The book club has just finished Pico Iyer’s new book, Aflame: Learning from Silence, and now we’re gathered around a scarred metal table to dig into our newest selection, the Harper Lee classic, To Kill a Mockingbird.
One by one, members of our all-women group read aloud, most in English, one in Spanish. A member who has been with us for more than a year jumps in to translate when needed. Another pulls out a drawing inspired by the book, emblazoned with the words of Scout’s father, Atticus Finch: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
As each woman finishes reading a passage, we all applaud—the only hard-and-fast rule of our book club. For a lovely moment, each round of clapping drowns out the incessant background noise of our meetings: shouting, wall-mounted TVs blaring, metal doors clanging shut.
The seven women, all in baggy sweatpants and white tees, zip through an entire chapter, continuing to read aloud. Then someone asks, “Can we keep going?”
And so the Santa Barbara County Jail’s Women’s Book Club turns to chapter 2 and begins again: Dill left us early in September to return to Meridian. We saw him off on the five o’clock bus and I was miserable without him until it occurred to me…
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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THE MOCKINGBIRD SINGS
I’ve led community book clubs with packed live and virtual audiences for the Los Angeles Times and two other newspapers. I’ve worked with demanding guest authors, Hollywood stars, even Barack Obama when his latest book came out. None of that prepared me for the unique challenges, and the sheer joy, of the jail book club.
This is a book club that demands constant flexibility amid lockdowns, COVID outbreaks, and the everything-else-grinds-to-a-halt appearance of the most popular person in the jail: the commissary-cart lady. There are grim days, too, when bad news from home keeps someone from joining. But most days, the group is a tonic for everyone involved, myself included. As every book club lover knows, it’s always about so much more than the book.
We began in the summer of 2024, a few months after I moved to Santa Barbara, building on the work of former Washington Post writer Scott Wilson, who runs a book club on the men’s side of the jail. Since then, we’ve been transfixed by an in-person visit with author Iyer, found ourselves moved by the words of Maya Angelou, dabbled in Shakespeare, and bonded with Prince Harry. The royal’s memoir about a difficult but über-privileged life was the last thing I expected to resonate with the women in cellblock Back Central-One. But the group found him sympathetic, his story proof that wealth and fame don’t inoculate anyone against family rifts, grief, or betrayal, heartbreaks the book club members know all too well.
Most of the women are quick to say that they rarely read. Some haven’t picked up a book since high school. Yet here they are, reaching for crisp new copies of Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist and Amy Tan’s The Backyard Bird Chronicles, for poems by Mary Oliver, Emily Dickinson, and California poet laureate Lee Herrick. I watch their instinctive wariness give way to curiosity, and then to conversation, the lifeblood of any great book club.
Wednesday afternoons become their own world. Mockingbird has especially held the group in its grip. We delve into characters and craft, themes of children coming of age and justice denied. I share the story of Lee once tossing her unfinished manuscript out a window in frustration, only to scramble in the street to retrieve the pages before they blew away. The Pulitzer Prize–winning novel—revered, reviled, banned, and constantly read since the summer of 1960—feels freshly alive here.
“I don’t want it to end,” says a woman with a background in landscaping, sketching her favorite scenes. “I’ll feel like I’ve lost a friend.”
Our volunteer translator asks if we can watch the film adaptation, starring Gregory Peck. I don’t know whether it’s possible, but I promise to ask Alice Perez, the sheriff’s office’s programs manager, whose résumé is uncommon in the corrections world: She has a PhD in literature and served as a college dean in a previous life. Perez had encouraged me to start a reading and writing group for the women here. Her years as a correctional counselor and volunteer chaplain had convinced her that a creative group could have long-lasting benefits. Godmothers, a local bookstore, offered to donate books. The group members treat the brand-new copies like treasures.
