Photos by P. Kevin Morley/MG News Service
Jim Evans, an inmate at the James River Correctional Center, reads his non-fiction writing to visitors at the Goochland facility as other inmates wait to recite their writings to the crowd.

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In his prison blues, inmate Adam Westbury does not cut the figure of a man in touch with his sensitive inner self.

Yet last week, the convicted bank robber read to an audience of fellow prisoners and others a story he wrote about one of the most intimate experiences of his life—the last moments spent with his mother:

“On the nightstand beside her bed was a pitcher of ice water and a glass. I picked it up and poured some careful not to spill any. . . . She took small sips in between each breath, while some of it spilled down her chin.

“I wanted to crawl into bed with her and be [her] little child again, the one that had never heard of the word cancer.

“I leaned over the bed and kissed her gently on the forehead. ‘I love you, Mom.’

“‘Read me Scripture,’ she said.”

Westbury grew up in western Henrico County. He said his mother died in 1997 when he was 21 years old. In 2002, when he was 25, records show he was convicted of armed robbery and other Richmond-area crimes and sentenced to more than nine years in prison.

Two years ago he began attending a writing class at James River Correctional Center in Goochland County taught by volunteer Scott Tilley.

“It’s a lot more than just a writing class,” Westbury said he soon learned. “There’s a lot of healing in it, too.”

“I read to step outside myself, but I write to step inside myself,” he said. Westbury was one of a half-dozen of Tilley’s students who read aloud some of their work last week.

Tilley, 63, a retired federal employee, was looking for a useful way to spend his free time. The Goochland Free Clinic and Family Services, which assists with literacy and General Educational Development programs at James River, suggested the writing class.

Tilley started the “creative nonfiction” class in 2005 with the blessing of the Department of Corrections. He had never been in a prison before and did not know what to expect.

“To be blunt, I was very scared about doing this,” he said. “Once I got into the classroom, though, and we got through a few sessions I thought: ‘Gee, this is neat. They like me, I like them and there’s a real hunger in there.’”

“These are voices most people never hear,” Tilley said. “You cannot come away from hearing their work and not be moved.”

The class is held once a week. The inmates are given shortand long-term assignments. They critique each other’s work during class — including Tilley’s, an aspiring writer.

“It has been a very successful program, said Samuel V. Pruett, warden of the 464-inmate, medium-security prison, noting it has the therapeutic benefit of enabling offenders to sort through their thoughts and experiences and put them on paper.

There have been many writing classes, programs and workshops in Virginia prisons over the years. Evans Hopkins, one of the most famous writers to emerge from behind bars, had work published in The New Yorker and The Washington Post.

He wrote his way to parole in 1997 and recently published his autobiography, “Life After Life: A Story of Rage and Redemption.”

Two teachers were particularly helpful to him, he said: Greg Donovan, an English professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Ben Cleary, who now teaches for the Department of Correctional Education at the Beaumont Juvenile Correctional Center.

Hopkins credits writing for turning his life around and more. “Writing programs help men and women to understand that their stories matter in this world, which helps them to see that their lives matter as well,” Hopkins said.

One of Donovan’s VCU colleagues, David Coogan, recently taught a writing class at the Richmond City Jail. He is encouraging his inmate students to write autobiographies, which he hopes to turn into a book.

Coogan said writing “helps them analyze their past and put together, in a logical order, all the decisions they made and why they made them. It helps them kind of unravel all that.

“We’re looking at family relationships, criminal role models, even in the home, He said. “Writing really forces them to create a picture out of all that, it’s not just the facts — you have to kind of invent a story out of all that stuff that happened to you.”

Coogan said he encouraged them to put together a narrative of how they were raised and wound up behind bars. “Not so much placing blame on people or even on themselves, but just to tell the story of how it happened.”

“It was cathartic for a lot of them. And it was difficult for a lot of them. They would say stuff like, ‘Oh, it feels good to get all this . . . out.’”

Coogan said there are not many opportunities for inmates to reflect on their lives in a group. “So this became an opportunity to come together and share those stories, and they found that they had a lot in common with each other.

“Writing created a sense of community, too, in the jail,” he said. “It helped us all kind of cross borders. It was interesting. Me, I was for the most part the only white guy in the room. I was definitely the only guy with a Ph.D.”

At the recital Thursday in James River prison, inmate Octavious Acilius Davis, 33, a poet, found it difficult to speak. “Since I’ve been in this class, I’ve been inspired by Scott and Adam,” he told the small audience, pausing to wipe his eyes. His voice broke.

Davis, in prison for drug, assault and firearms convictions, said he was raised in the projects of Norfolk. “When I was growing up, you had to be tough, you didn’t make friends, you did whatever you had to do to survive.

“I had trust issues. Since I’ve been in the class, I’ve been learning to accept and to trust not only people’s ideas, but white people’s ideas,” he said.

• Frank Green is a Times-Dispatch staff writer.