not have applied for before, because he didn't feel confident enough to do it. You just don't know those things because they are out of your control. Unless they come here, we don't have a system where we know what they are doing, so I am just guessing that for a number of young people it becomes easier to maneuver in the real world because they feel better about themselves. But outside of that, it is very hit and miss. I have a young person who right now is desperate for a job, and I have another friend unrelated to The Beat who has some contacts in the temp work world, so I put those two together to see if this kid can get a job through the temp service that my other friend has good contacts with, but see, that's kind of hit and miss, there is nothing organized about that, each of us has our own contacts and we try to employ them where we can for those people that we think, will work out, that wont disappoint us and make us look ridiculous. So, I wish, to be honest with you, I think that is one of our failures but its an understandable one, we are just to small we don't have the resources, but I guess its to say, it's a failure of the system to follow through and follow up so that people have field productive and can be productive, that is something that I wish we could do much more of.

L: Like networking?

M: Networking, but networking in the world of profit, not in the world of non-profit, we have plenty of networking in the non-profit world, but non-profits don't hire, they are like us, we are all scrambling for the same dollar. I mean they do from time to time, and that's good and you should be aware of that, but people, one of the things we say to the young people that work here is, don't think of this as a career, it's a stepping stone towards a career; the money is in the private sector, not in the public sector. So I wish we had better relationships or somewhat more formal relationships with UPS and Fed Ex or anyone that hires.

L: Are there any issues associated with gender participation?

Michael Kroll: That is a good question. It is an interesting question, I'm not quite sure how to answer that, I can tell you for example, in Alameda there is a girls unit, and that unit is superlative, they take their writing seriously, they read at the end of their writing, they turn out in these kind of 40 minute writing periods, I say 40 minute because we have 15 to 20 minutes discussion before. So they have about 40 minutes to actually write at the most. But these girls routinely at week after week turn out some of the most powerful writing, very emotionally revealing and deep writing. But at the same time at the girls unit in San Francisco, there are certainly girls in that unit who do just what I described in Alameda, as a unit, they are not nearly as serious as dedicated as respectful as each other as they are in Oakland. I cannot tell you, even surmise or speculate why that is. I don't know if that is a sex difference or a difference in units. There is no way for me to know that. I think that one of the things about the girls that I've experienced, although I don't have a girls unit right now...and I have had in the past is that often girls become sexualized very, very early, that is the victim of abuse at a very early age, and that becomes manifested in kind of a behavior problem, where they become sexualized towards you. They relate in a sexual way, it is the only way that they have been taught to relate with men. And that becomes a problem that you have to deal with sort of on a one to one basis and saying, this kind of approach is not acceptable in this environment. But that is not a common thing, its just something you see more in the girls unit then you do in the...well you never see it in the boys units because if there were sexual attraction with the boys they certainly would never own up to it, because that is just the worst of all admissions in an all locked male facility. So that is one that I think there may be a difference, other than that, I don't think there are many differences on a gender basis.

L: Could you tell us about the trust that exist in The Beat Within as suppose to the trust that exist in a classroom setting or between a correctional officer or teacher?

