Cells for Release

For six weeks, in 1995, the poet and performer Fiona Templeton locked herself up in the lugubrious corridors of the abandoned Eastern Penitentiary of Philadelphia to write. Why would she do this? Why would one do this? But this she did, “over six weeks”, writing by hand with an indelible marker, no return no edit, “I wrote without the possibility of erasure”, on one long string of paper, “where a spool of paper ran out, I sewed on the next one”, guiding it through one prison cell per day, and for as long as it would take to work through the thirty-eight cells that make up this one corridor of the dreadful panopticon.—Caroline Bergvall