The Wurster Interviews, Part 3: The Early Years of PPE
Read previous installments: Part 1 Part 2
The Academy of Prison Arts and the 1980 COSMEP Conference
In addition to teaching at community college, running the Pennsylvania Repertory Theater and Lion Walk Performing Arts Center, and getting their PhDs at NYU in New York City — Anne Wyma and Trudy Scott were going into Western Penitentiary and teaching theater. They found the inmates weren’t so much into theater as poetry, so they got me involved. They helped to start a (mostly poetry) organization in Western Penitentiary called the Academy of Prison Arts.
We developed the program through the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Four times a year, a prominent poet would hold a workshop/reading inside the prison and another outside the prison. I coordinated the outside activities. Readers included Etheridge Knight and Michael Hogan (themselves ex-convicts), Diane Wakoski, Laurel Speer, Paul Fericano, and Joseph Bruchac.
That was a great program. The inmates wrote their own grant proposals but weren’t allowed to handle money, so it was funneled through the Pennsylvania Repertory Theater. We were able to get some of the prison poets out on furlough to read with the guests.
Among these prison poets was William Welsh, known as “Grapey.” When he went to prison at age 18, he had a high school degree and a couple college credits. In prison, he got his bachelor’s degree, a master’s in economics, and by the time he got out he was halfway to a PhD that he didn’t finish. He got a commutation — the only commutation Governor Dick Thornburg gave during his term. Grapey got a scholarship to study at Oxford, but didn’t go.
Grapey was the second principal of the Academy of Prison Arts. (The first, a man named Benny, was stabbed.) He was followed by Danny Klauck, who was in for armed robbery. He had a book come out after his term was up, but he committed another robbery and went back to prison.
The next principal was John Paul Minarik, a former engineering student at CMU serving a life sentence for first-degree murder. Even today, he is occasionally sent to other prisons to develop programs similar to the Academy of Prison Arts. I still get a Christmas card from him every year.
Grapey published several books in prison, but hasn’t written so much since he got out. Last I heard he was working construction and living a life not of crime.
What happened to that program? There were other programs that involved inmates going out into the community, including a wrestling program. Gino Spruill, a very bad man, one of the wrestlers, eloped — he took off.
Then there was Paul Rolin, the liaison to prison-run recreation programs. When you work in a prison, you have to choose sides — the administrators’ or the inmates’. He was on the side of the prisoners. One day he got accused of taking something contraband into the prison and was asked to resign.
Between these two incidents, that was the end of the program. The Academy of Prison Arts shut down in about 1982.
In 1980, Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers (COSMEP) had a writers’ conference at California University of Pennsylvania. Grapey was out on furlough for this. I taught a workshop on running a community workshop. Allen Ginsberg did a reading and taught a workshop. Diane Wakoski was amazed when she read her contract that she was not required to meet with students but was required to attend five wine receptions and play in two softball games.
This conference is where I first met Laurel Speer, Karren Alenier, Loris Essary, and Arthur and Kit Knight (who later became my close friends).
At the end of the conference when they gave out awards, I received the MVP award — not for writing or teaching but for softball. Robert Turney, Diane Wakoski’s sweetheart and later husband, played first base and I pitched. Robert laughed at all my jokes.
Next in Uppagus issue 6: Two anecdotes from the 1980 COSMEP conference
