About
Cassie Will
Two decades selling real estate. One year in a federal prison camp. One book and one podcast about what happens when the second thing interrupts the first.
The short version
I was not supposed to be there.
Nobody is, of course. Everyone in a federal camp has a version of that sentence, and after a while you stop saying it out loud because everyone has already heard it.
For most of my adult life I sold houses. I was good at it. I knew every street in my market and half the people on them. Then a year arrived that took all of that off the table, and I spent it somewhere I had only ever seen on television.
What surprised me was not how bad it was. It was how ordinary it was, and how much of it was funny, and how many genuinely remarkable people were quietly sitting in there waiting for their lives to start again.
I came home and could not stop thinking about them. So I started writing. That turned into a book, and the book turned into a podcast, because it became obvious very quickly that mine was not the only story worth putting down.
I spent twenty years teaching people how to look at a house and see a life in it. It turns out that skill works on a prison camp too. Cassie Will
How it went
The order of events.
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Before
Real estate
Two decades of listings, closings, and other people's kitchens. A career built almost entirely on being able to talk to anybody.
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The year
A federal prison camp
One year inside. The waiting, the routines, the commissary economy, the rules nobody writes down, and the women who made it survivable.
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After
Writing it down
Home, and unable to let go of it. What started as notes became Pretty in Clink — the whole year, in order, with the jokes left in.
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Now
The book and the show
Finishing the manuscript and building the podcast, so the people I met in there get to tell their own version instead of having mine stand in for it.
What I am trying to do
Three things, basically.
Tell it straight
No embellishment, no invented villains, no tidy redemption at the end. The year was what it was and it is more interesting unedited.
Keep it funny
Because it was. Refusing to write the humour out would be its own kind of lie about what those days actually sounded like.
Hand over the microphone
My year is one year. The podcast exists so it does not have to stand in for everybody else's.