By Erica Wilson

As Kathy McGregor became officially ordained as a deacon in 2021, she was filled with hope at the prospect of being able to visit with people whom she had come to know and love: the men on Arkansas’ death row. She forged these friendships through her program The Prison Story Project, which amplifies stories which are “arguably the most locked up” with staged performances of participants’ writing. The project’s first performance of the men’s stories took place in a “small aisle between cages” holding the eleven participating men in 2016. Shortly after, the state announced it was executing eight men, two at a time over 10 days. Four of those men were writers for the project, and only two of them received last-minute stays of execution. After the state completed the executions, for reasons unknown McGregor was denied access to the remaining men on death row. She had highlighted the humanity of these prisoners through her work, and she was devastated. 

When she finally had the chance to talk to one of her friends on the row, he begged her to return and continue the project. He suggested that she become the men’s spiritual advisor, and then she would have to be allowed back into the prison. Taken aback, she said “Kenny, I’d have to go to seminary and that would take four years!” Kenny, 45 at the time and having been on death row since he was 19, said “Kathy, you don’t get to talk to me about time.” And that is when McGregor made the decision to attend seminary and become a deacon. 

“She was like ‘see you in a couple of years,’ and she went and did that,” Jane Blunschi, the project’s current creative writing director, laughs. The longer Blunschi has known McGregor, the more she admires her, describing her as someone who is definitely “for the people” with “a personality and heart that is bigger than Dallas.” 

McGregor has never shied away from helping others. In 2005, she drove down to New Orleans to aid those affected by Hurricane Katrina. She has acted as a union organizer for nurses, meeting with political campaigners and legislators to discuss mandating safer staffing ratios and to stop unsafe floating for nurses between departments less familiar to them. McGregor has years of experience as both a hospice and a parish nurse. When McGregor sees a need, she faces it head-on, never giving up on doing the right thing, Blunschi said.  

Healing Through Storytelling

There is one aspect of McGregor’s life she said she has never been able to separate from any other: storytelling. She understands what it is like to be overlooked and to have your voice minimized. She was born in Montgomery, Alabama, but moved to Memphis when she was very young. Having experienced abuse during her childhood, McGregor never felt like she had a voice until she attended the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, Tennessee, in 1981. The festival ignited her journey to becoming a professional storyteller, and she said it was “like a missing puzzle piece of (her) life had just been found.” 

“I cherished being heard so much that I wanted to make sure that what (people) heard from me was healing and thoughtful and wise, and so then I resonated with folktales that demonstrated the power of healing and gave hope,” McGregor said. 

Standing on a stage in Memphis, McGregor looks out toward the crowd as her lips form the words to one of her favorite folktales. She tells the crowd about a poor farmer and wife who discover a magical box. It triples anything they put in the box and gives it back to them, but all the couple ever put in it was greed. McGregor didn’t know it, but the story would stay with her “in the marrow of her bones” until she needed it, she said.

Storytelling proved to be a valuable tool for McGregor in end-of-life care during her time as a hospice nurse. One of the most important attributes of storytelling is understanding it enough to know when to just listen, she said. Before walking into each patient’s room, she would stop at the door and make sure she was gathered and that her “feet were on the floor.” At the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, McGregor was the only HIV/AIDS hospice nurse in Shelby County, Tennessee. The work took a toll on her mental health, and she suffered extreme burnout. “I couldn’t understand how if I felt so called to hospice nursing, how could God allow this to happen to me?” she said. 

As she drove one day to her hospital-mandated therapy appointment amid her recovery, her favorite story about the couple and the magical box suddenly “hits (her) like a ton of bricks.” She grips the steering wheel and jerks her car to the side of the road. She takes deep breaths as she realizes that similar to the couple, she had been putting all the wrong things into hospice nursing and she was getting all the wrong things in return, she said. While never hesitant to give, McGregor does not receive well. She recognized that she had been giving so much to her patients that she had not left a way to replenish herself and needed to adjust her boundaries. 

The story had been lying in wait to heal her. 

