J.E. Wantz

Besides my award-winning essay “Feeling(s) Cheated,” I am the author of one full-length science fiction novel, Storm Holding (unpublished), dozens of wide-ranging short stories and personal essays (also unpublished), and several one act plays (yes, you guessed it . . . unpublished) that have been performed in the gated community in which I currently live. As an active member in a creative writing group for the last four years, my need to put pen to paper has become a life-changing compulsion (and that’s a good thing). My writing has led my mind, and several of my regular readers’ minds, to many places that our bodies are as yet unable to go.

I work as a Library Clerk (a job I love), providing me access to myriad books, which I voraciously read. Though prospects look dim beyond the next five years, after which I am scheduled to leave prison for the uncertainty and unlikelihood of societal acceptance, I tenaciously cling to the now and let my pen roam free. I love the writing process, but am wo


Articles by J.E. Wantz

Prison and Justice Writing
Wednesday June 6

After Prison

I have 10 minutes until a call-out to see the mental health case manager I call Mr. Forgiveness. I don’t want to see him, not because he is always going on and on about forgiveness, but because I don’t want to be alive. The weather outside my cell window is gray and overcast. It was sunny when I passed out.

Prison and Justice Writing
Thursday May 10

Feeling(s) Cheated

From 1995 to 2005 I was on Paxil, a medication that, ostensibly, was to help me in the areas of depression and obsessive compulsive thinking. As I look back on the role that this medication has played in my life for the last 10 years I begin to wonder. Was my dependency on this drug