Overview

Enjoy the Ride! is an autobiographical book written from inside prison by William Shawn Tillman. In direct, unadorned language, Tillman recounts a life shaped by neglect, addiction, homelessness, and constant movement-train hopping, hitchhiking, stolen cars, temporary jobs, and long stretches of instability. The book traces his childhood in Southern California, years of substance use and life on the road, and the experiences that eventually led to incarceration. Along the way, Tillman reflects on moments of beauty, faith, friendship, and survival. Written while serving his sentence, the book is both a record of the past and an attempt to understand how a life unfolds through difficult circumstances. Tillman writes without self-pity or justification, offering a straightforward account of the choices, environments, and relationships that shaped his life. The book includes a foreword by writer Karleigh Frisbie Brogan and illustrations by artist Virgil Shaw. Enjoy the Ride! is part of the Same Time series, published by Some People Press. Some People Press publishes autobiographical books by formerly incarcerated writers, as well as books on art and other subjects. The press challenges the idea that only certain people-with the right educations, experiences, and connections-can be published authors. The project does not require that participants have experience writing. Instead, the process works with existing skills and knowledge by asking people to ""write what you know."" Participants develop writing skills at their own pace with the support and feedback of their peers and through weekly meetings with project leaders and visiting artists and writers. Many of the writers whose work appears in the Same Time series have taken part in the autobiographical writing and publishing project at Columbia River Correctional Institution, a minimum-security prison in Northeast Portland, Oregon. During weekly classes they workshop their writing with fellow participants and visiting writers, publishers, and artists including Miranda July, Constance Debré, Chris Johanson, Jim Drain, and Laura Moulton.

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Author Information

William Shawn Tillman is a writer from California who began writing his autobiography while incarcerated. His work was developed through the autobiographical writing and publishing project at Columbia River Correctional Institution in Northeast Portland, Oregon. Enjoy the Ride! is his first book. Karleigh Frisbie Brogan is the author of Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts. She was a 2024 OregonLiterary Fellow and the recipient of the 2023 George Pascoe Miller Scholarship and a 2022 Rona Jaffe Scholarship for the Bread LoafWriters' Conference. She is from Santa Rosa, California, and currently resides in Portland, Oregon.

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