Participants in the annual InsideOUT Writers Retreat held Friday at
Central Juvenile Hall. (Kim Nowacki)

In opera, a good story has plenty of tragedy. Or comedy. Or both. There's typically a lot of wishing and hoping and longing. Many times the characters make foolish, rash mistakes. Often, someone dies.
    
Unfortunately, the same is very true of the stories and poems written over the past 12 years by the teenage boys and girls who participate in InsideOUT Writers (IOW), a creative writing program held at Los Angeles County's three juvenile halls.

Each year, more than 300 incarcerated youths voluntarily take the classes where they write about drugs, rape, suicide, crime, violence, lost freedom, busted families and broken hearts. But they also write about lying in bed at night and dreaming about a better life and about a future free of trouble.

"I love to write, it's my passion, I write everyday," said Michelle, an 18-year-old girl with a million-watt smile but also a serious toughness about her.

There's a similar sense of toughness mixed with vulnerability among the 100 or so other incarcerated youth that guards led Friday afternoon into the boys gymnasium at Central Juvenile Hall, a walled-up, khaki-colored facility off Eastlake Avenue.

But on this afternoon, the teens were here to relax as their IOW instructors served them burritos, soda and cupcakes before watching -- in what's a first for Central Juvenile Hall -- a performance by three members of the LA Opera.

This special treat is part of the annual IOW Retreat, which honors the students' writing. Attendees included IOW board members and L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky (who this past Tuesday participated in the L.A. County Board of Supervisors' unanimous vote that ordered a thorough inspection of the Probation Department).

This year's retreat also served as the surprise debut of four new LA Opera pieces that put to music four poems written in the IOW program.

One of them, called "Safe," is Michelle's.

"I was happy. I was like, 'For real?' and then, I'm here. I was real happy," said Michelle, who was transferred from a detention camp in Santa Clarita to see the performance. (Michelle's real name has been changed for this story because once juveniles have completed their sentence their records are sealed.)

Her poem begins:

Something that seemed like an ordinary day
Started off as promising but ended wrong in every way
Driving pretty fast in my Mercedes goin' 80
As I come along the bridge and see a
young girl on a stump going crazy,
steppin' to the edge while rocks are tumblin'
off the road, and as I read the sign ahead
we're 200 feet in the air is what I'm told.
Using my first mind I got out of the car
and started preachin'. Next thing I know
I'm walking towards a person and I'm reachin'.
My hands extended, my tears on edge,
all I can do is pretend that this person
is not my baby sister, about to reach her end...

The idea to bring the opera to juvenile hall was Eva Stern's, a philanthropist and chair of the IOW board of directors whose husband happens to be LA Opera chairman and CEO Marc I. Stern.

"This is not about opera, per say, this is about giving children an experience," said Stern, who was on crutches after breaking her hip last week. "And because opera is a dramatization of life, it was an unexpected surprise to realize how the poetry that the children wrote actually resonates with opera."

Conversations between Sheri Lin, the IOW writing program director, and Stacy Brightman, LA Opera's director of community programs, led to the idea to incorporate student poems into the opera performance.

Eli Villanueva, a baritone, composer and resident stage director for LA Opera's Education and Community Programs, was given 11 poems to choose two from. He picked four.
 
"What I was hoping to do was to write this in a way that is not too far from what they might be used to but still trying to touch them in a more 'fine art' way, rather than trying to do straight music theatre or trying to do rap or something they are comfortable with," said Villanueva. "We're trying to really point out the stories within these poems, so hopefully they can find a connection in how we have set these poems to music."  

While there were some snickers and the squeak of chairs being shifted during the 30-minute performance, most of the young writers watched and listened politely, even intently, and erupted into loud cheers at the end of each piece, especially when it was pointed out Michelle was the author of such a moving story.

"What I love is the fact that it's taken their very personal, thoughtful, heartfelt words and adding music as an opera," Stern said before the performance. "I'm anxious to see how they will respond to the acknowledgement that what they have written is so meaningful and that it's not just their story, it's a universal story. I think that it will impact them in some way. Sometimes a moment in time is transformative and this could be one of those moments in time."

The nonprofit IOW program began in 1996, and now conducts 41 weekly creative writing classes in L.A. County's three juvenile halls: Central, Barry J. Nidorf and Los Padrinos. It also includes an alumni component to support members of the program after they are released from juvenile hall.

InsideOUT isn't so much about the mechanics of writing, but instead the goal is to give incarcerated youth, ranging from 12 to 18, an outlet for their emotions and a means of self-reflection.

"A lot of the themes of the lessons tend to center around what their lives were like before, what got them to this place and then how they hope to change in the future," said instructor Eve Porinchak, a novelist and former first grade teacher who's been with the IOW program for about two years.

"The one thing I found that surprised me is that the students in it become really bonded to each other," added Porinchak. "This becomes sort of like a surrogate family for them. A lot of crying, a lot of sharing emotions and experiences with other students that maybe they've never told anyone before. It gets really emotional with the boys and the girls."

In fact, the writing is actually secondary to the relationship building between the teacher and the students and between the program itself and the students, said Lin, the program's director, a self-described non-writer whose background is in social service work.

"If they buy into this," she said, "they become different people."

Each writing class ends with the students invited to read their work out loud. Friday evening closed the same way, with each young writer going up the microphone, although not all were eager to speak in front of such a large audience.

One boy began quietly and stumbled over his words at first, but the more he read, the more momentum he gained, ending strong before breaking into a smooth R&B refrain and even a subtle dance move.

As with all the poems read that night, loud cheers followed.