✏️🛠️ How to Become a Successful Writer From Behind Bars

We spoke to Naratively's 2023 Memoir Grand Prize Winner Christopher Blackwell about how he manages to be such a prolific writer without access to Google Docs, copy-and-paste or the internet.

Photo courtesy of Christopher Blackwell; collage by Yunuen Bonaparte

In order to have an hour-long conversation with Christopher Blackwell for this interview, it took three separate 20-minute phone calls, which cost about $1.50 each. There’s a slight delay on the phone so we interrupted each other a bunch, and several times when we were right in the middle of a deep thought or revelation, I heard the now-familiar “Thank you for using Securus, goodbye” before the phone went dead and I had to wait for Christopher to call me back.

A few days later, I did this whole process all over again in order to edit Christopher’s story, which I also did via phone. Over several hours and many more interrupted calls, we fact-checked anecdotes, finessed lines and relentlessly labored over details for his Grand Prize-winning essay, which published yesterday.

I’m no stranger to prison communication — I’ve had a pen pal through Letters to Solitary since 2016, but I’d never edited a story with someone workin…