Natasha Trethewey in Athens

Went to the Georgia Review's Earth Day celebration tonight at the Botanical Gardens. Saw fellow Mississippian Natasha Trethewey read from Beyond Katrina.

Stunning...

Reading at Avid Bookshop, April 12, 2012

About the New Town Revue

Last year my buddy Al Dixon and I started an Athens, Georgia based reading and music series, the New Town Revue. It's held at Athens newest independent bookstore, Avid Bookshop. So far packed houses have been entertained by readers Reginald McKnight, Sabrina Orah Mark, Jeff Fallis, and Beth Hall Thrasher, as well as musicians Madeline Adams, Old Smokey, and Tom Eisenbraun.

I am particularly stoked about the next installment of NTR, because one of my long-time favorite musicians/ writers, David Lowery of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, will be reading excerpts from his blog, 300 Songs. He might change his mind and surprise us with a short story. He definitely will play a few songs.

I'm also reading a piece from my teenage reform school captivity narrative, UnReformed. Scary, yet exciting!!!

The April 12th event starts @ 7 p.m. sharp. Looking forward to seeing you @ Avid Bookshop!

About UnReformed

On January 4, 1990, I boarded a plane in New Orleans for the Dominican Republic. I was headed to Escuela Caribe, an evangelical Christian reform school (also the setting of Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres). The school had been referred to my parents by the influential religious organization, Focus on the Family.

My life would never be the same.

I thought I was going to a Christian boarding school. Instead I entered a two year long nightmare where I lost all basic human rights. I quickly learned to ask permission from my “housefather” to stand, to sit, to use the bathroom, and to enter each and every room. If I didn’t I was punished with hours of forced exercise, sometimes holding stress positions (push-up position, or holding my arms out to the side weighted with books) for long periods of time. Staff and fellow students watched my every gesture, keeping track of my “progress” on a daily point sheet.

One of these days, staff said, I would move up the school’s level system, confronting those with lower rank than me. I promised myself I would never do that.

I lied.

Awful things happened. Kids being beaten, molested, put into solitary confinement. Being manipulated in God’s name intensified the pressure. When the first Gulf War began, we were told it was “the beginning of the end of the world.” Girls who had undergone abortions were denounced as “baby-killers.” One housefather refused to allow my friend to see a counselor on the anniversary of her dad’s death because she refused to recognize Jesus as her Lord and Savior.

All letters to and from home were censored. All phone calls were supervised and taped. There was no way to tell anyone on the outside about the abuse.

Over time, I changed. I became a high-ranker, confronting lower ranking students in ways I had previously vowed never to engage. I sucked up to staff members by debating Scripture.

Eventually I graduated and made my escape. I was so spun out from the trauma that I couldn’t even write, but gradually, I achieved stability. Lots of my friends weren’t so lucky.

Unreformed seeks to open the eyes of America to the consequences of imprisoning our youth in residential treatment facilities, putting a human face to the statistics, a cultural context to the numbers and psychological insight into the practice, propelled by the memories of what happened to my friends and myself.

Some died. Most survived. We all changed.

This is our story.

Kidnapped for Christ

Over Christmas break I flew to LA, where I met up with filmmaker Kate Logan. She interviewed me for her documentary Kidnapped for Christ, the Escuela Caribe expose she's been working on the past six years.

It was intense....

Escuela Caribe was an abusive religious reform school located in the Dominican Republic. It was founded in 1971, and only recently shut down. Many alumni have provided testimonials of their time at this site. For the past seven (?) years, I've been working on my EC captivity narrative, UnReformed.

Kate first encountered EC in 2004. She spent a day on the campus, and left with the impression that the school was rehabilitating hardened juvenile delinquents, teaching them about Jesus.

In 2006, Kate and Peter, her cameraman, returned. Initially she planned to make a feel-good piece about the school. But once she arrived at Escuela Caribe, she couldn’t deny that the kids at EC were being abused in bizarre ways. She kept her suspicions to herself and shot footage for six weeks, interviewing students. She even smuggled a letter out.

When I flew to LA, Kate quizzed me about the time I spent at Escuela Caribe in the early nineties. It’s been fascinating for us both to discover how little the school’s core philosophy, that their charges need to be “broken” through punishment, changed. It’s heartbreaking to realize how many lives have been damaged during the school's four decades.

Hopefully Kidnapped for Christ will help people realize what type of abuse happens in teen treatment facilities, even ones purported to be Christian. Ideally it would spur the government to regulate such facilities, and prompt parents to think twice before sending their kids away.