Next month I'll finish up my twenty-fourth year of teaching creative writing to juvenile offenders behind the chain-link gate at the Mt. Meigs campus of the Alabama Department of Youth Services. It's been quite the ride, and I've taught students who've committed all manner of crimes, some as serious as it can get, but when you're sitting next to a distressed child who's doing his best to write about and understand his life in an honest way, you tend to forget about what brought him through that gate. He's just a kid who has lived a life so trouble-filled, often through no fault of his own, that you think to yourself, How could you not end up here? I suppose I originally thought I'd do my time, so to speak, at Mt. Meigs for a few years and then maybe (hopefully) become a tenured professor at a university, where I'd teach undergrad lit courses and graduate-level creative writing workshops. And in fact, I do now teach grad-level workshops at Converse College in their low-residency MFA program, but [...]