“Sometimes stories lay dormant in your bones until you actually need them, and they can be really powerful stories,” McGregor said. 

She grounded herself with a repertoire of stories that fit how she was feeling. McGregor began extensively researching burnout, thinking “if this is happening to me, I bet it’s happening to other people.” Her research led her to create a company called “HealThy Self,” which used storytelling as the framework to teach people how to avoid burnout. The company held workshops all across the country and in Canada, where nurses and social workers could acquire continuing education credits. Even when she felt like she had given all she had to give, McGregor transformed her own healing journey into a way to give even more to others. Looking back, she laughs and says “That was my recovery, I can’t believe I did that!” 

The Prison Story Project

After moving to Fayetteville in the late 2000s, McGregor made the decision to step away from the storytelling microphone. However, she quickly realized that when much is given, much is required, and she could not just put her craft away altogether. That was when she decided to bring forth other people’s stories and experiences who normally do not have a voice: the incarcerated.  

McGregor sits within the circle of writers at the women’s correction center, where the project first began. Both an incredible teacher and eternal student, Blunschi said McGregor is always listening intently and writing just as much as everyone else. The circle of writers is sacred, an introspective space where folks can choose to write or not to write, to turn in their work or keep it for themselves. Blunschi often brings published poems to the circle to use as a starting place for people to tell their own stories. Then she will say “Write about a time when…” A particular topic that stands out to McGregor is when writers talk about things that they miss, with answers such as grass under their feet or a closed door, she said. It encourages an audience to look at prison in a new way, by focusing on the people in them, highlighting their redemption and their humanity. 

It’s a sentiment McGregor resonated with during her time as a hospice nurse at Joseph’s House in Washington D.C. The facility serves homeless men with AIDS or cancer. 

“One of the things we learned there is welcoming people right where they are, and I carry that over into my work with the incarcerated,” McGregor said. “We never had a curiosity about where the men came from that we served at Joseph’s House, and we have never had a curiosity to know what people have done to land themselves behind bars. When you take that (curiosity) away, it increases your ability to really hear people and (see) the humanity in people and connect with them.”  

The project members, along with UA MFA students, fashioned the women’s writings into a staged reading called “Stories from the Inside Out.” They first performed the reading for the women, then took it out to the public. The venue for the iteration’s first performance outside the correction center was St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where McGregor serves as a deacon. Many of the anecdotes in “Stories from the Inside Out” centered on abuse the women suffered from the men in their lives, whether that be husbands, brothers, uncles or others. Most of the times, if there is a woman incarcerated at the women’s center, at least one man in her life is incarcerated as well, McGregor said. After three or four classes, the theater director excerpted some of their stories about suffering abuse and wrongdoing at the hands of the men in their lives. They took those stories to the men at the correction center in Pine Bluff and asked the warden to give them men that would be paroling out in the next couple of years. They were hoping to “plant a seed for change for better relationships between those men and women,” McGregor said. After seeing the performance, some of the men wanted to join the project and write their own stories. The group stayed a few extra days and then took the men’s stories back to the women, creating a sort of “call-and-response” between them.  

In 2016, project members found themselves with unprecedented access to the men on Arkansas’ Death Row. When McGregor and the other project members approached the men about joining the project, they looked at them and said “We know what’s in it for you, but what’s in it for us?” Many of these men had been in solitary confinement for over 30 years and did not trust very easily. There were 34 men on death row at the time, and 11 men agreed to be part of the project. McGregor and the other project members became their liaison to the outside world. But even after the group was denied access to death row after the executions, their work continued on. Others began to notice The Prison Project and the importance and impact of highlighting prisoners’ humanity. The group received funding from entities such as Mid-America Arts Alliance and completed two tours of the staged readings covering five states. A Whiting Foundation grant allowed the group to tour across five more states and craft create a program guide so that other prison arts organizations could replicate parts of the program. They hired a documentary filmmaker to film a staged reading of the men’s stories titled “On the Row.” Soon after the pandemic hit, the group received various grants to show the filmed version of “On the Row” to Episcopal churches across the country and various organizations. 

