Rocco Di Pietro’s The Normal Exception: Life Stories, Reflections, and Dreams from Prison is an outcome of the author’s ten years of teaching college courses to prison inmates in New York, Ohio, and California.

A thoughtful observer, Di Pietro offers illuminating commentary on people's roles and the relationship
between prison and life outside the walls. Incarceration, he points out, “was only one way to transgress
out of the matrix of society; the artist, the poor, the homeless, the ill, the addicts, and psychological
cripples of every sort were also some of the other ways one could slip through the cracks.”

The book consists of essays that Di Pietro had assigned his students to write, interspersed with the
author’s thoughts on the content. For me, the most striking impression taken from these stories is how
many of these individuals had been living in prisons of other sorts long before their incarceration. Many
of these stories are harrowing, and the words of one woman are indicative of the suffering: “Though I

Sunday, May 5, 12noon-4pm, Goodale Park, 120 W. Goodale St.

Join us this Sunday, May 5 at Goodale Park for our May Day Picnic and Labor History Bike Ride Tour!

Picnic: 12noon-4pm

Bike Ride: 2-4pm

The picnic will begin at 12noon. We will be grilling burgers and hotdogs (meat and veggie of both) and will have lots of snacks and drinks. The bike ride will start at 2pm, be approximately two hours long, have nine stops, and will be around five miles in length. The ride will start and stop at Goodale Park.

• “May 1st, known as May Day, is also International Labor Day. This date was chosen to commemorate the Haymarket Affair, the aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on May 4, 1886, in Chicago’s Haymarket Square; what better way to celebrate than learning about our own local labor history?”

• “Join Columbus DSA for our annual picnic and labor history bike tour of Columbus, this year at noon on May 5th!”