Brothers in Pen: Pens Up, Don't Shoot

Book excerpt: Brothers in Pen is the collective name of the writers in an ongoing creative writing workshop at San Quentin State Prison. This book contains selections of fiction in many genres, memoir, creative non-fiction, and some mutant hybrids... the common denominator being story. This is the ninth anthology produced by this class; as with Scheherazade of the Arabian Nights, the stories keep coming and keep enthralling. Ursula Le Guin said, "As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul." The Brothers in Pen invite you to participate in this book.