M: Yeah, I think that, it's a good question. In some respects that question of trust in a penal institution versus in a public school has to do with the mind set of the authority, the adult, the teacher, the counselor, or the facilitator...as he or she comes into that institution whether it is the school or the prison. In the school, you approach it very openly, you start with trust, if you know what I mean, you don't distrust your students unless they earn your distrust. In the penal setting your come in with a...but when I say this all of these are generalizations, I want you to make clear that I'm not saying everybody, or even me...but I'm saying in general, the public approaches people that have been locked up as a breed apart, as a them, it is not the us. Even though I certainly see it as the us...most people don't. And the them can be defined in many, many ways...you know in war right now the Iraqis are the them, or the Vietnamese were the them, but in a prison setting its all the them, they are all criminals and we are all non-criminals is how we view it, so trust then has to be developed over time, from the point of view from the facilitator or the teacher, or the adults. From the point of view of the kid I think it is exactly the same thing for different reasons, a public school kid for the most part goes into the classroom, without needing to distrust...I mean they have their sense of what a teacher and a school is, and they respond and they do what they have to do to get their A's, B's, C's whatever it is they are going to get, or go out for sports, but the notion trust is just not a very big one on their agenda. But, those young people, almost to a person, who end up in our juvenile halls, our California Youth Authority and in our state youth prisons across the country, are there, because they have been betrayed from a very early time. They have been betrayed by parents who abandon them, by parents who beat them, by parents who weren't there, by sexual misconduct against them, by not having food on the table because no one was there to provide it, or provide it sporadically, so they have built up a tremendous distrust for the world in general, for adults in particular. And that is their mind set when they come in, so you have this double barrier, the adult has his or her own barrier to overcome, and the kid has her or her own barrier to overcome so it is much more difficult to establish trust in that setting than in a public school setting. At the same time, I just don't think trust is much of an issue in a public school setting, it only becomes an issue when it is betrayed, when some kid turns in a paper that the teacher finds out was copied. Then it becomes an issue between that individual and that teacher, but in a general manner it is hardly ever an issue as opposed to a juvenile hall where it begins as an issue with every kid. "Why should I trust you, I've heard your shit before. Your gonna tell me I shouldn't have robbed, you think you're the first person that has ever told me that, your going to tell me I shouldn't slang dope, you think you're the first person to tell me that, I know all that shit." As so it's that mind set, you have to got to overcome that, just with perseverance. It isn't the message, that is to say, it isn't that I'm telling you, you shouldn't be slanging dope, that you have to trust me on, you can totally disagree with me about that, what I want you to do is trust that I'm being honest with you, trust that I'm going to be here next week, trust that I'm never going to betray you, trust that if you tell me that you did something that you haven't been prosecuted for, I'm not going to run to the DA and tell the DA. Those are the things that you have to build over time, and it really is that consistency, that ultimately builds the trust that you need to have so ironically the young people that almost all of us prefer to deal with are the heavy hitters, or the murderers, and other high end offenders, and the reason for that is, they have a long time to establish this relationship with you. They aren't just there for a week, a day, or a month. They are there for a period of time in which they can judge for themselves whether your are going to be constant, as you say you are.

L: How are some of these workshops conducted?

M: Here is generally how I would go into a workshop. I'll go into a workshop and I'll ask, "Is there anyone here who is new to The Beat Within?" And generally there will be one or two, or sometimes none, and generally there are three or four who I know to be old, but who will still raise their hands, like, we're in the 7th grade sometimes...And there is a lot of by the way...I don't want to make this sound like its all serious, we do a lot of joking, a lot of playing, a lot of laughing at least in my workshops...but anyway, I will start with that. And if a kid says, "yeah I've never been to a workshop before", then I'll say, "have you ever seen The Beat Within before?", and almost always they will say, yes, because it's such a popular publication. And I'll say, "well the only difference is, you have been reading it, now you are writing it", and I'll show them a Beat, and if they haven't seen The Beat at all, then I'll tell them we have been around for 8 or 9 years, that it started in this very facility if indeed it did, and that the whole point is for you to have an outlet to express yourself. Whatever that expression is, except...and then I'll give those little limitations I talked to you about before, such as holding your gang up as if it is the highest value, using hate words, hating on anyone, threatening anyone, and the small list of words, "bitch", "nigger", and so forth...you can write about anything and we will learn what the limits are, but they are pretty straight forward and obvious, you just think of good, logical reasoning would be and you can write about anything...and then I'll introduce the several two or three of us, because you never go into a workshop...well I wont say never, often we are short staffed and we do go in by ourselves, but ideally there should be 2 or 3 facilitators per workshop...and the reason for that, basically is that different young people, just like different old people respond to different people differently...so I got a lot of fans who love me, but I got a lot of detractors who hate me, and don't like my style at all, but they like someone else's style, or they like someone else who is a different color, different age...you know I'm sixty-one years old, I got white hair...that's not the quickest kind of person for these young people to respond to...so it takes me longer than it will take Will Roy, who automatically brings his credentials, because he is one of them, they recognize that he has been where they are and there is a certain amount of trust immediately that he gets that I don't get that I have to earn. So I'll give them a little 5 minute background on what The Beat is and what its for, and then I'll ask for a reader...by this time I have passed out, or one of us has passed out The Beat topics which we bring in... and paper which we bring in and often pencils which are supplied usually to them usually by the unit, but sometimes we have to bring them in...ask for a reader, volunteer, who will read the first topic and then we discuss it, we spend 10 minutes talking about that topic, sometimes I have to arbitrarily cut off the discussion, because if it goes to long you have no time to write. And those discussions can get heated sometimes, people start yelling back and forth, and that can be one of the problems...where you tell people, sorry, but this is a discussion, its not an argument, you have to something to say, you say it and then listen to the other person's response. And it becomes that kind of, again, that police function, which I wish we didn't have to play but we do. And then after that discussion we will move on to the second topic do the same thing, and the third topic, do the same thing, and also the third topic is a very brief topic that requires no discussion such as..."I woke up this morning"...fill in the blanks, "My wish for tomorrow is"...so that doesn't require much, more than say, you can take this topic where you want to take it. Then they will start to write, and we the facilitators will wander up and down the isles, either commenting on a particular line that we like or one that we don't understand, and ask what that means, or say, what word did you mean here because I don't think you spelled it right, and they will tell you the word and you spell it for them. And sometimes you sit with a younger student who is unable to write or write so poorly that he doesn't have any confidence in his writing...and you'll say can I help you and he'll say, I want to tell it to you cause I can't write... and you will sit there and write what they say, hoping that sooner or later they will feel confident enough, even in their poor writing to try it themselves, they will never get any better at it. And then at the very end, different workshops do it differently, but, in some workshops they have built in a time period at the end to read what they have written. One of my workshops in San Mateo county, we always do that, and it is really a fine thing to do, in San Francisco I have not been able to pull that off, in Oakland they do it, and then you pass out The Beat Within's which are two weeks late, which is to say, what they wrote two weeks ago, will be in The Beat that we are passing out cause it is a two week process...production. And we pass them out, and they quickly go through the issue to first of all, find their own pieces, and they are very quick, and they are very quick to challenge you if they don't find their names, and of course, you have hundreds of kids, and you cant remember a particular piece, or why it is or why it isn't, but you'll promise to either get back to them...and that is the workshop, thank them for writing, and promise you will see them next week.

