#jesse bliss

[therootsandwingsproject]

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RAW Founder Jesse Bliss sits down with Santana Westbrook of TruthSeekers Radio to talk about the upcoming production of Tree of Fire. She shares the "Who, What, and Why of this passion project four years in the making.

To listen to the show in its entirety click here.

You can find Santana Westbrook and crew on Facebook or subscribe to TruthSeekers Radio on iTunes.

[therootsandwingsproject]

A Tree

                             "Typically, such teens are 'dumped back in the dysfunctional home, ill-equipped group home or foster care, and [often] disappear back into the underground of prostitution with no voice,'" Lois Lee, founder of a 24-bed Los Angeles shelter called Children of the Night. via California Times

  I always tell my students in juvenile hall life is a tree, writing is a tree.  I let them know their alleged “crime” is up in the branches. The roots of their incarceration lie in the failure of society to love our children properly.  

We live in a country founded on slavery and the pillaging of Native peoples. Today, our hoods are plagued with elements that push children to the wayside and allow them to slip through the cracks. In the haze of gun fire, abuse, and abandonment, girls run away and often get taken in by hungry pimps.

The young lady leans into the vehicle and has the potential John feel her up so she knows full well he isn’t a cop (prostitutes know that police officers can’t touch them). 10 minutes is $40. The Johns come in every walk of life from teachers and preachers to doctors and lawyers. Girls give every cent of their nightly earnings to the pimp. He does what he wants with the dough. He’ll buy you Mc Donald’s when he feels like it. Several girls live in his pad. He has his favorites. He is sure they have his baby. The younger you look, the more tricks you pull in. They show up in juvenile hall with long fake nails, singed eyelashes, and a vacant look, relieved to be locked up.  The pimp is often there to pick the girls up when they get released. No one else cares about their whereabouts.

   “Out of 80,000 arrests per year for sex solicitation, 10% are Johns, 20% are male prostitutes and 70% are women.”-Visual Academy

  Juvenile postitution is a direct result of children raised with roots growing in soil that has no love. The tree suffers and branches can’t bloom their sweet blossoms.   I tell my students the human spirit is indestructible.  With blind faith---even if it was never shown to them---they can, by a miracle, learn where and how to root in love. -- Jesse Bliss

[therootsandwingsproject]

The Glass Leaf

As we embark on production for our upcoming play TREE OF FIRE, The Roots and Wings Project will be blogging about The Prison-Industrial Complex, a topic the play deals with heavily.

After nine years of service as a Creative Writing Teacher in juvenile hall, I resigned on Wednesday.  My heart hurts. I had a nightmare last night that I was compressed by water holding me down in my student’s cells, almost drowning with them.  I woke up and cried while getting ready to go to what would be one of the last classes I would teach at Central Juvenile Hall.

I must change capacities. There is not a bone in my body that has grown weary of teaching my students. Those hours in the halls have been the most heart-felt, electrifying hours of my life.  However, the bureaucracy of the system, the things my eyes have seen inside those walls, is haunting.

I leave not abandoning them, not running from the horror of it all, but trusting that other capacities will give me opportunities in which to shed light on the emergency of mass incarceration.  As my dear colleague suggested, the tears will turn from mourning to celebration of the new path I embark on as I carry each and every precious moment I've spent with my students in my heart, blood and bones.

I leave with my eyes looking up, surrendering in prayer that I can somehow be even more effective in another context. I look forward to the telling of TREE OF FIRE. I am excited for those characters to breathe.  I welcome the conversations the work elicits. My husband mentioned I am stepping out onto a glass leaf. Indeed. – Jesse Bliss