As you prepare your agenda for Day One, here is a check list of the tools you will need:

• Reflection One: Introducing Yourself: Please feel free to revise what you wrote at the beginning of this curriculum building journey according to any new thoughts that are coming to you.

• Reflection Two: Oral Imaging Tools: Use this reflection to build your work plan for day one, including the stories you have selected that you would like to highlight.

• Reflection Three: Preparing Your Listening Log. Make sure that you have this on hand for your first working session. Whether you are working in person or remotely, it will be your choice as to whether to take notes while the session is going on, or to reconstruct your notes afterwards.

• Reflection Four: Making the Curriculum Your Own: Make a crib sheet of the parts of “If your words had the power” and “finding your page one moment” through oral imagining that speak most fully to you. How will you introduce each of them in your own way?

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Select 5 to 10 stories to share with your writing circle: Highlight the first two. The length of the stories you pick may be determined by the size of your group and the length of time allocated to the program. After you share the first story or two and move into the “go-round” of “If your words had the power” introductions, your selection from your stock of favorite stories may shift. So it is good to have extras prepared. If the group is very dynamic, you won’t need more than one or two, especially since you will be imaging page one moments aloud. But if there are lulls, it is good to have extra stories available. If you are working in person, it will be good to pass the stories around the room to have everyone take turns reading them. If you are working remotely, you can project them and take turns.

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Select 5 to 10 additional stories, either from your readings on this website, or from your life experience with people impacted by the carceral ecosystem, to demonstrate how page one moments might look. For example:

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• One writer opens his story with a dream, and then suddenly shifts to his waking up behind bars

• Another writer takes us into early childhood when she is watching her addicted mother die

• Still another finds us in her cell, remember what brought her there… etc.