L: What types of issues do you present to the participants?

M: We try to give the writers a choice among serious issues, and by serious issues, I'll give you some specific examples...talk about issues that we think relate to their day to day lives. As well as issues that don't necessarily relate to their day to day lives but allow them to get out of their day to day lives. An example of the first, and these examples I'm giving you get repackaged in many, many different ways and different ties, because I mean, we been doing this 9 years and you can't always come up with brand new themes, the themes get repeated in different questions, so for example we had in this last issue, "father figure" was the title...and then we will give a paragraph or two explanation, you know, we know that many of you...we read each week that many of you don't have fathers in your lives...or you have other men, who are surrogate fathers, who operate as if they are fathers...tell us about your experience, did you have a biological father in your life was that good or was that bad, how did that help you, how did that hurt you, if you did not have a biological father, did you have any male that you related to as father or that you still do, and how does that relationship work, what makes a father a father, and these may be, I may have given you four or five different topics, because you can see how many ways you can spin that question. Are you a father, what did it do to you, how did it change you when you saw your own child, these are all questions that we have used. Another topic in this last week, was right and wrong, where does that idea come from, is it fixed, is something right in all cases, or does it depend on circumstances, is anything wrong in all cases, or does it depend on circumstances...and again that whole question of right and wrong, you can see how many separate and distinct topics you can milk in that overall theme. Drugs, why do people take drugs, so that you don't have to make it to specific to them, sometimes they want to write, but they don't want to write about their own lives, so you want to give them an opportunity to pull it away from themselves if they want to, or to focus on themselves if they want to. What do you see in your community that makes you think drugs are harmful, what do you see that makes you think drugs help, what do they help, why do people take drugs, what is your drug, why did you take it, why did you quit? Any of those things, the whys, the open ended questions, not the questions that can be answered yes or no, but the questions that require thought and explanation are the ones we try to go for. That is in the category of deep important questions, family, violence, the street, turf, gangs...what do they offer, how do you see this apparently never ending shoot or be shot kind of mentality ever ending, and if not how do you see your community ending. And then the other category outside of their lives you might say, as we did, we have a writing contest in The Beat right now, which is what is your favorite movie, why, why did you like that movie, what did you like about it, would you like to be in a movie, what would your movie be like? That is away from the specific trauma of their lives, but of course they often incorporate the specifics of their lives into those general questions as well. If you could invite anyone in the world, living or dead to dinner, who would it be and why? So you could see that can go in any direction, one of the...I'm not sure if this is directly answering your question but it is an answer you should hear...which is to say, one of the things I have found myself, that is most distressing and disturbing is that often the young people that end up in the juvenile hall, have such limited experiences, they have vast experiences of a certain kind you know, far more than I have had in violence and staying alive and hustling but its within a two block radius of their lives, you know what I mean? It hardly gets out of the limited view, so their view of the world is very, very limited. So getting them to just let their imaginations run wild is a very difficult thing. And I'll spend sometime at a discussion saying you can take this...you can take me to the moon with this one, you know, where would you like to travel if you could travel anywhere, we'll ask. And I'll say, take me to the most exotic place in the world, and it hardly ever is, its hardly ever more exotic than McDonalds...or some place they know. Hardly ever, in what we would call just being imaginative, just letting their imagination run wild, I don't care where you go with it...they...or you ask a question like, if you could be anyone in the world for one day who would you be?...and 90 percent of the answers, I'll be myself, I don't want to be anybody else...and its that lack of, that fear I think of jumping into the unknown, even the unknown in their minds. And that's a terrible commentary on us as a society not on them. It is what people are exposed to and their exposure is extremely limited, although in that limitation it's a world we barely see at all except through their writing. So those will be the two categories I think that we try to give, many, many different topics but often the same themes, recycled very many different ways.

