Robert P. Waxler

Literature is the greatest tool we have in our culture to humanize society.

This is what Bob Waxler, a UMass Dartmouth Professor of English, believes deeply.

Waxler said that when he speaks of literature, I'm not talking just about the words on a page or the book sitting peacefully on a shelf. I mean something that makes me part of the story that I'm reading, or creating, or thinking about. Literature is always alive for me. It keeps me free.

One way that Waxler has been able to demonstrate the power of literature is through the Changing Lives through Literature program that he co-founded in 1991. Changing Lives Through Literature (or CLTL) is an alternative sentencing program for criminal offenders that centers around a series of literature seminars facilitated by a professor.

The program has recently been awarded a $200,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to make it universally accessible through a Web site and CD-Rom.

A more recent project is a book that Waxler co-authored with his wife Linda. Losing Jonathan (published by Spinner Publications) centers on the 1995 death of Waxler's son Jonathan, at 26, after a battle with heroin. The book describes the last year of Jonathan's life and the years after his death, tracing the curve of his parents' grief. Through telling their story, the Waxlers hope to help other parents who have suffered similar losses.

Changing Lives Through Literature

Waxler said that for more than a decade before he started the program, he struggled with the sense that a society growing increasingly fascinated with technology had pushed literature to the margins. But he remained convinced that literature was powerful and could be used in public policy.

During a conversation with his friend Robert Kane (then a district court judge and now a superior court judge) about sentencing, Waxler saw the opportunity to propose a program that would ask the offenders to think seriously about the stories of their own lives by reading and discussing selected pieces of literature.

I offered it as a challenge to the judge. I believed that literature could be helpful to these offenders, more helpful than sending them back to jail.

We took eight offenders whose other alternative would have been a prison sentence. I tried to choose books that would resonate with them, and we decided to hold the program at the university. We had the support and active participation of the probation officer, Wayne St. Pierre of New Bedford. We were walking in the dark, but we felt it would work.

Since that first class, thousands of lives have been changed by CLTL.

In an independent evaluation, researchers determined that only 18% of the offenders in a CLTL group were convicted of new crimes, compared to 42% of a control group with similar criminal profiles.

Waxler said, "The statistical evaluation is reinforced by the hundreds of stories of people who've turned their lives around, who have gone back on the track to education or work, who have reconnected with their families, with their children."

"One of the men said that discussing these stories, really have to think about something, was as challenging as the life he lived on the streets dealing drugs. It's a wonderful testimony to the power of literature."

In 1992, Jean Trounstine developed the first CLTL group for women offenders at Middlesex Community College.

She and Waxler subsequently co-edited a book titled Changing Lives Through Literature (University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), an anthology of works that proved successful in the program.

CLTL has earned extensive media coverage over the years. With the success of the program, others began to adapt the model for their own jurisdictions. Programs based on Waxler's model are now running throughout Massachusetts, in six other states and Great Britain. A program is also slated to begin soon in Canada.

For Waxler, who continues to teach CLTL groups, it always comes back to the power of literature:

When we sit around the table to discuss the text, the masks and the roles are thrown aside, and you're talking about literature from your heart. It's really a magical table.

Losing Jonathan

Jonathan Waxler was a young man of tremendous promise. He helped organize community groups, worked with labor unions, campaigned for educational and social issues, taught a course at UMass Amherst on labor history, and sought to improve the lives of people less fortunate than himself.

Jonathan died after a tragic struggle with heroin. He was 26.

The book that Waxler and his wife Linda have co-authored addresses the story of parental grief as well as the issue of a child's addiction. Waxler described the book as another way to invoke the power of literature, the power of the story.

We need to understand and appreciate how fragile the relationship is between parent and child. So many people have suffered the kind of loss we suffered. We hope that people will be helped by the book.

In it, the authors affirm the power of the stories that bind a family together.

A section of the book was published in The Boston Globe on Father's Day, 2001. In that excerpt, Waxler recalls the bedtime stories he made up for Jonathan when he was young. Cowboy Jonathan became part of their family's collective memory, and we carried with us traces of his story wherever we went.

Of his son's death, he wrote, Cowboy Jonathan lives on, in that mythical place between father and son, reminding me each day of the gift that he was. But despite the cliches we've heard, there is no such thing as closure for the loss. Distance created by time may help, but time and distance can collapse in a moment as the image of the beloved returns unexpectedly and the heart opens to embrace the vanishing ghost.

Thanks to the generosity of friends and colleagues of the Waxlers, an annual award was established to honor Jonathan's memory. The Jonathan Waxler Memorial Prize for Social Justice has been presented to undergraduate students at UMass Dartmouth in recognition of their commitment to social activism both on-campus and off.

Professional Profile  

B.A., English, Brown University.
M.A., English, Boston College.
Ph.D., English, State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Dissertation was on William Blake.

Teaching specialty is the English romantics.

Co-founder and co-director (for 15 years) of the UMass Dartmouth Center for Jewish Culture.

Served as Dean of the Division of Continuing Education, Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and as chairperson of the English department at UMass Dartmouth.

Published articles on such authors and topics as William Blake, Ken Kesey, Phillip Roth and Jewish literature.

Links

Visit the Changing Lives Through Literature web site, which in turn includes links to many other sites.

Visit the UMass Dartmouth search site and type in changing lives through literature to find more articles about the program at the UMD site.

Learn more about Prof. Waxler's book, "Losing Jonathan."

Also of interest:
http://www.villagelife.org/news/archives/novelapproach.html
http://www.umb.edu/news/2002news/reporter/october/english.html
http://bakerbooks.net/halloffame.asp

 Last Updated On: 11/7/05