I think that “Writing Our Way Out” is a really powerful book that has a bunch of emotional weight. The stories that the book contains are beautiful because they toe the line between being really tragic and somewhat up-lifting. The stories are sometimes really hard to read, with harsh subject matter and descriptions of traumatic events, but when you consider the people behind the writing, you can see how each person if really working to improve themselves.

One of the things that struck me the most about the narratives in the book was how young all the writers were when they first started going down a bad path. In the stories, kids as young as eleven or twelve years old were committing crimes and risking their lives on a daily basis. I think this is a perfect example of why it’s so important to experience stories like these. Not just because the process of writing and reflecting is therapeutic for the authors, which is of course a fantastic benefit, but because the publication of these stories helps educate the people that read them about some of the fundamental problems in our society.