FAMMily Connections: Book Club
By FAMM staff
Families with loved ones in prison are faced with all kinds of barriers to staying connected. Visits are cancelled, phone access denied, email shut down — even snail-mail is limited. But time and again, families persist past the roadblocks, determined to keep relationships thriving. Our new FAMM storytelling series, “FAMMily Connections,” features some of the creative, loving, and rehabilitative ways they’ve come up with. Our first installment is about the “family book club.” Here, family members describe how reading keeps them connected to their incarcerated loved ones, and just how nourishing this special way of staying in touch can be.
“My brother (best friend), who is at FCI Thomson, and I read the same books — I. Conn. We share of our understanding and experience, and use the insight to inform and influence our next steps … our creative ideas for writing and developing stories, games, etc. He recently doubled down on his I. Conn knowledge by also participating in and completing a few ACE courses on Mongol society.” — Hanalei Aipoalani
“We are not currently reading the same book but we have done that. We do what we call essay questions each week. Things like, if you could go anywhere where would you go and why? If you won the lottery what would you do with it? Sometimes multiple questions other times just one.” — Kay Baker Chandler
“We are doing a Bible study book together called Steadfast about the Book of James.” — K.R.S.
“We have been reading the same books for a while now. We go a few chapters at a time and talk about it. We do this with TV shows as well.” — Gigi Lopez
“I’d known Ben for 21 years and were reunited on Leap Year 2020 and instantly reconnected in a huge way. I was so excited to be accepted shortly after for a visit, but due to Covid, it would be a year before I ever made that visit. Therefore we had to be crafty to stay connected so we established our 2-person book club. I would buy two of the same book on Amazon, one for him and one for me. We would read and discuss every day until we were finished and move on to the next. The first book we read was Love in the Time of Cholera because we thought it was fitting to our pandemic love story. We both thought it was terrible! Other titles included The Time Traveler’s Wife (which we loved!), The Green Mile, A Boy’s Life, The Stand and Swan Song … the last two were enormous, post-apocalyptic sagas about 1,000 pages long. Tragically, Ben lost his life in prison in October 2022, but the book club remains such a fond memory of the precious time we had together for exactly 2 years and 8 months.” — Gina Mac
“We read the same books, but mostly every day our love notes to each other are from God’s word. Day after day we exchange verses and talk about our lives being helped from the healing comfort of the encouragement in sharing the Bible. God’s living word.” — F.G.
“My brother and his kids exchange music in a similar way as a book club, to get each other out of their musical comfort zone and explore different genres … and then they will go over it the next time they are able to, either by email or phone call. I must say this has been a hard thing to be consistent with since he has had periods of lockdown at his facility and stretches of no contact with the kids.” — Sondra Green
We’d love to hear how you and your loved one stay connected. Please send us your story here.
