Extra! Extra! Read all about it! (after censoring, of course.)

My friend, Lelan, started a unit newsletter a few months ago to share events that happen in the unit and give some positive messages. It was a great idea and fairly well-executed. He asks inmates to contribute ideas for articles, quotes, recipes and news items so it stays well-rounded, too.

Around Christmas Lelan asked me to write the feature. Somehow my words came out remarkable similar to his draft for the Thanksgiving newsletter, even using the exact same in places. We had a good laugh about how our brains operated n the same frequency.

This month Lelan asked me to put together the whole newsletter from material he had gathered. I've been helping with his work in the ACA office because he's been swamped and I haven't been working in the library much n ow that I have two able coworkers. (Dawson's departure allowed for the addition of a Hispanic guy named Ant.) Now, instead of doing tedious paperwork, I'm able to exercise my creativity.

Lelan does the newsletters with MS Publisher, which is like the Ford Taurus of publication design. It lasted forever and gets the job done, but the result is inelegant even after struggling against the program itself. I had hoped that my little bit of design savvy could help make the result look a bit more professional. No such luck. As they say, a mechanic is only as good as his tools.

The material I was given wasn't quite enough to fill two pages, so I came up with what I thought would be a nifty little column: a monthly "list of five", with a random selection of five related things and a short fact about each one. To fit this month's theme of keeping promises, I made a the first list the Five Languages of Love, followed by examples of each, such as writing an encouraging note for the language of kind words.

In an example of how silly prison can be, my list of five as shot down by Lelan's boss because anything I put as an example for the physical language would be "encouraging inmates to touch each other." Really" The inmates who touch each other in loving ways are going to touch each other regardless of what our newsletter says (that may be the first acknowledgement of homosexuality in prison for this blog, a reality that has been around me since my first unit 3 1/2 years ago.) The column is not meant for inmates to use on each other, but for their families at home. This is supposed to be a unit for reintegration.

Instead, I put together a quick list of five offbeat books with a quirky summary for each. Even with my effort, the design didn't end up very aesthetically pleasing. However, it is complete.