Richard W Hardwick – Interviewed by Caitlin Walker July 28th 2010

Background to Richard

I am a writer and have just finished my second book ‘Andalucia’. My first novel ‘Kicked Out’ was inspired by working in youth offending teams and homeless hostels. Published in 2009 it became Waterstones Recommended Read and was described by them as “a fantastic book expressing the cynicism and dissatisfaction of those on the edge of society”.

Laura Sandy of New Writing North wrote in The Journal: “When allowed to build, Hardwick's writing has the power and humanity to make you wonder about the way you see the world and to give voice to those whose stories usually remain untold”

I've been highly influenced by NLP, Symbolic Modelling and Clean Language in my work and in my personal life.
There was a time when I thought I'd go more deeply into the field and become a therapist but instead I've edged towards the creative writing and am using it
indirectly in a therapeutic capacity.

I teach creative writing in HMP Frankland and HMP Durham. I helped students from HMP Low Newton create an animated film recently as well as teaching some Creative and Therapeutic sessions with young offenders at HMP Castington.

Are you a teacher or a facilitator?

That depends on the funding. If I'm being funded through the education service there is so much paper work to do, lesson plans, learning outcomes etc. If I'm being funded through the arts its more about catch up sessions where I share what I'm doing. I work most effectively when I'm freed from the confines of the paperwork that goes with being part of the education service.

I don't see myself as a teacher – even the students say I'm not a proper teacher because I'm much more relaxed and therefore have that rapport with them. There's something about working with prisoners where rapport is hugely essential. For a lot of prisoners being able to suss people out has been a big part of their lives and at times their lives may have depended upon it. Being able to be genuine when with them and having excellent rapport and being comfortable with yourself means things work so much better. Some teachers who are scared of prisoners act in ways to keep control and then control becomes the most crucial thing rather than the process or the end product. This wouldn't work for a creative environment.

Why is it so important to be genuine?

Within prisons, there's an overall atmosphere of intimidation and bullying. Prisoners, in general, don't feel able to reveal themselves or their true emotions. They feel they'll be humiliated and expressing themselves can be used against them. In the creative writing classes they can and do get the opportunity to really be themselves. This is where being able to be myself and role model this for them is key.

What are you offering prisoners?

Creative writing has great therapeutic benefits. The simple act of taking stuff out of your head and putting it down on paper and then rearranging it is a therapeutic process.

During the first draft, you take the stuff out of your head – according to research, this uses the left hand side of your brain. Reviewing the work and editing it, then rewriting is much more
structured and uses the right hand side of your brain.  Research in America and Canada has shown the great therapeutic benefits this can bring.

A lot of prisoners are in prison for a very long time and have often done something awful and now have a lot of time to try and come to terms with that. They have so much time to themselves that they're often focussed inwards. They often have a great deal of guilt and spend time replaying the story of what they've done.

Getting them to write stuff down is a slower and more methodical process than thinking. They have the opportunity to think of whether this word is the right word or that phrase is the right phrase and if not, what make more sense. It's a cognitive process that they can develop themselves. They leave the class and go back to their cell and do more work on their writing. It breaks events and emotions apart and gives them an opportunity to really attend to them. They can create very small sections of their experience that fit together and make the whole. Then the particles themselves can be looked at in turn and understood.

How do you use introduce Clean Language and NLP with these students?

The two areas of creative writing and modelling are very compatible.

To begin with I simply state that we all have the ability to go backwards in time to places in our lives, whether they're sad places, happy places, places where we learnt something, where we were frightened or pleased with themselves. I ask them to go to a time before they were in prison, when something changed – that's initially where I ask them to go to. Then I ask them to write about that time.

When they're finished doing that; I play the five senses game in the same way as I played it with yourself and it's always hugely powerful.

(The 5 senses game is one of the key tools of Training Attention's approach to personal and group development. It can be found in full on our introduction to clean language DVD)

I simply start it by saying we're playing a game – and just do what I ask you to – I don't link it to writing until it's finished

I say things like: 'see an elephant' – 'what kind of elephant is it?', 'whose elephant is not like that' – I don't insist everyone talks – some people don't say a word.

I'm careful with certain things, I don't say “smell perfume' if they're sex offenders. I go through the whole thing – asking them to see things, smell things, listen, taste, feel – I keep them in that experience as long as they want.

