It would have been one thing to interview a criminal in prison.

To walk in confident he or she had been patted down, knowing guards were within shouting distance and that cameras were recording our every move.

But to interview a man who had spent 12 years behind bars while sitting in his living room alone, knowing my feeble sense of security was only within myself, that was another thing.

The feeling didn’t strike until the morning of the interview, and when I got out of bed I considered allowing the fear in my stomach to disguise itself as an illness. I considered not doing the interview at all.

But I hated myself for that — that I was more nervous about sitting with an ex-prisoner in his home, rather than sitting with a current prisoner in a cellblock. After all, I wasn't going to meet an ex-prisoner. I was going to meet an artist. It was this realization that pushed me out the door and into the car that would take me 70 miles to the home of Fernando Delezica.

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By the time I reached Delezica’s home my fear had more or less subsided.

His small apartment was carved into the lower level of a cookie-cutter home built in the 1960s. A small staircase led from the driveway down to his apartment. When I pulled up, the door opened almost immediately and a small man came rushing up the steps.

“I’m so sorry it was difficult for you to find my place,” he said over and over again before introducing himself.

He was shorter than me. His white sneakers produced a striking contrast to the dark blue of his jeans. He wore a cotton polo and his hair was a bit disheveled, as if he too had felt unsettled about how to prepare for the interview.

Last fall I facilitated a poetry workshop in a Detroit juvenile facility through the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), a University organization that pairs up students with prisons, juvenile facilities and select Detroit high schools. PCAP members work side-by-side with inmates to collaborate on original works of art, writing, music and theatre.

After my semester with PCAP, the words ‘compassion’ and ‘understanding’ seemed to take on another definition for me. Prisoners and juvenile delinquents that were once only a thing I heard of on the evening news now had faces and names that held a solid part of my heart. People like Delezica were no longer inmates, but artists.

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“I’m about to get to my point,” Delezica promised after 45 minutes of talking about his experience with PCAP — the organization that, as he describes it, changed his life.

“But I need to stop before I get too emotional,” he quivered. After looking around the room, Delezica got up and grabbed some of his acrylic paintings, pointing out the different paint strokes and colors. One wasn’t finished completely, the tree in the background was more or less finished but the windmill still needed a bit of work. It was the groundwork for what Delezica said would be a painting of the "memory of a place he'd never been."

He wanted me to know that he had talent, that these pieces meant something to him, because for 12 years Delezica was told by the state that he had nothing. And talent? Convicts don’t have talent. They have time. Time spent in a 7' x 10' foot box. They have time to sit and think in an iron casket that society calls a cell.

When Delezica talks about his first eight years in prison his eyes glaze a bit. They were hard, he admits.