volume 4 Release
Purchase our newest volume online through Amazon, or in-person in Missoula at the Zootown Arts Community Center or Fact & Fiction. If you are unable to purchase a copy, you can find it at the Missoula Public Library.
What is this project?
In 2017, the National Endowment for the Humanities funded a proposal by the Free Verse Writing Project and Young Poets, a poet-in-the-schools program of the Center for Creative Writing at Montana State University in Billings, for the I Am Montana project, a collaborative endeavor that offers creative writing workshops at five different learning facilities across Montana, along with yearly publication of an anthology that features student writing. Writers, teachers, and guest speakers go into these youth detention centers and learning facilities on a regular basis to teach literature and writing classes structured around the theme of Montanan identity. These workshops encourage students to excavate and analyze the beauty and hardship of their unique experiences growing up in Montana and to explore those experiences in writing.
The project recognizes that:
Incarcerated young people are often wrongly labeled and dismissed as “problem children,” “bad kids,” or “juvenile delinquents.” The I Am Montana Project seeks to give these young people the tools to reclaim their narratives and tell their own stories about who they are and where they come from, as well as to encourage them to realize their identities go beyond their addictions or the crimes they are accused of or convicted of having committed.
The healing power of art through creative expression and, using trauma-informed care practices, encourages the youth participating to express themselves freely in a safe, non-judgemental space.
While much of the Montana narrative of wide-open spaces, sprawling ranches, and the old west is given over to people already empowered to speak, we want to instead elevate the voices and stories of lesser-heard Montanan experiences into the state dialogue through publication in our yearly anthologies. We recognize the voices of the marginalized, including the socially, economically, and racially marginalized young people are disproportionately represented in Montana’s juvenile detention centers and in the Billings public school system, and we want to change that.
One of our students : "Free Verse has given me the ability to show people who I am. I know now that I’m not a bad person, that I have a story and that I am powerful. You guys have inspired me.”
What Facilities do we Partner with?
Missoula County Juvenile Detention Center
Billings Juvenile Detention Center
Ted Lechner Youth Services Center in Billings
Pine Hills Youth Correctional Facility in Miles City
Billings Career Center
What is the mission?
The mission of the project is to encourage students across learning centers to explore their identities as Montanans and reflect on their understanding of the state and their experience within it through classes in literature and creative writing. Each year has seen the publication of an anthology titled “I Am Montana” featuring student work drawn from creative writing classes. This past year our classes have given students a much-needed opportunity to reflect on fear, grief and loss in a pandemic.
Over the past three years, Free Verse has sent teachers twice a week to teach literature and creative writing classes to youth in the juvenile detention centers in Missoula and twice a year a team of Free Verse teachers has gone to the Pine Hills Youth Correctional Facility, the only long-term correctional facility for male youths in Montana, to teach I Am Montana writing lessons to the youth there. For their part of the I Am Montana project, Young Poets runs an eight-week teaching program in the spring working with high school students from three Billings public high schools at the Billings Career Center. During this eight-week program, lead classroom teacher Wanda Morales and Project Lead Dave Caserio guide students through workshops dedicated to mining their unique experiences as Montanans in writing.
Guest Speakers
Each year, Young Poets brings guest speakers to present specific lessons on writing, poetry, and music and how it relates to Montanan identity. In the first year of the program, Free Verse and Young Poets brought Crow Agency Apsáalooke rapper and fancy dancer Supaman to the Billings Career Center workshop as a guest speaker to teach song-writing to the students, and in the second and third years, Montana Poet Laureates Mandy Smoker Broaddus and Melissa Kwasny visited the classroom as guest speakers and delivered highly successful poetry workshops.
What happens in the workshops?
In the workshops themselves, Free Verse teachers work to create a trauma-informed and student-driven space that emphasizes choice and acceptance. We begin every workshop with a mindfulness exercise and a warm-up writing prompt designed to get the young people to tune inwards to their current emotional state. Students are then led through examinations and discussions of poems, songs, or other artistic excerpts designed to get them to further reflect on their lives, identities, homes, or the wider world. After each text, students are given an opportunity to write in response to prompts that encourage them to share their own stories about their lives, thoughts, feelings, or experiences growing up in Montana.
Students become passionate as they write about their lives - a river they love, or a parent’s struggle with addiction, or memories of playing with siblings when they were small - and this passion helps them to learn that they have a voice and a story to offer. Our lessons always end with a focus on creative writing, wherein students are encouraged to use the formats they’ve studied to produce their own writing and artwork to convey their experiences and truths.
The work we do challenges our students to engage in critical thought, to understand different experiences, to imagine with empathy and compassion, to discuss their own experiences, and to think about the world in new ways. Through their words and art, they have a means to creatively explore the challenges they face, to reclaim their narratives, and reframe hardship with resilience. Most importantly, the I Am Montana project gives students the chance to find their voice, at once distinct from and part of the ecology of voices that make up their homes and ours.
Volume 3
Volume 2
Volume 2 - I Am Montana: Student Reflections on Identity and Place
This second volume of student poems is a collaborative project between two Montana-based organizations: Free Verse Writing and Second Season. Free Verse teaches literature and creative writing to students in juvenile detention facilities across Montana, and Second Season serves Northern Cheyenne communities, helping young people set and achieve positive goals.
As former Executive Director of Free Verse Claire Compton says in the Foreword of the collection, “So much of Montana art and literature succumbs to familiar tropes, to pioneers and the rural West, to idyllic landscapes and the great outdoors. Although there may be remnants of truth in these tropes, they speak to a certain kind of story, a story written by those already empowered to speak, a story rooted in settler-colonialism. “I Am Montana” aims to bring another kind of voice into Montana’s literary legacy. Featuring work from students across our state, from high school classrooms to juvenile detention centers, this anthology aims to elevate young voices and voices from historically marginalized communities. The importance of this work echoes the shift we see happening across the country. Everywhere, people are recognizing that the voices we need to hear are not the ones we’ve amplified. Rather, they are the voices that have been silenced for generations.”