L: How would you word the benefits that writing provides? (eg. therapeutic, educational).

Michael Kroll: I can tell you that from my own experience that it is because I am a writer and I think that my best writing, is that writing that I do out of powerful emotion, off of the emotion of hate, to be honest, that is my own, that doesn't mean its good or bad, its just my own. But it will be based on kind of an immediate response to something, I'll see something and it is so absurd or so insane or produces such anger in me that I would just sit down and let it all out. And those pieces to me are my favorite pieces of writing and they are therapeutic because it does all come out. Just to let you know, one of my pieces was generated from having the very unfortunate experience of watching a very close friend of mine, get executed in San Quentin in the gas chamber. A very brutal way of killing a human being. I was so full of hate and rage and pain when I watched that, that I wrote a piece on the back of an envelope and that piece got published on the cover of the Nation magazine so I know that the therapy was there because once I wrote it, that sense of being poisoned was out of me, I still felt all the same things I wrote about, I didn't disagree with anything I wrote, but that emotion that propelled it...that hateful poisonous emotion, I dealt with it...in that writing...so from my own experience I know its therapeutic. From the experience of the young people I absolutely see it. I see it week after week. I see young people go out, who are in the writing program, go out, fuck up again, and come back, and they would be so eager to write about that experience where as before they might have bottled it up, they might have screamed about it, they might have said how they were played and what they are going to do when they get out. They will write about it, and it would almost always be, when I left the hall I swore that I would never be back and look at me. I did it again, I can't understand why that...I can't understand...they are processing stuff, they are processing their own thoughts about themselves, and their relationships to the world, and processing is therapeutic, it is therapeutic, and even though therapy ends with tears, sadness, depression, it is still therapeutic, because you probably have to get through that self hate and depression to get to the next level. So I have no doubt that it is one of the most therapeutic in the context of the juvenile hall, writing and particularly writing in The Beat Within, and I say this without trying to be self promoting, I think this is the therapeutic thing that happens there.

L: How can writing establish an identity for the individual themselves?

