Category: Pivotal Moments

Ohio’s Incarcerated Celebrate 2nd Annual Prison Fest by CHRISTOPHER MONIHAN

On By ChristopherIn OH Director of Prisons, Pivotal Moments, Women Behind Bars14 Comments

Prison does many things to its incarcerated, but the one thing it will never do is define us.I’m a Harmony Project choir singer at Madison Correctional Institution in Ohio.Harmony is a nondenominational first of it’s kind initiative based in Columbus, Ohio. It is the brainchild of charismatic founder and director David Brown. Harmony inspires the incarcerated through community and song, and on a balmy day in late May, held the 2nd annual Sunflower Arts and Music Festival at the Ohio Reformatory for Women.

I’ve been incarcerated nearly 30 years. In 14 short months Harmony has changed my life. For the second time Harmony would touch the lives of thousands at an event others said could never succeed.

On the day of the festival Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction Director Ms. Annette Chambers-Smith, told us that we are showing the world what is possible. “Other states are watching,” she said, and shared how they once told her that an initiative like Harmony could never work. I brimmed with an immense sense of pride at her words.

In the morning we gathered in the women’s gymnasium with invited guests, correctional leadership and staff, for song and spoken word events. I sat side by side with men and women from Madison Correctional Institution, Pickaway Correctional Institution, and the Ohio Reformatory for Women.

Spoken word presentations gripped the crowd and I was deeply moved to witness invited guests wiping away tears. These were our stories. Knowing others connected with them was all I could do to hold back my own floodgates.

Music solos thrilled an expectant crowd. My favorite moments of the morning came when the Harmony choir women sent chills down my spine singing “Fight Song” by Rachael Platten; and when two Ohio Reformatory women performed a beautiful all original song backed with acoustic guitar.

We then linked up via skype with the Sunflower House, a hospice for orphans in Bloemfontein, South Africa where the children sent us a message of hope and love. Harmony has a long relationship with the hospice.

The afternoon brought a lawn concert on the prison yard headlined by Ohio bands the Mark Rhodes Band, and Fya and Sol.

A massive crowd of women waived tissue paper sunflowers in the air to the beat of the music. Harmony passed out the sunflowers and welcoming packs consisting of sweets, sunscreen and lip balm to the thousands in attendance.

Ms. Rochelle Moore is Pickaway Correctional warden and lead singer of Fya and Sol. She rocked cheering crowds to a medley of crowd pleasing favorites leaving everyone in awe.

On stage spoken word presentations again inspired and delighted us, the performers men and women from the three prisons. For the second time in as many years I stood atop the massive stage. I presented a spoken word piece I had titled “What is Prison?”.

What is prison? Prison is an impossible festival on a warm day in May; it is hearing the director tell us we matter and that we hold the key to our futures; and, it is so many dark and difficult things.

As I left the stage invited Harmony guests pulled me aside. “Thank you so much for sharing a truthful window into your lives,” said one grateful woman, whose name I do not know.

I hadn’t thought of it that way, because for us incarcerated “What Is Prison?” is our lives. We live it every day.

I heard so many of my peers both in the choirs and festival attendees, say that the day was the best day of their lives. For a day we were all free and forgot where we were.

*Christopher Monihan is incarcerated at Madison Correctional Institution in Ohio. He is a Society of Professional Journalists Stillwater Award winner and writes about issues impacting the incarcerated and their families.

*Read about the first Sunflower Arts and Music Festival here.

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The Healing Power of Horse Therapy for Prisoners by Christopher

On By ChristopherIn Pivotal Moments, Prison Journalism Project7 Comments

I overcame my childhood fear of horses in the most unlikely place.

As I trailed my hand along the railing of the pen, I felt the cool touch of steel and the warmth of the morning sun on my face. A breeze rolled through, soothing my brain.

The round pen was situated in an open expanse of green. Two quarter horses, one taller than the other, plucked lush grass. Their tails swished and noses snorted.

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FRIDAY: Moonwalking With Einstein

On By In 7 Days Behind Bars, In This World, Pivotal Moments7 Comments
Photo Credit: Jystyn

When I was growing up I couldn’t remember much in school. It seemed no matter how hard I studied, I’d retain a fraction of what I learned. I suppose it will come as no surprise to hear that I dreaded tests.

When I grew older I became very absentminded. I constantly forgot where I put things. I’d forget where I put my wallet or car keys, or to do a specific task that I wanted or needed to do. One year I parked in Washington D.C. for a day of museums and sightseeing only to wander the Capitol for an hour, trying to remember where I had parked the car.

Then one day I read a book review about a book called Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer. In it, the author had set out to see if it was possible for the average individual to improve memory to levels that memory champions enjoyed.

Over the course of a year, the world reigning memory champion mentored the author in techniques that today’s modern world has forgotten. Then after a year of practicing, he entered himself into the U.S. Memory Championship and won. He also set a then U.S.A. record in ‘Speed Cards’ for memorizing an entire deck in order in exactly 1 minute.

I promptly ordered Moonwalking With Einstein. I figured that if this guy could go from Average Joe to Memory Champion by learning some old memory ‘tricks,’ then I sure as hell could cure my absentmindedness.

What I didn’t realize then was that Moonwalking With Einstein was about to change my life. I was so energized after reading this book that I ordered another book, this one titled How to Remember Anything by Dean Vaughn. The book teaches techniques helping you to remember anything. If any of you reading this have a terrible memory, this book is for you.

After reading the book, I spent 2 hours a day for the next 3 months practicing and unlearning the terrible way we learned to remember things growing up.

