Time To Talk About It: The Wildwood Experience

TIME TO TALK ABOUT IT is a fictional novel based on shared, real-life experiences and fantasies. The names and circumstances have been changed and/or altered to fit the story. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental. TIME TO TALK ABOUT IT, The Wildwood Experience is the first novel of a trilogy. The Wildwood Experience takes us on the journey of self-realization and the beginning process of transformation. We follow the experiences of seven teens being incarcerated at a youth detention center named Wildwood in the hills of Tennessee. The TIME TO TALK ABOUT IT program is a highly controversial, state funded, pilot program. It focuses on the solution, understanding of self and the emotions that drive our behavior without blame, rather than punishment. The bureaucratic hierarchy wants to blame and punish and they fight program director Rachel East every step of the way to Wildwood. A spy has even been placed on her staff to report her every action. Without her close relationship with the governor, Rachel could never have imagined the opportunity to work with the seven. Her determination to succeed is fueled by the naysayers and she gets the chance to change their minds. Each teen was specifically chosen according to their level of trauma and for diversity. Yet, are they really that diverse? Seven journeys to the heart, sharing history and relinquishing those deepest, darkest secrets that hold them hostage. The list of their convictions is baffling. Faith and Grace at the mere age of fourteen, wrongly charged and held for attempted murder; Nate, star athlete, having been set up selling weed by his highly successful, minority contractor, father; Blade, following in his dad's footsteps, stealing cars for the joy of the ride; Jewel and Sam, running an escort service out of their high school and Liz, a daddy's girl and daughter to a very prominent surgeon, wraps her car around a tree, killing her best friend and is convicted of DUI with vehicular homicide but she really was not drunk. Rachel encourages the teens to look at their lives from a new perspective, one of observation without judgement. Introspection and curiosity to replace fear and judgement. Making NO CHANGES, just observing, the teens begin to ask the questions; what happened? how did I get here? what is the source of my pain? how do "I" respond? what do "I" need? how am "I" feeling at this moment? Most have never stopped long enough to ask one question, let alone several. Compared to where the teens had been incarcerated, it's as if they've gone to camp. What they don't know is that they will work much harder in this setting as they dare to discover and share how history has brought them to this place and their unending possibilities for the future. They learn that shared trauma is shared healing but not everyone survives. We are as sick as our secrets and some cannot let them go. Can these lessons work outside of the isolation of the group? They will be tested as tragedy hits our nation once again. It is a new experience for the seven to be serving on the frontline with a deliberate observers view and they are warmed by the experience of helping others. They each begin to get a sense of their autonomy and how they can speak "life" or "death" into another human being. With understanding comes choices. What choices bring joy and what choices bring sorrow? Take a look for yourself.