M: That is interesting, I'm thinking of a particular writer we have had, he calls himself E-Money, he has always called himself E-Money as he has written for us. And I have watched his pieces move from not very literate, he couldn't really write, but just sort of feeling his way to being one of the most powerful teachers we have got who sees himself in the role of teacher, and who actually teaches in a way that is accessible to his quote students, which are his readers. Which he doesn't preach, he doesn't say I'm better than you, he says, "look at the experiences I have had and what they have earned me. And weren't their ways to have earned the knowledge I have gotten in less destructive ways." And I'm putting it in my words, not his words; his words are much more effective. So that is one kind of self identity. There is another writer who started writing to us... said he had never written before, he is a state prisoner, you know we have a back to The Beat Within, section called The Beat Without, which are writings we get through the mail, people we never see eye to eye but who have gotten copies of The Beat Within through whatever means, and have written us saying, "could I write a poem, could I write a piece for your magazine because I have been where those young people are, and I want to say something to them." So we establish this section in the back called The Beat Without, which is some of the most powerful writing we have of course, because these people are in prison they got the time to write and one of the writers that I have established a strong bond with... a relationship with... his writing is so powerful, and is so good, actually we sent off one of his pieces to Harper's magazine last year and they published it. He wrote back saying, "this is the first legitimate money I have ever earned"... he earned 400 hundred dollars for that piece of writing. That, not just the earning of the money, but the seeing that what he wrote was not just worthy, but worthy enough to be pulished in one of the major magazines in the United States, so he writes me a letter saying I know I have all these experiences and I think it would make a good book, but my spelling is bad, my grammar is bad, I don't know how to write, will you help me? I wrote back and said, well of course I'll help you but you know, I have never been published in Harper's magazine. Just to remind him of his own strengths. To me it is equally probable that I could have written him geeze, I got all these stories to tell will you help me write them? You know, you could publish in Harpers, I haven't, but he doesn't see himself in that light, and little by little he is beginning to see that he actually can write. He can write in a way that people want to read what he writes, and he has really changed his kind of world view, his view about human beings, and people who deserve to live and deserve to die, he no longer thinks that it is up to him to decide who deserves to die. It is kind of inspiring to read his letters and to watch this...and he credits us very directly although I'm sure it isn't us very directly it is us indirectly, its him very directly, but that's alright we'll take the credit. Its just an example that how through writings he has begun to see himself in a different way, and in seeing himself in a different way he has begun to see the world in a different way, and it is just really hopeful... it is really hopeful. And yet when he writes a piece, it is just about the most brutal kind of child hood upbringing that anyone can imagine, or even should imagine. Often when we get a piece from him, we wait till the end of the day to read it because if we read it at the beginning of the day we wont really be able to get any work done because it just haunts you throughout the day.

L: Pertaining to the music culture, specifically Hip Hop... I was reading the biography on the website and I've been reading these articles that Donna sent me... how do you feel about Hip Hop and The Beat Within?

Michael Kroll: You know, again that is an interesting question, particularly to me, because I'm probably the most... well I don't guess I'm the most, but I'm one of the group of us that is totally out of tune with Hip Hop. It's not my cultural upbringing, and it is very hard for me, to even understand the words of Hip Hop, some of the music, just is hard... my ear is not in tune to that rhythmic style, or at least it wasn't at all when I first started with The Beat. Because it is the medium of I think art, poetry and music, for the most part, for this generation, and particularly for this subset of this generation... I have become much more familiar both with the professional practitioners...I mean you know that the whole Beat was born around the death of Tupac, did you know that?

L: Yes.

M: So Hip Hop has a real central role in the life of The Beat. But beyond that, young people often write flows...I mean we print their flows, so they are just so excited to hear often that they can write a flow, because Hip Hop has been so vilified from so many...like President Clinton, even before he was president attacking Sister Souljah, not because... it was purely a political issue, that's all... he wanted votes and he thought this was a clever way of getting votes. And then it becomes this generational thing, the generation who loves Sister Souljah versus this white older male/female population that dismisses anything about this culture. So I think this is the current medium of expression for the most part, I encourage it, sometimes I'm just blown away by the quality of a flow that maybe was started by a kid in his room, but then comes out and takes on a life of its own, one kid picking up where another kid left off and its really quite inspiring, and it reveals tremendous skill and talent in a manner that most adults do not credit as skill and as talent. Hip Hop has this reputation of being gangster, words that we don't accept, and its destroying our culture, and its producing violence and all of those things that every generation has heard, you know... and I heard it when I was a boy, whatever the Hip Hop was of my generation, I can't remember what it was, but it was destroying us just like this is destroying kids today... that is the dynamic and the duality of it. I feel myself privileged because I am now immersed in a cultural expression that otherwise I too, would have been dismissed, you know what I'm saying? And not just the them that are talking about their guns and their bitches. Plenty of it is just in the opposite direction, very positive, and so to see both the message and the ability to express that message in this rhythmic beating way, and it may not be my music, but it is definitely music, it is music to many, many ears. And it has become more and more music to my own ears, and I don't just turn it off and automatically say, I just can't understand that shit... I listen now. And I got to tell you something else in reverse, with these young people I have great privilege of working with in this office, and that keep me on my toes and that keep me young, I...my own particular music choice is classical music, although I like a lot of different kinds of Jazz, all kinds of music, but Classical is really what my upbringing is, and so I will listen to a piece that I particularly like and if one of the young people is walking by I'll take my earphones off and say, "wait, wait, wait, Will listen to this..."...and you know often its just shit to them, just like the Hip Hop was to me...but other times its not, often they'll hear something, and say, "is that what its like, I'd like to hear more of that, so it's an interesting little reverse dynamic...