Other Make a Difference Day celebs:
Writer Anchee Min on the value of education
Bestselling author Matthew Klam is enriched by a handicapped child
Robert Putnam, writer of Bowling Alone, is optimistic toward youth
Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays With Morrie, finds his late teacher's words live on.
Arthur author Marc Brown believes where kids read, kids help others
Christopher Paul Curtis, author of Bud, Not Buddy, hails a hero he overlooked -- his dad.
Marc Parent, Turning Stones author, makes a difference to a dying woman's cat.
Ana Castillo, poet and author, tells how a gathering replenishes women who make a difference.
Ann Hood, author of Ruby and the upcoming Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time, comforts the spirit by feeding the sad, the lost and the lonely.
Justin Timberlake makes a difference through music
Wish You Well writer David Baldacci, learns a lesson from young writers
Patricia Cornwell, writer of The Last Precinct recalls what a world-renowned evangelist did for a scared little girl

Wally Lamb, author of the Oprah Book Club novels She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, testifies to the passion of six prisoners who've found new voices.

Unlock a spiritual prison

On my nervous first drive to York Correctional Institution, a maximum-security women's prison in Niantic, Conn., I sought to calm myself with music.

I was half-listening to the standards on a gospel CD I'd bought weeks earlier but never played when, suddenly, a piano pounded and the car shook with the vocal thunder of the Abyssinian Baptist Gospel Choir.

The unfamiliar song so overpowered me that I pulled over to the shoulder. To this day, the emotional wallop of that moment fills me with wonder. Knowing nothing yet about the plot or characters of my next novel, I somehow understood I had stumbled upon the new story's setting and title. When the song ended, I noticed the sign in front of my car: "Correctional facility area. Do not stop."

I was driving to York to keep a promise I'd made to Marge Cohen, the librarian there. Several suicides and suicide attempts had triggered an epidemic of despair, and the prison school staff hoped writing might prove useful to inmates as a healing tool. Would I come and speak? Yes, I had told Marge. Once. For 90 minutes.

To gain access to the women of York, you check in with the guard at the main gate, walk through a metal detector, then pass through a series of 10 doors. I met my liaison, Dale Griffith, who described her teaching at York as a calling, not just a job. Dale and I arranged chairs in a circle. Thirty inmates entered the room.

Dressed identically in cranberry T-shirts and pocketless jeans, the women came in all colors, shapes and sizes. Their attitudes ranged from hangdog to Queen of Sheba. Most had shown up not to write but to check out "that guy who was on Oprah." I spoke. We tried some writing exercises. They asked questions. (You met Oprah? What's Oprah like?) At the end of the session, I promised to return if they promised to write something. We would react to one another's work. Each woman's draft would be her ticket into the workshop.

At session two, 15 of the 30 chairs were empty. Stacie wanted praise, not feedback. Ruth said she'd meant to be vague and non-specific, that her business wasn't necessarily the reader's business. Diane, at 50 the senior member of the group, eyed me suspiciously. She'd written under the pseudonym Natasha and sought reassurance that her work would never, ever be read aloud. I suspected Diane would be gone by session three.

But it was during session three that Diane couldn't keep her writing to herself. In a shaky, tentative voice, she voluntarily read to the group a disjointed chronicle of her life story: savage abuse, spousal homicide, lawyerly indifference and parallel battles against breast cancer and the hopelessness that accompanies long-term incarceration. When she stopped, there was silence. Then, applause. The dam of distrust had been sledgehammered. The women's writing began to flow.

It's been a year since those first sessions. Many writers have left the group rather than confront the pain of remembering and drawing hard-earned insights. Others have done their time and graduated back into the world. Carolyn, Brenda, Michelle, Tabatha, Robin and Diane -- the six brave writers who have stayed the course -- have faced their demons without flinching, revised relentlessly and become a community. Through their writing, I've come to know them not merely as the drug abusers, gang members, thieves and killers they have been but as the complex, creative works in progress they are. Each discovered the intertwined power of the written word and the power that resides within, even at this place that exists to make them powerless. They are six tough cookies, not because of their crimes but because they will be neither defeated nor silenced.

For me, writing fiction is slow and painful, fraught with standstills and backward slides before small forward lurches. A year into it, I am still only at the gateway of the prison novel I am daily discovering. But the women of York have been writing furiously. They are on the verge of publishing an anthology of their riveting autobiographical pieces. Last month, we wondered what to call their publication and I lent them the title of my novel-in-progress.

"Couldn't Keep It to Myself? I know that song!" Tabatha exclaimed. She then treated us to a resounding, spontaneous a cappella rendition of Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody that packed all the joyful thunder of the Abyssinian Baptist Gospel Choir.

Said I wasn't gonna tell nobody
But I couldn't keep it to myself
What the Lord has done for me

"I knew that once we got you here, you would want to come back," Dale Griffith recently told me, a mischievous twinkle in her eye. "You were called."

Next Week: Matthew Klam, author of the story collection Sam the Cat, writes about making a difference.