Two performances of the men’s stories took place for the UA community in 2016, in line with a lecture from author Bryan Stevenson. He spoke about his book “Just Mercy,” which shares some of his client’s stories from his time as a lawyer and addresses present flaws in the legal system. A takeaway from his book that has stuck with McGregor is that “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done,” in line with her mission to highlight the humanity of those incarcerated.  Currently, Blunschi and McGregor are working to bring author Susan Burton to visit both the university and the women’s correction center in April. They plan to drop off copies of her book “Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women” to the correction center for the women to read. 

Getting Back to Death Row  

The pandemic has complicated prison access despite McGregor’s position as a deacon, although she has resolved not to give up on the men of death row. She has formed very deep friendships with many of the men, and they mean the world to her, she said. The members of the project have vowed to never abandon the surviving writers, and the men are continuing to write. McGregor usually spends four or five hours a week following up with the writers on the row. She also assists with hosting art exhibits of their work, the next set for March 19-26 at St. Paul’s. 

In Arkansas, you can only be on one person’s phone and visitation list from death row if you are not family, McGregor said. She is currently on her friend Ray’s list, and he has been in solitary confinement for more than 30 years. When she goes to Varner Unit, she knows she is being watched by people in the guard tower the second she pulls into the parking lot. After going through security, she walks down a long sidewalk and to her right she can see a slew of dead birds that have accidentally flown into a large electric fence. To her left is the prison, and from a distance she can see small white specks in the windows. It is the incarcerated men, in their white prison uniforms, watching her as she walks.  

Death row is the building at the very end of the sidewalk, where she gets to visit with Ray. McGregor hopes to soon be able to use her position as a deacon to see the remaining writers, her friends, the men that she has come to know and love. In the meantime, she continues to help make incarcerated people’s voices heard any way she can, whether it be amplifying their stories through art, letter writing or a listening ear. 

Called to Service  

On her birthday, McGregor sits in the St. Paul’s parish hall next to a table holding items such as condoms, Plan B and Fentanyl test kits. People are gathered in the hall for St. Paul’s community meals, in which hot lunches are offered to hungry people from all walks of life twice a week.  The sign next to McGregor is titled “harm reduction ministry.” A stethoscope sits around her neck, and several people approach her for free blood pressure checks during their meal. As McGregor interacts with each person, she genuinely asks them about themselves and how they are doing.   

It is her first week back at the church after a month-long retreat in Florida, where she worked on a memoir about her relationships with the men on death row, and her return is noticed by many.  When Mikki Cloud sees McGregor sitting at the table, they run up behind her and give her a big hug, saying how much they have missed McGregor. Cloud first noticed McGregor’s table at one of the luncheons in 2018 and approached her, expressing admiration for her harm reduction ministry. Having lived in a mini-van for almost five years, Cloud said having a regular place to come for food and other resources is essential for them and many in the community. They think McGregor’s presence at the luncheons is calming because they know someone with medical expertise is around and happy to provide aid. As one man approaches McGregor, he opens by thanking her for her service. 

Her passion for service is how she became involved at St. Paul’s in the first place. She was not raised Episcopalian, but when she began looking for a church home in Fayetteville, people would look at her and say “I don’t go to church, but if I did I would go to St. Paul’s.” For someone looking for a service-oriented church, that phrase is the perfect invitation, she said. 

As the procession enters the church every Sunday, McGregor is among them, holding an intricate red and gold book high for all to see. She sets it on the altar until it is time for the gospel reading when she goes down into the church aisle to share a message with churchgoers. McGregor also gives the dismissal at the conclusion of the service, and one of her favorite phrases to say is “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.” Her current position as a deacon has left her feeling like she is right where she is supposed to be, like it is “one foot in front of the other in doing what God has called (her) to do,” she said. And she even utilizes her background as a professional storyteller, because a deacon’s responsibility is to tell a story that will bring the congregation to service of some sort. When McGregor tells others to “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord,” she means it with all her heart. And when asked about the healing impact her life’s work has had on others thus far, her response is simple: she is just thankful to serve.