To everyone’s delight, the jail approves the screening. We gather on another day for a matinee in Back Central-One. As Scout, Jem, Dill, Atticus, Tom Robinson, and Boo Radley come to life on-screen, the women offer low-key running commentary. Toward the end, everyone in the cellblock inches closer to the screen, drawn into Mockingbird’s dramatic final scenes.
This time, the applause is fierce and includes a standing ovation.
Days like this remind me why I keep coming back.
ARMCHAIR TRAVELERS
On my first day, in July 2024, I arrive with a stack of paperbacks and an invitation: Travel the world with me. I share composition notebooks and stubby yellow golf pencils, the only writing tools allowed.
One of our first stops is Paris. “Bonjour, mes amis,” I say, handing out copies of The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter and Tears at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School in Paris, Kathleen Flinn’s memoir about losing a corporate job and using her savings to enroll at Le Cordon Bleu. In those early days, most of the women sit quietly, guarded. But as Flinn stumbles through cooking school, they begin to open up, sharing their own experiences of working in restaurants. Two members talk about the culinary courses they are taking through tablets the jail provides; one of them is studying French.
Over the next few meetups, everyone starts talking about their favorite foods, and the first brave souls share their writing with the group: A woman with a sociology background gives an impassioned reading of her poem, “My Babaganosh”; a former restaurant employee shares a spirited recipe for a perfect pepperoni-jalapeño pizza. Both performances draw cheers (and make everyone hungry).
Other weeks take us to Korea (The Island of Sea Women, by Lisa See), to Haiti (Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, by Tracy Kidder), to Germany (The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel, by Kati Marton), to Australia (Patchwork: A Sewist’s Diary, by Maddie Ballard). The week before the 2024 presidential election, we land in Amsterdam. Someone had requested Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. The women take turns reading Frank’s words aloud, and it’s an emotional afternoon. It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality.
We step inside Scotland’s Balmoral Castle for Spare, by Prince Harry, who lives nearby, in Montecito. One club member tells the group that she once worked at a Central Coast dry cleaner where the Duke and Duchess of Sussex sent their clothes. Two jail guards decide to read Spare too.
When Iyer visits in July 2025 to discuss his book about finding solace in a hilltop monastery after a wildfire destroyed his Santa Barbara home, the women make a sign to express their appreciation for our first-ever guest author. “welcome pico” is spelled in giant orange letters that are glued to paper with toothpaste. Our group’s longest-term member stands to read a passage from Aflame to the writer, then shares a question. Later, Iyer tells us how moved he was by the depth of the conversation.
Like most book clubs, our group is self-selecting. The women who gather weekly around the table to share a common read are there by choice. Every few weeks, I also set up a Book Buffet, lining up fiction, poetry, memoir, and graphic novels between the bars. It’s a simple raffle: Pick a number and, starting with the lowest number, pick an individual book.
I do this on zero budget, helped by a network of extraordinary support. Another indie bookstore, Chaucer’s, has started donating books; Gunpowder Press, Tin House Publishing, Mesa Bookstore, and the Planned Parenthood Book Sale have shared books too. I scour thrift stores for novels, comic books, and free magazines, and I pick up composition notebooks at the Dollar Tree. Friends leave magazines and books on my porch. One week, I arrived at Godmothers and found a surprise: Actress Jane Lynch had heard about our book club and shared 10 copies of her memoir, Happy Accidents.
The jail is a transitional place. Women arrive, stay, leave, move on. And yet the book club’s impact feels lasting. One new member told me that she hadn’t read in years before joining us. Her next stop is state prison, where she now plans to earn her GED.
Another woman, the French student, was incarcerated when her mother died. Writing in her book club notebook, she says, helped her grieve. She turned the journal into letters to her mom. The book club became an anchor for her, allowing a sense of peace that the jail environment so often strips away.
“It just feels normal,” she tells me. “Like nothing else does here.”•
Donna Wares is a writer, editor, and live-event producer. She founded the L.A. Times Book Club and served as managing editor of the Orange County Register.