In school, most of us learned to remember information by reading, taking notes, rereading, and taking more notes. Then we would reread our notes and maybe reread our books again. The night before tests you probably reviewed questions in your text books, and tried to remember everything by repeating it over and over again in your head. This is the “rote” method, and it’s the worst possible way to learn and retain information.

Back when the world didn’t have Google, handheld devices or even books, you had to remember everything. Everyone did. When books finally came about, only the rich and religious scholars were privy to them.

Have you ever seen a picture of a page from a very old book? We’re talking 1300’s old. There’s ornate pictures and scribblings filling the borders of pages around text. Oftentimes these images are overlaid within the text itself. What are these images for anyway? Why would someone spend so much time and energy drawing in a book?

The answer: they’re memory cues that the reader created in order to efficiently and accurately memorize the text. Through these images, you are able to visualize, hear, see, and mentally smell the information you want to remember. By doing so, you are activating several regions of the brain simultaneously, and the more senses involved when memorizing, the easier it is to recall information. It’s just the nature of how we’re wired. It’s something ancient societies understood well.

Rather than explain every memory method, and there are many, I can drive home the point by telling you a little about my memory now versus before. The difference is astounding.

I can now remember, in exact sequence, thousands of digits (before I could only memorize a handful, maybe 20 or 30 if given enough time); lists that are hundreds and hundreds of things long (before I was lucky to memorize a grocery list); entire chunks of data, like say, entire books of the Bible or other meaningful information like names, phone numbers, addresses, birthdays, etc., of everyone I know (whereas, before I was lucky to remember 7 pieces of pertinent data at any one time); and, even entire decks of cards amongst everything and anything else. Incidentally, my personal best is 14 decks memorized in one hour. Why 14? It was all the decks I owned at the time.

Before I go, I’m leaving you with 4 videos. I recorded them a couple years ago for family, but today I’ll share them with you. In the first two, I’m memorizing a deck of cards. In the last two, I’m recalling them in sequence.

Recall that in Moonwalking With Einstein, the author set a then U.S.A. record of 1 minute memorizing a deck correctly in sequence. It takes me about 53 seconds in these videos. No tricks. No gimmicks.

My personal best is 28 seconds.

The world record is mind boggling faster–google it. Not bad for a guy who once wandered Washington, D.C. wondering where he parked his car, don’t you think? And yes, I will compete in the U.S. Memory Championship the first chance I get.

*You can do anything you set your mind to. Believe in yourself. It’s that simple.
—Christopher—

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When I Fail

On By In Pivotal Moments5 Comments
Wright Brothers Aircraft

“No matter what you do you need to be able to fail and know how to recover from it in order to one day succeed.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson—

The greatest lessons I’ve learned in life didn’t come about through my successes, but through my failures. Our failures force us to examine ourselves. In those moments when we are too stubborn to acknowledge that we’ve failed, the universe kindly allows us to fail again at the same task, the same effort, the same thing. “As you were,” says Mother Nature.

Right. As you were.

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16 and Forever

On By In Guest Writings, Pivotal Moments6 Comments

Those of you who know me won’t be surprised at what I’m about to say because you’ve heard me say it hundreds of times: life is what we make of it. When we look for the positive, we find positive, and when we look for negatives, negative finds us. One of the secrets of life. So simple, yet so many people never realize this.

Years ago I used to tutor juveniles and eventually transitioned to mentoring. The moment where I realized that mentoring was what I wanted to do, my life changed. It is a beautiful thing to help someone in need and to see them overcome and grow. This is what life is all about. It is the meaning of happiness.

Of the many juvenile offenders I’ve mentored, Tim is one who has overcome and grown into a man with confidence and direction in life. When I first met him, he was a deeply introverted 16 year old facing a long sentence. An eternity for all intents and purposes for a boy of 16 years.

In those early days, depression often seized upon him, and he struggled mightily to move forward from day to day. I remember those times. They were dark days for him. I’d spend time with him daily, mostly us sitting at a table and talking over random subjects like science and astronomy or stocks. Especially stocks. Tim took to learning stocks with eagerness and concentrated devotion. He has been the astute student and to this day drives himself to understand and succeed. I’ve been involved with stocks for 20 years now, and we often discuss trading strategies and game theorize geo-politics in order to discern the future direction of equities. I love our discussions and find them fulfilling and meaningful.

During his early days, when we weren’t engaged in discussion, we silently fought one another in games of chess. When Tim transferred to another institution, we continued our epic chess games through the mail. Tim is a deep thinker, and as time progressed he nourished that through college classes and self studies. Opportunities that weren’t always available to him.

An area of interest for Tim is writing. He has spent his time incarcerated developing his skills, and with his permission today, I am happy to post a work he penned a little while back. It is about his incarceration as seen and experienced by him and presented in his own words. He sees the world through a lense shaped by incarceration, from being a young boy alone in This Dark World, to the adult he is today. It’s a view that’s sometimes shaded, sometimes pessimistic, but always circles around toward hope and understanding. Even now, when I read his words, I am impacted by how much he has overcome since those early days. I am happy to offer this to you, and I am proud of the man Tim has become.

Tim will finish his sentence in just under two years from now, a long journey that he once told me he couldn’t see the end to. His family supports him, and all his future plans include them. I can’t wait to spend time with his as a free man, and do all the great things we’ve talked about doing over these years. Tim is an excellent example of how through seeming impossibility, hope, change, and goodness prevail.

It has been a long journey for him.

I’m proud to count him a friend.

You can read Tim’s writing here.

*If you enjoyed this post, please like and share with your friends. And, if you’d like to leave a comment for today’s guest writer, Tim, know that I will gladly get it to him. In the meantime, I’ll keep writing for you! Also, if you know of other blogs written by inmates, please let me know because I enjoy reading what other guys write. Frankly, it helps keep me sane.

—Christopher—