didnât want to ruin their reps as hard-asses wouldnât respond to the call. Others just might not clue in that the call was for book club.
âMake sure the chaplain calls every block,â suggested Graham.
âAlso some books are harder,â said Dread. âAnd men get distracted watching TV, working out or sleeping and donât want to show up to book club looking like a fool with the book unread.â
How about the guys who showed up without their books, Carol wanted to know. Did they sell them for drugs?
âThat would be some very cheap drugs,â said Dread, laughing hysterically.
Carol showed them a mock-up of the certificate that would go in their files for acting as ambassadors.
âI think ours should be backdated,â negotiated Dread, implying that heâd been acting as an unofficial ambassador for months.
While it was the chaplain who had made it possible for Carol to launch the book club, the meeting with the ambassadors reminded her that the book clubâs home in the chapel was a mixed blessing. Religion and books sometimes didnât mix. She was feeling similar unease about her partnership with Prison Fellowship Canada, which for the previous few months had carried out her book orders and shipping to the prisons, as well as extending to Carol their standard book discount. An old friend, who was her contact at Prison Fellowship, was being noncommittal about ongoing funding. Carol told me she sensed that the organization was not willing to help buy books beyond the book clubâs start-up period. She said that Prison Fellowship had also expressed a desire for more influence in her selection of volunteers, in keeping with its mandate. In particular, Carol told me, it wanted assurances that the book club volunteers were people of faith. Carol insisted that this was a secular book club and that she wanted volunteers whose passion was books. Impatient as always, she accelerated the process of registering Book Clubs for Inmates Inc. as a non-profit corporation, the first step in registering as a charity and tapping alternate sources of funding. Another organization was not going to call the shots.
Carol was at the wheel again that day, driving us back to Toronto. She looked exhausted and I wondered if I should offer to drive. I knew she suffered from sleep interruptions and I had heard her up at night during one sleepover at Amherst Island. She wore earplugs to bed in the spring to avoid being woken early by the birdsâ dawn chorus. But as we talked, I learned it was something else that had caused her to lose sleep the previous night. It was lambing season, and Carolâs neighbours at Topsy Farm on the island had phoned her in the middle of the night to ask if she would help rescue newborn lambs. During one of the dampest springs on record, many lambs were hypothermic after gushing out of their mothersâ wombs into fields pocked with near-freezing puddles of water. Working together with her neighbours, Carol had wrapped the lambs in towels and brought them into the farm kitchen to warm them with her body heat. Gradually they began to shiver, open their eyes and bleat, their umbilical cords lolling against their bellies. She felt maternal and literally pastoral all at once.
Now Carol had flocks inside and outside the prison. And both flocks had guards. Topsy Farmâs most popular photograph of their sheep is one in which all the animals are facing the photographer. Itâs only when you gaze at it for several seconds that you realize that posing among the white-faced sheep, and almost identical in colouring and size, are white Pyrenees guard dogs.
4
THE N-WORD
C AROLâS EFFORTS TO MAKE the Collins Bay Book Club feel more like a book club on the outside had already moved into its next phase: inviting prominent authors to visit and answer the menâs questions about the books. The first writer she targeted was Lawrence Hill, whose breakout 2007
âMake sure the chaplain calls every block,â suggested Graham.
âAlso some books are harder,â said Dread. âAnd men get distracted watching TV, working out or sleeping and donât want to show up to book club looking like a fool with the book unread.â
How about the guys who showed up without their books, Carol wanted to know. Did they sell them for drugs?
âThat would be some very cheap drugs,â said Dread, laughing hysterically.
Carol showed them a mock-up of the certificate that would go in their files for acting as ambassadors.
âI think ours should be backdated,â negotiated Dread, implying that heâd been acting as an unofficial ambassador for months.
While it was the chaplain who had made it possible for Carol to launch the book club, the meeting with the ambassadors reminded her that the book clubâs home in the chapel was a mixed blessing. Religion and books sometimes didnât mix. She was feeling similar unease about her partnership with Prison Fellowship Canada, which for the previous few months had carried out her book orders and shipping to the prisons, as well as extending to Carol their standard book discount. An old friend, who was her contact at Prison Fellowship, was being noncommittal about ongoing funding. Carol told me she sensed that the organization was not willing to help buy books beyond the book clubâs start-up period. She said that Prison Fellowship had also expressed a desire for more influence in her selection of volunteers, in keeping with its mandate. In particular, Carol told me, it wanted assurances that the book club volunteers were people of faith. Carol insisted that this was a secular book club and that she wanted volunteers whose passion was books. Impatient as always, she accelerated the process of registering Book Clubs for Inmates Inc. as a non-profit corporation, the first step in registering as a charity and tapping alternate sources of funding. Another organization was not going to call the shots.
Carol was at the wheel again that day, driving us back to Toronto. She looked exhausted and I wondered if I should offer to drive. I knew she suffered from sleep interruptions and I had heard her up at night during one sleepover at Amherst Island. She wore earplugs to bed in the spring to avoid being woken early by the birdsâ dawn chorus. But as we talked, I learned it was something else that had caused her to lose sleep the previous night. It was lambing season, and Carolâs neighbours at Topsy Farm on the island had phoned her in the middle of the night to ask if she would help rescue newborn lambs. During one of the dampest springs on record, many lambs were hypothermic after gushing out of their mothersâ wombs into fields pocked with near-freezing puddles of water. Working together with her neighbours, Carol had wrapped the lambs in towels and brought them into the farm kitchen to warm them with her body heat. Gradually they began to shiver, open their eyes and bleat, their umbilical cords lolling against their bellies. She felt maternal and literally pastoral all at once.
Now Carol had flocks inside and outside the prison. And both flocks had guards. Topsy Farmâs most popular photograph of their sheep is one in which all the animals are facing the photographer. Itâs only when you gaze at it for several seconds that you realize that posing among the white-faced sheep, and almost identical in colouring and size, are white Pyrenees guard dogs.
4
THE N-WORD
C AROLâS EFFORTS TO MAKE the Collins Bay Book Club feel more like a book club on the outside had already moved into its next phase: inviting prominent authors to visit and answer the menâs questions about the books. The first writer she targeted was Lawrence Hill, whose breakout 2007
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