I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent: How Poetry Changed a Group of At-Risk Young Women (Lessons in Rehabilitation and Letting It Go)

by Sharon Charde

Overview

Letting It Go—A Bereaving Mother, Delinquent Girls, and the Power of Rehabilitative Poetry Therapy

"Anyone who has suffered and cares about our world (that probably includes everyone) will be moved and changed by this book.” ―Elizabeth Lesser, author of the New York Times bestseller Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

Experience the poignant real-life story of how author Sharon Charde was saved by her relationship with incarcerated young women at Touchstone, a residential all-female treatment center in Litchfield, Connecticut. And, learn how these young women—confined for crimes such as using drugs, truancy, assault, prostitution, and running away—were rehabilitated by their poetry teacher.

Letting go of grief and loss by writing poetry as therapy. I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent is a book for fans of the acclaimed movie Stand and Deliver. After the death of her child, a grief-stricken psychotherapist, teacher, and writer volunteers as a poetry teacher at a residential treatment facility for “delinquent” girls. Here, their mutual support nourishes and enriches each other, though not without large quantities of drama and recalcitrance. As Sharon and the girls share their losses through weekly writing, they came to realize their unlimited potential and poetic talents.

Healing from trauma. Healing can come in surprising ways across age and social class, as it did for both the girls and Sharon. But what happens when Sharon finally grasps that the most challenging experiences are the best teachers? Narrated in five parts, the book also contains poems written by the girls, as well as excerpts from their writing, Sharon’s son’s writing, and her own.

If you have read books such as Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood, The Freedom Writers Diary, Between the World and Me, So You Want to Talk about Race, or Reviving Ophelia; you will love I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781642502138
Publisher:	TURNER PUB CO
Publication date:	06/16/2020
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Sharon Charde has edited and published an anthology of poems from her years of workshops with at-risk girls, I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent, which won the PASS award from the National Council on Crime And Delinquency. In 2012, BBC radio broadcast "Four Trees Down From Ponte Sisto" on Radio 4, an hour-long adaptation of her poetry collection, Branch In His Hand (Backwaters Press, 2008), and related poems and reflections. It is a requiem for her dead son, written by Gregory Whitehead and performed by Anne Undeland. In the fall of 2005, Sharon Charde won the first Litchfield County Inge Morath Award, given for significant social impact in the arts, and in April 2006 she was given the “Making a Difference for Women” award, given by Soroptimist International, Waterbury (CT) Chapter. In July 2009 “The Sharon Charde Poetry Garden” was dedicated at Touchstone in honor of her ten years’ work there with the girls. She has won numerous poetry awards, including first prize for three chapbooks, honorable mention for another and finalist for a fifth. Bad Girl At The Altar Rail (Flume Press 2005), Four Trees Down From Ponte Sisto (Dallas Poets Community Press 2006), After Blue (Finishing Line Press 2014), Incendiary (Arcadia Press 2015), and Unhinged (Blue Light Press) have all been published. Sharon Charde was a licensed professional counselor, now retired, with twenty-five years of experience working with families, women’s groups, couples and individuals.

Table of Contents

Cast of Characters 16

Foreword 19

Introduction 23

Part I Initiate

Fish Tank 26

First Meeting 30

If I Could, I Would 35

Facials, Confrontations, Advocates 39

Sun Porch 42

Nothing Left to Lose 46

Tricky Business 51

We Keep Going 54

Taos 58

Geoff 62

Christmas 65

I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent 68

Sister Benedicta 74

Push 79

Mother's Day at the Morgue 83

Just Read, Sharon! 90

Show and Tell 93

We Try Again 99

Another Gorilla in the Mirror 102

Cathedral 105

"My File" 108

Mixing It Up 113

Part II My Girls

Raindrop in a Gale 118

"My Story" 120

Black Queens 123

Attached to Outcomes 128

We're on TV 132

What's Love Got to Do with it? 135

Artwell 139

A Scar Unraveling 147

Tarray 147

Chimere 156

Jeni 161

Hotchkiss 167

Dennis 172

I Should Have Been Happy 175

What I Want My Words to Do to You 180

Movie Stars 183

Part 3 Turning Point

Miranda 188

The Boston Trip 195

Getting There 200

Cloud Place 203

The Rip in Her Jeans 214

Carla 219

The Gorilla Returns 222

Trapped 225

A Family 234

Molly 243

Blood on the Floor 249

The Perfect Teachers 251

Conclusion 257

This Is The Way It Is Right Now 257

Afterword 261

Acknowledgments 263

About the Author 267

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Sharon Charde explores how grief gives way to insight even when healing cannot happen and voids cannot be filled. Her crystalline writing offers glimpses of hope in unlikely places. She paints a vivid picture of how connecting with others, however different they may be, can be a step toward making a whole life. It is a worthy portrait of her own.”

—Mary E. Hunt, Co-Director, Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (WATER)

“Sharon Charde, grief-striken and adrift after the death of her son, begins leading poetry workshops at a residential treatment center for girls. Though strangers at first, the group soon forms bonds as a space for the stories of love, grief, addiction, trauma, and connection blossoms. No singular story emerges.

“Told in chronological fragments, I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent is a heartfelt, emotional tribute to the transformative power of human connection. This is not an easy story. Honest, at times brutal, the stories the girls tell, and the stories Charde recounts of her relationships with the girls over a ten year period, shirk redemption. Instead, they are relentlessly raw, strong, stories that remind us both of our own powerlessness and capacity for connection. The book's power lies in that impossible, entirely true contradiction. I loved it.”

—Tessa Fontaine, author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

“Sharon Charde’s writing about trauma grabs us and forces us to feel what we most want to avoid feeling. She brings us back to feeling and thereby back to a fuller life.”

—Jessica Stern, bestselling author of My War Criminal, Denial, Terror in the Face of God, and ISIS

“Vulnerability. Compassion. Transparency. Inclusion, Courage. Beautiful concepts, important buzzwords, but living them is an entirely different matter. Sharon Charde has lived them. Her book, I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent, is proof. In it, she maps the journey she shares with troubled girls in her writing class at a residential treatment facility. A masterful, poetic storyteller, Charde is able to break our hearts and heal them at the same time. The way she weaves the stories of her own loss and grief, with the loss and grief of the girls is stunning. What links Charde and the girls—and all of us—is the human struggle to make meaning out of trauma and spin it into the gold of transformation. Anyone who has suffered and cares about our world (that probably includes everyone) will be moved and changed by this book.”

—Elizabeth Lesser, cofounder of Omega Institute and author of the New York Times bestseller Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow and Marrow: Love, Loss, and What Matters Most

“Sharon Charde has written a big-hearted, beautiful book, with the light touch of a poet and the deep insights of a humanist. You won’t easily forget her or her girls.”

—Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book and The Orchid Thief