The filler’s slow pace repeatedly dragged me into a swamp of unwanted memories. I couldn’t write any faster than it let me it refused to skim lightly over the surface as I tried to breeze past the unpronounced emotions that would crawl up my throat and fill my eyes with tears. It was not just that it hurt to hold it, but that it moved so slowly, forcing me to attend to every detail. At times I literally cursed the makeshift pen caught painfully between my fingers. I would forget about not blaming others, fearing the truth that might be triggered by the next word or sentence I wrote. Many events recalled in these pages could have kept me angry my entire life many times just the memories made me want to quit writing. Then I began to silently challenge myself: Without anyone else having to know, I asked, how honest can I be with myself as I write all the scattered memories of my life? Can I do so without blame, with only a truth that has no place to go beyond these sheets of paper? In essence, questioning my own sincerity is what inspired this book. At first I wrote in circles, the long way around memories. It helped me realize my true purpose in picking up the thin straw of ballpoint pen filler, resting it between my fingers, and beginning to write. It would have sounded strange to say “thank you” to my friend, but what he said spoke to me. He made him bite these holes in me-here, there, everywhere.” He would hold Fang by the chain, and he wouldn’t let him go. “Whenever I did anything wrong, I mean anything, my pops would sic his dog Fang on me. “You want to sit down and write all night about this kind of stuff?” “I still dream about this shit,” he said. Look at this.” He raised his sweatshirt, revealing horrible, healed-over gashes-scars, he said, from dog bites. “Man,” he said, putting one arm out to bring us to a stop in the middle of the yard, “I wouldn’t do that. We were walking together out on the death row exercise yard. I remember what a friend said when I told him what I was writing. It was only from not knowing what layers of memories-particularly from childhood-would slowly unfold that I innocently began to write. If I had known how painful it would be to sit and write this book about my life, I doubt that I would have ever picked up my pen filler, the only writing instrument allowed to an inmate in solitary confinement on death row. I have experienced an inner journey that brought me to the life- affirming realization that my violent actions were never a reflection of who I really am. That I reclaimed it on San Quentin’s death row doesn’t change who I am. But I finally came into a situation where I dared myself to reclaim that natural goodness. In that same place, the violence later grew so much larger than life that I stopped believing in myself. This may have been the place from which my tears poured when I was a young child. In spite of the pain and hurt, and however much I engaged in crazed violence and lashed out at the world for thinking it owed me something, in the center, in my heart, there was always something of a natural goodness. Rather, I have simply discovered who I’ve always been: the young child who knew that his life mattered, that he could make a difference in the world, and that he was born to fly. What experience created a reverberation that transformed me from the person I was then to the person I am today? The truth of the matter is that I have never changed. Over the years, I have been asked when it was that I “saw the light,” had a dream, or heard a voice. That Masters’s book is Oprah’s Book Club Pick is testament to the impact, inspiration, and reach of one man from a prison cell in San Quentin. Word by word, he wrote his way out of anger and violence while in solitary confinement, with only a pen filler as his writing instrument.

But through Buddhism and writing, Masters has made peace both with a wrongful death sentence and with his past, though he continues to fight for his release. Faced with similar circumstances, that could have been anyone’s trajectory.

The Dalai Lama once said, “We are all potential criminals, and those who we put into prison are no worse, deep down, than any one of us.” In reading Jarvis Jay Masters’s book That Bird Has My Wings, these words resonate as he chronicles his life’s journey-from childhood trauma in which his father was abusive and absent, and his mother addicted to drugs, to the instability of foster care and ultimately a life of crime that culminated in imprisonment at age 19.

Wings n things