If you were a Manhattan resident between the years of 1980 and 1995, you may remember telephone poles and prime wall space plastered with yellow fliers advertising The Apology Line, the American conceptual artist Allan Bridge’s radical social experiment in confession and forgiveness.
The headline on the flier read:
ATTENTION
Amateurs, Professionals
CRIMINALS
Blue collar, White collar
YOU HAVE WRONGED PEOPLE. IT IS TO PEOPLE THAT YOU
MUST APOLOGIZE, NOT TO THE STATE, NOT TO GOD.
GET YOUR MISDEEDS OFF YOUR CHEST!
It invited people to unburden themselves of their guilt and shame by calling an answering machine and leaving an apology for their wrongs. The same phone number would also play back the recordings, making it possible to listen to strangers’ confessions and their emotional reckonings. As young professionals at that time, my coworkers and I burned way too much clock listening to those recordings on speakerphone.
What was the appeal to us? Was it the emotional honesty of a confession? The anonymity? Or the presence of something authentic? Perhaps it was just that the Apology Line offered anyone with a phone a chance to tell their story, with no one on the other end to judge.
Those Apology Line confessions have been the subject of books, films, exhibitions, and plays. As a college writing teacher, I have to say that Allan Bridge got the following right about personal expression: anonymity shields the scared child in us, allowing us to be open and vulnerable not just when confessing our wrongs, but also when trying to understand how the stories we tell might fit into the architecture of our identity.
We writing instructors know that we get the best work from our students when they are allowed to write about themselves and their lives. That positive outcome is amplified when the students know they are not required to share their work with their fellow students. Gone is the high wire balancing act between honesty and self-preservation that many students fear. Privacy allows for honesty and vulnerability to emerge on the page. As teachers we understand this and know to be supportive of all personal expression in our comments, while still red-inking run-ons and fragments.
Of course. But we also know we must push students to move beyond “What I Did Last Summer” kind of writing.
Privacy allows for honesty and vulnerability to emerge on the page.
Several years ago, I came across a social experiment similar to The Apology Line that offered participants the chance to unburden themselves with a stranger, to indulge their interests and passions, and to connect with interesting people. From 1997 to 2000, before the National Park Service removed it, there was a pay telephone booth in the middle of the Mojave National Preserve in California. In 1997, a man scouring a Mojave map noticed a telephone icon within the vast area and decided to visit it. He posted a letter on an online bulletin board with the booth’s phone number. Godfrey Daniels, an Arizona resident, read that letter and visited the phone booth to see for himself.
Daniels’s reporting about the phone booth became an internet sensation and was eventually picked up by The New York Times. People from all over the world travelled to the desert phone booth to speak with whoever might call or called the number themselves to see who would answer. Thus the Mojave Phone Booth phenomenon was born. Over the next three years, 20 to 30 people on average would visit the phone booth per day. Unfortunately, those who came to the booth in person left too much trash and graffiti for the Park Service to clean up, and the booth was removed in 2000.
Imagine you are camping by the Mojave Phone Booth. It is the middle of the night and the phone rings. Who is on the line?
I don’t know whether The Apology Line begat the Mojave Phone Booth, but together they inspired a writing prompt I have used with my college-age students for some time. The assignment is simple. Imagine you are camping by the Mojave Phone Booth. It is the middle of the night and the phone rings. Who is on the line?
The prompt asks us to see what happens if we open ourselves up to possibility—and impossibility. The caller could be someone you know, I tell my students, or it could be a stranger. It could also be someone from another time—anytime—living or dead or from the future. She might be the abuela you never met and only heard about. He could be a father who died young. It could even be you—a future you calling the present you or a younger you calling from the past. I intentionally give instructions that are open-ended. I tell them they can say anything to the person on the other end of the line. Then I ask them to tell the story of the conversation that follows.
Sort of like the best of The Apology Line with a Twilight Zone take on the Mojave Phone Booth.
Knowing from experience that this prompt brings out the writer or storyteller in even the most STEM-oriented students, I add a few requirements that deepen the assignment. For instance, while dialogue is key—they are telling the story of a phone call after all—I remind them that it is critical to establish a mood and tone as well. The piece must contain sensory details that place us in the setting—the sun, the sand, the rocks, the snakes, the cacti, the heat inside the booth from the magnification of glass all around the phone. As for the narrative, I ask the students to give some thought to how they will start. Will they begin in media res (in mid action) or will they show us how they get to the moment of the phone ringing? I also ask them to try to write as honestly and artfully as they can.
Finally I let them know that an essential requirement for their story is to make clear why the person on the other end of the line is calling. If their caller is an historic figure, for instance, then they need to say, somewhere in the piece, why that historic figure needs to reach them. If the caller is a younger or older version of themselves, they need to include a reason why that version of themselves is calling.
Over the years, I’ve seen students chat with Tesla over whether he is bitter over his lack of success in his lifetime. Da Vinci has called. So has Jesus. Many students speak with a deceased relative, and too many students talk with an absentee parent. A fair number of students transform the call into a stalking situation with a mysterious and malevolent voice, a variation on “the call is coming from inside the house” trope, and a nice workaround for those students who don’t care to open up.
But the most frequent caller is a future version of themselves, reaching out to reassure the student of today that, yes, you will eventually get over your body dysmorphia, find true love, or earn your way out of poverty. I believe it is telling that the most common conversation for students is with themselves, and it seems to spring from a sense of loneliness and a need for comfort. In my comments back to students, I introduce the idea that anything included in the piece is a representation of the self. What starts as a creative writing exercise can become a journey of self-discovery and expression.
Motivating students to write about themselves is not only a productive part of a literary education but a necessary skill for understanding who they are.
Critical thinking remains the backbone of what we do in English Comp I and II. During the past semester, my students wrote about Hemingway’s short story “After the Storm,” and about Bob Dylan’s rendition of the 18th-century ironic ballad “Arthur McBride.” They tried to figure out what the heck is going on in Virginia Woolf’s short story, “A Haunted House.” Still we know that motivating students to write about themselves is not only a productive part of a literary education but a necessary skill for understanding who they are. It takes imagination to open the heart and mind. And I’ve seen that the better they know themselves, the better they can relate to the works we study.
The Mojave Phone Booth project is often my students’ favorite assignment of the semester. One quiet student gave it its name—”May I Ask Who’s Calling?” In the cohort I teach, composed mostly of computer science, pre-med, electrical engineering, and business majors, the writing that follows from this one imagined phone call is often described by the students as one of the most honest and authentic pieces they’ve created. At a time in their education when studying can feel like it is only about knowledge acquisition and mastery, the combination of imagination and self-reflection this writing prompt elicits seems to be just what they want and need.
Featured photo of the Mojave Phone Booth by Maureen Bond.
Bubba Henson
Bubba Henson is a writer and educator in Sarasota, Florida. He teaches at State College of Florida, and his poetry, stories, creative non-fiction, and reviews have appeared in Esoterica, Blue Lake Review, Bridge Literary Arts Journal, The Raven’s Perch, Nifty Lit, Magazine1, Bangalore Review, and The Laughing Unicorn. His first book, Conveyances of the Poets, was published in April 2026. He co-hosts the long-running Sarasota poetry sharing community, Bards by the Bay, with the poet Tanya Young. As always, he is seeking firsthand experience with the people, places, and events that shape the telling and retelling of this great story.
