When Vida Mueller was in middle school, she experienced a tectonic life shift: she discovered her older brother was actually her half-sibling – a term she rarely uses because there is no halving their brother-sister bond, she explained.
After learning her brother had a different biological father – one with a problematic history, who had been incarcerated multiple times – they set out to try to find him together, she recounted.
“Me and my brother are best friends, so we both wanted to find his dad, but he had been in and out of the [prison] system, so it was very difficult,” said Mueller, who is now a 17-year-old high school senior. Though it was hard to track him down, they eventually did and slowly started communicating.
“It seemed like he wanted to [have a relationship],” she recalled. But over the next few years, the siblings both experienced the ups and downs, and disappointments that often accompany trying to connect with someone who couldn’t be fully present as a parent – physically or emotionally.
“So we kind of had to come to terms with our situation, my brother especially,” said Mueller.
As a freshman, Mueller found a refuge for coping with her complicated family life: the Pathfinder Club, which is part of POPS (Pain of the Prison System) the Club. Created for teens impacted by incarceration, detention or deportation, the club helps students “transform hurt and harm to hope and healing” by sharing their stories at weekly meetings, and through its emphasis on creative expression – writing essays and poetry, drawing and painting, or taking photographs.
Through the club, Mueller had an outlet for releasing the range of mixed emotions she was experiencing by creating poetry, other written vignettes and drawings. And this year, she will be among over 90 students to have their works published in the 10th POPS/Pathfinder anthology.
Titled “Home and Away,” the book features a diverse collection of visual and written works that were created by club members during the past year. The book’s theme emerged organically as submissions were reviewed and divided into two sections – “home” contains writings and art that express a “sense of feeling at home,” and “away” conveys a longing for those who are away.
“We really wanted to make sure that kids were creating … because the clubs are designed to be arts-based, for the purpose of healing and communication,” said author and criminal justice activist Amy Friedman, who co-founded POPS the Club with her husband Dennis Danziger while he was a teacher at Venice High School in 2013.
Nearly every year since then they have published an annual anthology, with contributions from 10 active clubs – including six in the Los Angeles area – with more than 450 student members.
When Friedman visits clubs at different schools and speaks with students, she is struck by the positive atmosphere and “how very safe these clubs feel – and how critical they feel for connecting with people who know what you’re going through and care about you,” she said.
“This is such a scary time, particularly for kids,” said Friedman. She noted that many of the students are dealing with the difficulties of being away from family members who are incarcerated, while others are living in daily fear of losing relatives to possible deportation.
“Many have close relationships with undocumented loved ones, and it’s pretty harrowing what they’re going through,” added Friedman, but she emphasized that whether someone is detained, deported or incarcerated, the impact of their absence extends far beyond that individual person.
“We’re a country that over-incarcerates and there are just too many people who don’t pay any attention to the way people are impacted, beyond the people who we put behind bars,” she said.
“I think we’re all sort of experiencing that now, seeing the family of [Kilmar Abrego Garcia], who was deported and then imprisoned in El Salvador,” she continued. “I’m hoping people are paying attention to what this man’s family is going through.”
Friedman hopes that publishing the yearly anthology, and sharing the students’ deeply personal experiences and feelings, can help contribute to a better understanding of how kids are affected.
Leticia Longoria-Navarro, executive director of The Pathfinder Network, the nonprofit arm that manages the clubs, said the “pains [created by] the prison system are really significant,” which is why the sense of belonging and community created by the clubs can be so powerful for students.
“When you’re in the middle of it, for someone like me – who had both parents incarcerated while growing up – you don’t really know how much it’s affecting you until you start voicing it,” recounted Longoria-Navarro, adding, “That’s particularly true when you hear from other people with shared experiences.”
The clubs “create meaning” from those shared experiences, which encourages kids to open up “instead of just suppressing them or, even worse, staying silent about them,” she explained.
For Mueller, who has always enjoyed art and writing, being encouraged to communicate artistically helped her become more creative and confident – she used to be a “very shy, quiet person,” she recalled. And seeing her works in print – in “Home and Away” and previous anthologies – has been enormously gratifying, said Mueller.
Being part of the club and sharing their experiences, with one another and for the annual book, also helped Mueller realize that she’s “not alone” – that there are many families just like hers.
“It has meant a lot to me,” she said, “to know there’s so many others who have similar stories.”