On a recent Thursday afternoon, the Free Minds Book Club was thrilled to host a visit from best-selling crime writer, George Pelecanos. The young book club members who gathered in the Correctional Treatment Facility’s chapel had just finished reading Pelecanos’ new release, The Way Home – a story set in the familiar streets of Washington, DC. The book describes the unsettled life of a white teenaged boy named Chris, who is charged with a violent assault and spends more than a year at “Pine Ridge,” a fictionalized version of Oak Hill, Washington, DC’s now-closed juvenile detention facility. The youth were overwhelmingly struck by Pelecanos’ very real depiction of DC life, as they know it.

Mr. Pelecanos, whose past jobs included line cook, dishwasher, bartender, and woman’s shoe salesman before he published his first novel in 1992, began the session by describing his journey to become a writer. He told the young men, many of whom have newly developed aspirations to become authors and screenwriters, that “in order to be a good writer, more than anything, you just need to live an interesting life. And you all have already lived incredibly interesting lives.”

When one youth asked him, “How do you get in the zone to write?” Pelecanos replied that he doesn’t take any breaks when he is working on a book. “I write seven days a week,” he told them.

The author encouraged the young men not to be disheartened by their current circumstances. “What’s happened is just one chapter in your life.”

After talking with him in depth about the characters and the redemptive theme of The Way Home (Pelecanos’ 16th novel set in his hometown of Washington, DC), members excitedly peppered him with questions about the storyline that unfolded over five award-winning seasons of the HBO dramatic series “The Wire,” for which Pelecanos was a producer, writer and story editor.

As the session wound to a close, a 16-year-old sitting in the back of the room piped up, saying, “I think your next novel is sitting right in front of you!” to which Pelecanos responded, “Don’t think I’m not listening to every word you say. I’m always working.”

We are enormously grateful to George Pelecanos and to the Pen Faulkner Foundation for making his visit possible and for generously donating books to the members of Free Minds.

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