The Hartman Profile is an ongoing series that features CALA faculty, staff, and students—all through the lens of award-winning Adjunct Associate Professor and writer Susan Hartman.
For Cullen Thomas, 46—who teaches memoir writing at SPS—everything changed at 23: He was caught smuggling hashish, and was sentenced to 3 ½ years in a South Korean prison.
He wasn’t a hardened drug dealer, but a Long Island kid, who had attended Chaminade, a Catholic boys high school in Mineola. His father had been studying to be a priest, and his mother was a nun, when they fell in love and married. “I had been pretty sheltered,” Cullen said. “I was a very tame kid. I was mostly home when I wasn’t in school.” He and his brother, Chris, acted out scenarios starring the Jolly Marauder, a character they’d made up. “A kind of half pirate, half noble adventurer,” he said, who’d stir up trouble, but also save backyard creatures about to be attacked.
After graduating from Chaminade, he attended the State University of New York at Binghamton. “I still had not encountered the world at large,” he said. Then at 23, he took a huge leap, and travelled to South Korea to teach English. “For the first time, I was testing myself, independent.”
He was fascinated by Korean culture, and enjoyed teaching ESL “to a degree,” he said. But it didn’t offer adventure. “I wanted to do something daring.” Thinking he could be his own boss, and live on easy cash, he decided to try smuggling hashish from the Philippines.
There was no elaborate plan: After purchasing the hashish from young Filipinos he’d met, he mailed it to a post office in Seoul. When he showed up to claim the box, he was immediately arrested.
His sentence stunned him; it seemed excessive. “The hardest part was being removed from society,” he said, “being held away from everything that’s good and decent.” Yet his time in prison wasn’t totally brutalizing; it hastened him into adulthood. His remarkable memoir, Brother One Cell, published by Penguin Books in 2007, describes those years. Cullen continues to write about issues relating to crime and punishment; his work has appeared in The New Times Magazine, GQ, and USA Today, among other publications.
“I still live a little bit like a liberated prisoner,” he said, wryly. “I have a stripped down life.” His one bedroom apartment in Jersey City is spare: His grandfather’s old black desk serves as a kitchen table and writing desk. He cooks simply, “but I do enjoy it,” he said. “Bacon, eggs, pasta, stir fries. And I still like to eat my ramyun soups,” the Korean version of ramen, which was a special treat in prison.
He has gotten used to being alone. “I can see that as a direct result of my experience in Korea,” he said. “But I’m enjoying my solitude. I catch myself in moments of loneliness, then realize I’m choosing it.”
His students at SPS, where he has taught for five years, are a source of joy: “They are my outlet,” he said, smiling. “Sometimes, I feel they save me, though they don’t know all this.”
Riding his bicycle in the city is another source of joy. “It’s meditative, stress-relieving,” he said. And it takes him back to his Long Island childhood on the North Shore: “It’s a sea change–suddenly you have wheels,” he said. “We’d have our whole crew of friends, riding around. You can be self-guided,” he added, “exploring the perimeters of your town. I’m still living that.”
This spring Susan Hartman will be teaching:
WRIT1-CE9093 The Art of the Photo Essay
WRIT1-CE9531 Interviews and Profiles
For all Writing Courses this spring click: Writing
What a wonderful piece. Thank you.