The 5 senses is the most powerful thing I've done in my lessons by far. It's the most powerful tool I've come across. The prisoners go on journeys in their minds. In the rest of their lives, they're stuck in a cell and do as they're told – they have very little freedom – the 5 senses takes them away from prison to somewhere completely different.

One prisoner said  “I've just tasted my mums sunday dinner and I've been fishing with my best friends on the sea and I've walked through a tunnel of marigolds where I used to work and I can't do any of those things anymore”. I was wary that this had been too much for him and asked afterwards how he was. He said it had been a really really enjoyable and useful experience – it was a special time for him to go back there and he also saw how useful the exercise was in terms of writing.

We talk about how powerful the senses are, how they take us on journeys, how useful they are in writing as you use them to take the reader on journeys too, to bring their senses alive while they’re reading. They make writing so much more realistic and powerful.

This exercise can take quite a long time. I let them have as much time as they need. Afterwards I usually put them back on their timeline and ask them to move forward to a time when they're not in prison anymore and I get them to associate into this time and I ask them to write a piece using all of the senses about being free. The only time I don't do that is in Frankland prison when I'm working with people who have very lengthy sentences or will never get out so I'm careful with my groups in that way. In these cases I simply ask them to go back to the time when ‘something changed’ and add the five senses throughout that piece of work.

How do you use the clean questions in your work?

I use clean langauge with poetry. I start on a 1-1 basis. I get them to free write whatever's in their
heads for 10 minutes with no attention on punctuation and no regard to making sense, grammatically or otherwise. Then I get them to go back and circle the 5 most important words in
that freewriting.

Next, I go through the 9 basic clean language questions on each particular word, one at a time and get them to write their answers down. Sometimes they're quite happy to tell me the answers as they write
them down. If the answers are particularly private or personal they might not share them with me, just write them down. Then I get them to use these answers as the basis for poems and its quite usual they'll have a number of poems out of that 10 minutes of free writing and the answers they get from the clean questions. It's very useful because of the metaphorical nature of the answers that clean questions elicit. Poetry relies on metaphor quite heavily so clean questions work wonderfully on it.

The questions allow them to go somewhere that they don't ever seem to have been before – deeper into their experience. It enables them to turn their stuff into metaphors which are then safer and sometimes not as emotional or aggressive. After the session they often have a great period of contemplation and a lot of silence. Some prisoners go back to their cells and spend a hell of a lot of time to come to terms with what may have been dormant for quite a while. Others go straight towards creating. Taking this stuff and creating new things that have rhythm and beauty in the form of a poem can work wonderfully. They’re also creating something that other people value as well as themselves.
One of the lads last week commented after his work was made public; “For the first time I've felt valued and you don't feel valued in prisons.”

This sounds like a form of group therapy, do you advertise it as therapeutic?

No, when I started I had this naïve idea that I would run joint therapy and creative writing packages.
I soon learnt that prisoners have a negative view of psychology or anything psychologically based. They see psychologists as part of the prison system and as having a huge impact on how long they stay in prison and on what they can and cannot do in prison. They complain, rightly or wrongly, that psychologists ‘twist’ their words. I let them use words however they want to and value their words.
Older prisoners often think that younger psychologists don't have enough life experience to have a say in these things. In general there's a hugely negative view of psychology.

What I do is to offer purely creative writing sessions rather than creative and therapeutic and then I've slotted therapeutic elements in but I'm absolutely clear about always relating them to writing. This process works wonderfully. I do genuinely think that writing is a natural form of therapy. When
Nancy Kline writes about the most respectful thing you can do to anybody is to listen to them, really listen to them; I believe that helping others write about themselves and their stories is akin to that. They're listening to themselves in a different way and by reading through someone's stories and listening to them talk about it I and the rest of the class are also doing it. This has really valuable benefits.

We have a society which doesn't encourage us to express our emotions – but somehow in creative writing it’s ok to let it all out on the page – that's acceptable.

What are your next goals?

I'm fascinated with different experiences of time. I'd like to support prisoners to write about their experiences of time and get their writing published in a book.

We'll be keeping close contact with Richard over the next year and hoping he'll share some more of his experiences with us.

Caitlin