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Sunday, March 17, 2002

By David Templeton, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Seldom Seem, David Templeton's whimsical perspective on life and times in and around Washington County, appears weekly in Washington Sunday.

One curious detail about Carole Waterhouse's first novel, "Without Wings," is that much of it takes place inside a men's penitentiary.

It makes the nosy reader wonder how a female English professor at California University of Pennsylvania could know so darn much about life behind bars in a men's prison.

Yes, it's a novel, and the writer has literary license. But don't think Waterhouse wasn't writing from experience. She's spent plenty of time inside a men's penitentiary -- the State Correctional Institution Pittsburgh, to be exact.

For two summers, Waterhouse taught 15-week writing and journalism classes in the prison and enjoyed the experience. "[The inmates] were extremely nice to me," she said. "They wanted me to come back. They opened doors for me and wanted to carry my books."

Waterhouse, who lives on a 10-acre horse farm near Ligonier, raises thoroughbreds and a breed known as warmbloods and would seem to be the least likely person to have experience inside a penitentiary.

But after receiving a master's degree in fine arts at the University of Pittsburgh in 1984, she began teaching at Pitt and learned about a program in which inmates can earn college degrees and teach other inmates how to read.

She volunteered and eventually found herself in an SCI Pittsburgh classroom surrounded by glass so guards could keep an eye on the inmates. One year, she taught an afternoon class, and the next year, she taught an evening class.

The hard part was getting to the classroom. She often had to walk across the penitentiary grounds through hordes of inmates without an escort, and inmates occasionally yelled obscenities at her. Waterhouse said she was struck by crowding inside the prison, where three men lived in cells built for two, leaving no room for all three to stand at the same time.

"Image what that would be like, living that close to people, especially people bordering on being dysfunctional," she said. "And you can't show emotions. You have to put on a tough-guy act."

Inside the classroom, inmates enjoyed writing fiction to escape prison reality. None wrote or talked about prison life. Some did discuss their families and financial problems. Class became an open forum to share thoughts and feelings.

"In most of their stories they were going to the ocean or hiking into the mountains," she said. "Fiction was something they could escape into."

Journalism, however, was too real for them and stoked anger. Many inmates had bad experiences with newspaper stories about their crimes. So they didn't enjoy writing news stories.

But inmates generally enjoyed the courses and worked to make sure Waterhouse would continue teaching. "Some were serious about writing," she said. "The level was as good as what I was seeing among Pitt undergraduates at the time. There were some interesting story lines."

Her experience at SCI Pittsburgh serves as the basis for "Without Wings," published by American House Book Publishers in Baltimore and released in January. The front cover features a watercolor painting by Heather Powell, a Cal U graduate who took writing classes from Waterhouse and now serves as president of the Pittsburgh Society of Artists.

"Without Wings" is for sale online at www.barnesandnoble.com and www.amazon.com, and in the Cal U. bookstore, Geezer's Literary Bookstore in Brownsville, Drummer Boy Books in Ligonier and Pennywise Books in Latrobe.

She will sign copies of her novel Saturday and next Sunday in Indian Summer Books in Castle Shannon as part of the Emerging Literary Voices Festival. Another book signing will be held May 4 in Barnes and Noble in Greensburg.

"Without Wings" deals with a 36-year-old woman named Rachel Weyant who is facing a turning point in life. Her first husband had died in a small plane crash, and her only solace is imaginary flights she takes with her dead husband. She marries an older man who's still infatuated with his first wife. Then Rachel's best friend, Annie, shows up with a mysterious 6-month-old baby she claims is her own.

Meanwhile, as the book cover states, Rachel begins a new job teaching English literature classes in a penitentiary and meets, "an inmate who promises to guide her not only through the dark corridors of the prison, but more importantly, the labyrinth of her own life."

At one point, Rachel receives an anonymous love letter from another inmate that prompts her to idealize the letter writer rather than consider him realistically.

That part of the novel is based in reality.

While teaching at SCI Pittsburgh, Waterhouse wrote a free-lance story for the Pittsburgh Press Magazine about prison poets and artists she encountered there. A Press editor asked her to get illustrations from a particular inmate, and Waterhouse had to ask inmates in her class to pass her address on to the artistic inmate.

It was a bold move, but the inmate sent her the illustrations in time for publication. Her address also ended up being passed throughout the prison, and one inmate sent her a love letter.

"He was nice and polite," Waterhouse said. "He kept referring to how he was imagining my moon-shaped face. It's not how a woman wants to be described." Another woman she knew also received the same letter, almost word for word, but her face was described differently.

Her prison experiences rolled around and brewed in her mind. She began teaching at Cal U in 1986 and earned her doctorate in 1990 from Ohio University, where she wrote a creative dissertation she later transformed into the novel.

"I didn't use people I met in prison as models for characters in the novel," she said. "But I did use details about life there."

Details that let her imagination fly in writing "Without Wings."

David Templeton can be reached by e-mail at: dtempleton@post-gazette.com