Book Reviews
Letters From the Pen
Review by Bob Lancaster
From the March 1, 2007 Arkansas Times.
"Letters from the Pen" is a collection of weekly newspaper columns written by an inmate in the federal penitentiary at Forrest City and published by the hebdomadal Lovely County Citizen in Eureka Springs from 1999 to 2004.
The columns were written over that span by Dale McCurry of Eureka Springs, who was serving a five-year term for a white-collar crime involving business fraud. They were published under a pen name, Curly MacRed, an anagram of his real name, because prison regulations prohibited his using his real name or the names of other prisoners or prison personnel. He also was forbidden to receive any compensation for the work.
McCurry wrote 242 columns for the Citizen during his incarceration, and the publisher of the paper at that time, Mary Pat Boian, has assembled a majority of them into a book that will be the first number from the book-publishing firm she has established at Eureka Springs.
She says in a promotional blurb about "Letters From the Pen" that it "speaks to our inner jailbird," and, silly as that sounds, I suppose the empathy it suggests really is the book's main attraction. McCurry seems a decent man whose plunge into disreputability could've happened to any of us at one time or another in this hectic world, and through these short pieces we follow him through the painful descent and then back up again into hope and humility and self-acceptance through self-forgiveness. He gets his life together - the GYST process, it has been called - and through his columns, week by week, we can see it happening - and root for him.
