Matt Malyon sits at a table with a group of teenagers at Skagit County Juvenile Detention. It’s a weekly meeting to read and discuss prose and poetry. They’re talking about the symbolism of a tattoo in a poem by Tomas Transtörmer.
“Even in the hard times, like you're saying, there's a loveliness that remains,” Malyon said, “What does he compare it to there in that third line?"
“A tattoo,” one of the students said.
“Yeah, a tattoo is a reminder of things, right?” Malyon said.
No matter how many times Malyon leads these sessions, he said he’s still caught off guard by some of the conversations and new insights the students bring to works he’s read for years.
“Things I had never thought of,” he said. “That's great to affirm them for that. It's also great for me, just person to person, learning from them to some degree.”
Malyon is the executive director of the Underground Writing program, which marks its 10th anniversary this year. KNKX first met him in 2020.
Underground Writing provides a dedicated time, with fewer outside distractions, for the participants to reflect on how they’re feeling and express it, he said.
“We're always telling them that writing is an art form, but it's also a tool for their life, self-expression. You don't have to hit your wall or go out gangbanging,” he said. “You can get your emotions out on paper, and it's a much better way to learn about yourself and process emotions and that sort of thing.”
Malyon said reading is an important part of the program as well.
“Most of the kids in juvenile detention, their reading picks up once they start coming to our program,” Malyon said. “They were just go-go-go-go on the outside, didn't have any time. Maybe reading books wasn't cool. They have all this time in there, and they have a pretty good library for the size of juvenile detention it is, and so they read a lot of books.”
'Feeling lost'
The group recently discussed an excerpt from Dante’s Inferno.
“Have you ever felt like you're in the middle of something and you're stuck?” Malyon recalled asking the students. “Maybe it's like a dark night, it's the dark woods. You don't know which direction you're going to go, and you're just, like, lost?”
The students agreed: They had felt something similar. From there, they started to read the poem.
Malyon can’t directly quantify how much the program helps keep these students from repeating crimes or engaging in violent behavior. Still, he said it can be helpful.
"In our workshops, when they're dealing with literature, they're learning to engage with language and engage with story in ways that help them learn about their own emotions,” he said.
Malyon said the students might not even be aware of their maturation. But now, when they’re confronted with an issue — like getting provoked by someone else in the detention center — instead of getting into a fight, they can pause.
“They can step back. Maybe they go back into their room later and write,” he said.
‘The sort of thing we hope for’
Malyon said there’s a reason he doesn’t spend time in these sessions bringing up the teenagers’ court cases or why they're in juvenile detention.
“Shame is a powerful thing, and so I think they struggle with that,” he said. “So I don't want to do anything to kind of bring that up… If they talk about their court case, it's okay."
Robert was in one of the first workshops that Underground Writing put on at the juvenile detention center. KNKX is only using Robert’s first name because he was involved in the Underground Writing program as a juvenile.
“I love the fact that Matt never judged,” Robert said in an interview over Zoom. “Like, no matter how gruesome the story was, no matter how traumatizing it seemed, he was there. He was like, 'Get it out.' 'How do you feel?' He kind of opened my eyes to the fact that, just because I’m feeling like I’m alone, doesn’t mean I am alone.”
Robert, who was sent to Skagit County Juvenile Detention after being arrested, said he’s always loved writing and working with words but didn’t want to keep going to school.
He remembered thinking. “I don't want to learn anymore.” But that didn’t last.
Robert said he realized the writing exercises felt more like an act of self-expression rather than traditional school work.
Those lessons stuck with him. Years after he was released from juvenile detention, Robert met up with Malyon for lunch.
“He pulled out this duffel bag, set it on the lunch table, unzipped it,” Malyon said. “And it was — yeah, it makes me emotional — because he pulled out a bunch of notebooks that he was writing, what he had just kept writing. And that is the sort of thing that we hope for.”
Malyon is thankful for moments like those.
“You don't get them all the time,” he said. “I think of professors I had in college. How often do those professors have students come back and thank them? Well, not all the time.”
‘We see them improving'
One of the program’s key indicators for success, according to Malyon, is how much students are writing and reading outside of the group’s weekly hour-long meetings.
“I think students that begin writing with us and reading with us — even though it's not quantifiable, say, or trackable — it’s always there,” Malyon said. “We see them improving in what they're writing about and how they're thinking.”
Robert, who entered the Skagit County Juvenile Detention a decade ago, is now living in Alaska, has two steady jobs working with animals, and has a girlfriend. He’s still writing.
He said before Underground Writing, he was frustrated, anxious and stressed about his inability to put feelings into words.
“Just being able to know how you want to hold yourself, what you want to say, what you want to write, how you want to talk about it — it helps in every aspect,” he said.
This is the final installment of a three-part reporting series called Agents of Change: Addressing Youth Violence — Lessons that Work.
