Inside Voices: A Prison Choir, My Mother and Me

by Amy Kolen

For fifteen months Amy Kolen traveled between two very different worlds: a medium-security men’s prison, where she participated as an outside singer in the prison choir, and the confines of her mother’s room in a health center, where her mother required round-the-clock care following a massive stroke.

This excerpt is Chapter 6 of Amy Kolen’s Inside Voices: A Prison Choir, My Mother, and Me, released recently by Ice Cube Press. This chapter is printed with permission.

Listening to music that we enjoy releases dopamine, one of the feel-good chemicals in our brain, even one as damaged as my mother’s. And singing, alone or with others, even using vocal cord tissue that’s been around nine decades and has become thin and inelastic, like my mother’s, releases the hormone oxytocin, what researchers call “the bonding hormone,” and “a brain tool for building trust” that’s important for healthy nerves.

Aware of my mind and body’s positive response following prison choir rehearsals, voice lessons, and practicing on my own, and wanting to dim the importance of possible external cyclones in the Health Center when I visited my mother, I tried to schedule my time with Mom directly after my lessons. Or I ran through choir scores, scales, and other exercises at home, swooping my voice from low to high and down again, like a siren, before seeing her.

Though her stamina and mood were often low, she clearly got a quiet rush from musical interludes with her MTs in a day that was always too long for her. And when she became upset, like the day she perseverated about my father after various nurses had given her different information, in response to her question about her dead husband’s whereabouts—“I want to find my husband! He was here with me yesterday! Where’s my husband?”—June didn’t encourage her to remember that my dad had died or corroborate one of the stories a nurse had told her, which would’ve aggravated the situation. Instead, she met my mother where she was, in her agitated state, and led her out of her distress, matching my mother’s anxiety with music, gradually decreasing the tempo and complexity of the songs to ease Mom to a more comfortable state.

Photo by Janine Calsbeek.

“Moon River, wider than a mile, I’m crossing you in style, some day.” My mom mouthed the words along with June’s singing. Between “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” and “Sentimental Journey,” two aides transferred my mother to her bed in prep for her morning nap, and after the latter song, Mom described to June some of the countries where she and my dad had traveled and lived (Scotland), including countries they’d never been (Italy, France, and Ireland). “I have pictures of all these places,” my mom said, waving her good arm in the air, as if to indicate pictures she thought were on the wall by her bed. “See?” June said the images (photos of various family members I’d framed and hung on the wall a week earlier) were lovely. Five minutes later, when we both slipped out of her room, my mother’s eyes were closed and she was softly snoring.

By Lillian and her recreation therapy aide, Majesty. Photo by Amy Kolen.

I’d never seen my mother draw or paint. To the extent that she was up to it, though, the rec therapy aides tried to get her to communicate, using crayons, watercolor markers, and colored paper during her weekly sessions with them. Although Melanie actually created the images signed “Mom,” the sentiments behind the rainbow-hued arc bearing my name suspended over the line drawing of a figure with long, dark, curly hair and the words “To Amy Love Mom” were clear, though my mother hadn’t voiced such feelings to me since I was very young. As were the emotions behind the scrap of blue paper with a smiling frog sticker and Hershey Kiss taped to it and the words, “Bright and beautiful and a precious sister” that my mother “made” on Kindness Day. She’d intended this offering for Beatrice, but the aides figured it was for me.

Melanie attempted to represent what she thought my mother was feeling or what she thought my mother was supposed to be feeling, but nobody really knew what her innermost emotions were. Flipping through these pieces of paper with their simple images in bright primary colors propelled me back to childhood, when I’d churned out picture after picture, giving each one to my mother, who’d praised me, adding each drawing to a pile that she kept on a shelf in the living room cabinet. My mother allowed me to feel visible then, as a young child, like I had something valuable to say. I thumbed through the pages bursting with color and light from the rec therapy aides. Maybe my mother was saying that she wanted to be heard, that she loved me and appreciated that I was in her world, even if she was channeling her sentiments through Melanie. More likely, though, my interpretation of those pages stemmed from a deep, ever-present longing for an intimacy with my mother that could only ever be a fantasy, like the one I briefly conjured around our book club of two.

This chapter was originally published in The Blazing Star Literary Journal, sponsored by AgArts. Read Kolen’s full Chapter 6 of Inside Voices here:

Click here to order a copy of Inside Voices.
Copyright © 2025 by Amy Kolen.

“ In fluid, penetrating prose, Kolen allows us to step into this primal relationship, experience it with her, and find transformation. A must-read for anyone who has struggled with family dynamics or assumed the role of elder caretaker.”
—Mary Swander, author, The Maverick MD

Amy Kolen’s book, Inside Voices: A Prison Choir, My Mother, and Me, was released recently by Ice Cube Press. Kolen’s essays have been published in several anthologies, including Best American Essays, 2002. Her work has also appeared in various publications, including Orion Magazine, The Missouri Review, Bayou, The Massachusetts Review, and The Florida Review, and has been shortlisted in Best American Essays, 2009. Holding an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa, she sang with the Oakdale Community Choir for four years. She lives with her husband in Estes Park, Colorado.

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