Malcolm Ivey / Author

Writers Write

Greetings, my friends. Long time, no essay. I have been uploading lots of videos but that doesn’t count. Not for us self-proclaimed scribes and practitioners of the time-honored craft of the written word. Writers write. No way around it. And if I’m not writing, then how long can I continue to call myself a writer?

For me, writing is life or death. The difference between freedom and a prison cell, clarity and chaos, the blue-sky future and the hellscape of my past. “Writing gives me an identity other than failure/loser/career criminal” declared Ezra James in the prologue of my third novel, On the Shoulders of Giants. But like many fictional characters, Izzy was just serving as an avatar for the author’s intrinsic beliefs. Back then I was putting in work, stacking up coffee-stained and ink-blotted pages, living in that ethereal realm known as flow state. Not so much these days. Currently, my prefrontal cortex is absorbed with learning technology after decades in the joint, reconnecting with family, acclimating to the world on this side of the razor wire. It’s not a bad life. I’m free. I’m home. I’m grateful. But I’m not writing. And again, if I’m not writing, then how long can I continue to call myself a writer?

This question has been gnawing at me lately. While working a 12-hour-a-day landscaping job in the Florida humidity, then coming home and staying awake long enough to eat, bathe, and dick around on my guitar for a few minutes before passing out. Only to rise before the sun the next day and do it all over again. All the while, this shiny new MacBook is just sitting here across the room, eyeing me resentfully. Like a jilted lover. Or worse, like a lover whose partner has suddenly developed erectile disfunction.

If you’ve read my other essays or books, you know that everything I’ve written was achieved longhand in my cell. Day after day, year after year, this pen and quill approach was the central focus of my life. My locker was stuffed with composition books, legal pads, thesauruses and craft manuals. I had no other option. But guys who were serving shorter sentences than me used to tell me how much I was going to love writing on a computer when I got out. Now here I am, nine months after walking through the gothic gates of FCI Terre Haute and out into the bird-chirping sunshine of the free world… and I haven’t written squat.

That changes here and now.

Yes, my time is limited and there are way more distractions to navigate out here. True, I no longer have countless hours to agonize over the perfect word or pithy sentence. And on top of all that, everyone seems to be a writer or essayist these days, thanks to AI. None of this matters. I have work to do, questions that require a fair hearing, stories to tell, a world to change. It all comes down to carving out time and harnessing will.

There’s a quote that I memorized early in my writing journey. I used to repeat it like a mantra when I was writing Consider the Dragonfly. Fifteen years later, I’m still busting it out to anyone who will listen. To aspiring incarcerated authors, to my coworkers on the landscaping crew, even to the 5^th graders up in Michigan I had the honor of speaking to at the end of the school year. It’s attributed to a 19^th century author named Anthony Trollope who worked for the British Post Office but awoke before dawn each morning to write for an hour before galloping off to his day job on horseback.

“The smallest task, be it done every day, will trump the efforts of a spasmodic Hercules. It has the force of the drop of water that hollows the stone…”

Such a potent observation. It’s time. Time to get back to the basics. Time to do the work. Time to liberate these thoughts from the solitary cell of my skull. Time to be that persistent drop of water that hollows the stone.

Writers write.

—August 2026

Six Pages

“The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity . . .” George Orwell, author of 1984, wrote these words. And while Mr. Orwell was damn near clairvoyant when it came to the dystopian future and the rise of the totalitarian state, I have to disagree with him on this point.

I’ve been living in captivity for most of my adult life and writing books from cramped cells and steel bunks for the last 15 years. During the most bleak and psychologically oppressive periods of this journey, it was my imagination that kept me company and filled me with hope. Without my imaginary friends and the parallel worlds they inhabit, I’d be crazy by now. “Nuttier than squirrel shit,” as a character from one of my first books once said.

Now that I’ve arrived at the dwindling hours of a 7,550 day odyssey that began in March of 2005 and wound its way through eight books, six presidential terms, and half the prisons in the Florida Panhandle to the crumbling Indiana federal dungeon where I sit drafting this final E=mc2 newsletter on a November afternoon in 2025, it seems like a good time to allow myself to let off the gas and peek in the rearview.

