I had come to the Omega Institute, an adult summer learning center in the Hudson River Valley, on a lark, intrigued by a catalog description for a workshop that promised to integrate baseball with yoga, meditation, and martial arts:

Here is a chance to experience both the doing and the being of the great American myth. Participants in this workshop experience will recreate the national pastime as it might have been and might yet become. With bats, balls, and gloves we will explore baseball as a Way.

One instructor listed was Jeff McKay, a coach from Western Washington University. The other was Bill Lee.

The five works that appear here are excerpted from This Prison Where I Live: The PEN Anthology of Imprisoned Writers, to be published this month by Cassell. The book celebrates the seventy-fifth anniversary of PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Editors, Novelists), an international association defending writers who face imprisonment, torture, and death.

The activity center at my parents’ Florida condo was a low, T-shaped building with sliding glass doors that opened onto room after well-lit room. Signs on these doors read, Bingo, Pottery, Woodworking. lnside sat white-haired men and red- or blond-haired women (in southeast Florida, women don’t get white or gray — it’s one of God’s miracles), their hands caressing cards, or vases, or pine boards. There were two nearby pools, the smaller one equipped with jets to create rushing water. Some of the altes, as my father would call them (short for alte kaker — Yiddish for “old shit”), swam or walked against the current for exercise.