Potrebenko and Shreve, who are clerical workers, read poems expressing outrage at the common assumption that their work is easy. But their poetic styles are very different. Potrebenko's poems are incredibly funny ("If someone tells you they are bored/you know right away they're not a typist") although they have a way of going from funny to stunningly serious in one line. Shreve, on the other hand, writes with a reverence for women's jobs. Her message is: typing well is as important as art, and as beautiful. To Shreve, the office is a stage where she executes bravura performances.

The best message May Works offered was that our work, no matter how devalued, is work; that it is important and that it is culture, or at least that it is a suitable topic for culture. That this message is embodied in performances of real strength and beauty is a gift to all workers.

Faith Jones is a Vancouver-based writer and partner in a three-woman desktop publishing business called SuperScript.

Letters continued from page 6 <<

I was only trying to survive - by selling the only marketable job skills I knew.

I want to tell you as women that I am a woman too, who wants to be accepted for me, not judged for what I have done or may do.

You cut all but the last paragraph. When your editor had suggested cutting that section to shorten the article, I found other places where cuts could be made. I explained to her that Michelle talking about lack of support from the feminist community was an important part of the article. That it was a challenge to your readers to examine their own relationships (or lack of relationships) with women who have been in prison.

Why did you go ahead and cut it, rather than cutting a less crucial section? Michelle's last paragraph is much weaker on its own, and is almost entirely a repetition of a point made in a previous section. Why would you cut the strong, challenging part and leave the repetitive part. Is it because you don't want to hear the challenge?

I have one more criticism - a self criticism. My last section in the article is naive and one sided, through no fault of the editors. I wrote it like that, and I'd like the chance to apologize. I made it sound as if a friend of mine had read some of the texts from Doing Time and miraculously stopped "distancing and dehumanizing" women in prison. If only it were that easy! What actually happened was that she realized that she was distancing and dehumanizing them, and that it was wrong. From her point of view it's a big step, but for women prisoners it's an incredibly obvious insight, leaving a lot to be accomplished in terms of other people actually changing their behavior.

In my anxiety to show your readers that more privileged people can move away from the attitudes society has taught us, I overstated the case, in a way that was at best naive and perhaps insulting. Women prisoners can't afford such naiveté and deserve better from those who would be their allies.

Thank you for giving me the space to say these things. It's been a "learning opportunity" for me, and for others too, I hope.

Persimmon Blackbridge.