When I began writing my first novel, Consider the Dragonfly, in early 2011, the Florida Department of Corrections was the most dysfunctional prison system in the U.S. Its aging institutions were understaffed, unairconditioned (they still are), teeming with scabies and staph, oblivious to basic human needs like nutrition or even a reliable supply of toilet paper, and rampant with abuse. I had recently finished serving nine months on 24-hour lockdown for an alleged relationship with a staff member. I weighed 132 pounds and was having major breathing difficulties even though I quit smoking while I was in the hole. For some reason, that deep satisfying breath that I had taken for granted my entire life was suddenly elusive. I was convinced it was asthma or COPD, but after checking my blood oxygen level repeatedly and finding nothing wrong, the nurse told me it might be anxiety. In hindsight, this makes total sense. Especially considering the conditions.

What made me want to write a book in the first place? I’m not sure. I have numerous theories—and I’ve mentioned most of them in various essays over the years—but no concrete answers. Here are a few of the greatest hits:

1. Age 40 was rapidly approaching and I had nothing to show for my time on Planet Earth—no kids, no property, no retirement account . . . just a criminal record dating back to the juvenile justice system in the late ’80s.
2. I spent my whole life breaking mom’s heart and letting her down. I wanted to give her something to be proud of.
3. I was a musician with no instrument. No guitar. But the creative impulse within me could not be suppressed and ended up working its way out through fiction.
4. Similar to the character of Izzy in my third novel, On the Shoulders of Giants, I was seeking an identity other than failure, loser, career criminal.
5. I grew tired of writing unanswered letters to disinterested people, so I decided to write the world a letter in the form of a book.

All of these motivations are true. Then and now. In 2024’s Letters to the Universe, I offered a more metaphysical explanation:

There’s a passage near the end of Liz Gilbert’s magisterial Eat Pray Love where she riffs on a Zen school of thought regarding the oak tree. In her retelling, the mighty oak is brought into being by two separate forces at the same time: the obvious one, the acorn, but also something else—the future tree itself which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being.

All those letters, all those years. All of the working and reworking of sentences and paragraphs, trying to make them sing, replacing weak verbs with more robust options, attempting to convey humor, expanding my limited vocabulary, learning to write like I talk . . . Maybe what I was actually doing was finding my voice, shaping it, sharpening it, letter by letter, year after year. Maybe, like Liz Gilbert’s mighty oak, a grizzled fifty-year-old convict and multi-published author was pulling his twenty-year-old self forward, willing him to “Grow! Grow!” all this time.

And so, with the centrifugal pressure of all these forces pushing and pulling and swirling and gathering inside of me, as well as all the fear and suffering and violence surrounding me, I sat down on my bunk, put in my headphones, and began to write the story of CJ McCallister. I had no idea what I was doing. But I did it every day. And slowly, the characters stirred to life. Mom had recently retired after 40 years of administrative assistance in those days and was thrilled that I was doing something with my time other than chasing dope and running parlay tickets. When I asked if she would type my handwritten pages, she agreed without hesitation. But I doubt she ever imagined that this single question would define the next fifteen years.

Ever since that day, I’ve been stuffing pages in envelopes, six at a time, and sending them home. A week or two later, they return to me typed and double-spaced in Times New Roman font and sandwiched between Miami Dolphins articles and letters about the birds in the backyard. This is still happening today, even though mom is nearing 80 years old and I’m a couple weeks away from going home. In fact, I just received the latest installment of Prose for Cons in the mail last night.

Process. In James Clear’s Atomic Habits, he notes, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” This system that we installed 15 years ago is still humming along today. It’s a system that turned adversity into hope, and weakness into strength. Six pages at a time. There’s a lot of talk in writer circles about AI replacing human authors. But the journey of how these particular books were written could never be replicated by a machine. The next time you hold a Malcolm Ivey novel in your hands, I hope you will remember this.

—November 2025