The one story Curtis Dawkins is not permitted to write is his own. Of how he dressed up as a leprechaun, got out of his mind on crack and vodka and went out with a gun on to the streets of Kalamazoo, Michigan. By the time a police Swat team captured him, Dawkins had killed one man and taken another hostage.

Even before the trial, his lawyer told Dawkins he would be locked away until the day he died under Michigan’s unforgiving sentencing laws. When the 49-year-old former salesman was swallowed into the state’s sprawling prison complex 12 years ago, he might have abandoned himself to the obliteration of his future. Instead Dawkins found an escape in reviving the dream he abandoned years before in frustration.

“I didn’t think from the beginning: ‘I’m going to get back to writing.’” he says. “First I was just paying attention. I looked at the people around me and I imagined their stories.”

Dawkins is waiting in the prison visiting room. He is short and slight with thinning hair, and wearing a dark blue uniform with a wide stripe of orange cloth across the shoulder. A lone guard at a desk takes my driving licence – it’s my pass back out of the prison again later – and tells us to sit in armchairs in front of the vending machines.

Family time: with Kim Knutsen and their children, posing in 2006 in front of a tourist backdrop in jail.

The medium-security Lakeland Correctional Facility, two hours’ drive from Detroit, is formidable from the outside with rows of glistening steel wire. The search to enter is extensive, including removing shoes and socks for checks to the bottom of feet.

But inside there are few bars on the windows and the visiting area has the feel of a living room. All the seating is armchairs with knee-high tables. Prisoners and visitors can touch. Children sit on laps. Regulars know to come armed with a supply of coins for the hamburgers, crisps and soft drinks.

Dawkins’s speciality in his writing is as much the mundanity of prison life as the unexpected. The result is a book of short stories, The Graybar Hotel – the title is drawn from an ironic name for jail – which is far away from the usual clichéd tales of violence and sex inside America’s feared prison complex.

In one tale, A Human Number, a prisoner calls random phone numbers around the US in search of someone, anyone, to talk to on the outside. The first challenge is to get that someone to accept the cost of the call. Some do so out of curiosity. Some out of confusion. Does this really happen, I ask Dawkins?

“Yup. That happens often just to make a connection with someone who isn’t a prisoner. I’ve seen so many people I live with have nobody out there. No one sends them money. No one writes them letters.”

Home front: Kim Knutsen, kids and a new puppy in happier times.

Dawkins doesn’t need to random dial. He talks every day by phone with his partner, Kim Knutsen, but he, too, finds solace in the ordinariness of life outside the wire. “He likes to hear the kids fighting, the dogs barking. He wants to hear about normal life,” she tells me.

Dawkins’s stories in The Graybar Hotel explore the struggle with addiction in prison, the injustice of the justice system and the parlous state of mental health care. They are an engrossing introduction to a stark universe that can only come as a shock to those who have to navigate it for the first time for real. Dawkins’s subtle eye and nuanced characters are a guide to who gets by in prison, and who doesn’t. To when to talk and when to shut up.

In one tale a man insists a guard calls him by his name and not his inmate number. We learn that some of those numbers, stencilled on the back of prison uniforms, once belonged to inmates classified by the Department of Corrections as having been “released by death”. If the system has its way, that is how Dawkins’s own number – 573543 – will be freed up.

Of all the challenges of prison life, one leaps out from The Graybar Hotel – the quality of cell mates. “No question, it’s the most difficult part. You’re on a bunk with this guy you don’t know. It could be anybody. I had a guy who was so mentally ill, or faking it so good, that he was under his bunk most of the time with his finger up his butt. And there’s nothing you can do. You have to live with it,” says Dawkins.

So how does he write in those circumstances? “You never have any privacy. You have to do it every day regardless of whatever else is going on.”

Inmates can’t own computers so Dawkins writes on a throwback electric typewriter with enough memory to store 70 pages of text. The authorities banned those models after a prisoner used the memory to format a forged court order for his own release. Dawkins was allowed to hang on to his, but if it stops working, he’ll be downgraded back to a regular typewriter.

Inmate 573543 largely sidesteps the most notorious aspects of prison life in his writing. “There is very little hope here and there is violence as a symptom of lack of hope. But none of it is random. It all has something to do with money or respect,” he says. “I do have friends, but it’s dangerous to really go out of your way to be friends with everybody. If I can help it, I just stay away from people.”

Dawkins is more concerned with shaping how the outside world views the two million people incarcerated in America’s labyrinth of Graybar Hotels, saying: “I wanted to show that the men here are human beings, are decent people. You don’t know how broken the system is until you’re in it. It’s easy to keep putting justice reform on the back burner if prisoners are all seen as tattooed, muscle-bound rapists. That’s not what I see.”

Play time: Dawkins with his children Lily Rose, left, and Elijah at at home in Michigan in 2003.

Looking around the visiting room, many of the prisoners would be indistinguishable from their visitors if it were not for the uniforms. A young couple – he is black, she is white – sit side by side, saying almost nothing to each other, but her arm is resting on his and both look at peace. An older woman is trying to make conversation with a younger man, perhaps her son. A middle-aged man is playing delightedly with a young child.

Occasionally a prisoner and visitor have their picture taken for $2.50 by an inmate assigned to the task. The choice of backgrounds include a panorama of Disneyland and a painting of a gazebo. Dawkins’s own family has not visited in two years. Partly it’s the cost of the more than 2,000-mile journey from Oregon where Knutsen now lives with their three children. But she still remembers the trauma of the last visit when his teenage daughter refused to go into the prison.

“I have PTSD from all this, but I still made myself go because I really wanted to see him. But frankly just talking on the phone every day is a lot more intimate,” Knutsen says.

Dawkins views writing as therapy, describing it as “like a lifeboat drifting daily from the fog”. But it only goes so far. “Every night it’s painful. My kids are the most amazing part of my life. To be cut off is excruciating,” he said. “My little girl – she’s 16 now – she is still coming to terms. She feels betrayed because I suddenly went out of her life and she has a lot of anger towards me. The boys take things more in their stride, although the eldest had real issues with substance abuse and anger.”

In prison all you have is time, so that is when Dawkins really grew as a writer Kim Knutsen

his partner is also a published author. One of Knutsen’s novels is based on Dawkins’s life before prison. He read it while serving 40 days in solitary confinement after another inmate stole his typewriter and they got into a fight.

“He’s improved 100% as a writer in prison,” she says. “He never wanted to revise. He was always in a hurry. But in prison all you have is time. That’s when he really grew as a writer.”

Knutsen asks to meet me in a Starbucks near her home on Portland’s east side. She is in her 50s although she looks younger and is warm if cautious and contained. Her life is still very bound up with Dawkins, who she calls Curt. She edits his writing and he features heavily in her own. But her days are filled with teaching as a professor of English at Concordia University and coping with what she describes as “the nightmare” of seeing her three children, now aged 16 to 22, suffering and scarred by the trauma of a father in prison.

It’s clearly left its mark on her, too. She sees injustice in Dawkins’s sentence, but addresses whether her partner will ever be released by talking about his hope of freedom and not her own belief that it will ever happen.

The couple met while studying at Western Michigan University. She was doing a PhD. He was working on a Master of Fine Arts degree and says: “I’d say I am perhaps the only MFA holder in all the American prison institutions. It’s rare for educated people to be imprisoned.”

Every night it's painful. My kids are an amazing part of my life. To be cut off is excruciating Chris Dawkins

Knutsen didn’t know it at the time but Dawkins had long struggled with alcohol. It contributed to him dropping out of his first college and going to work for his father at a meat packing factory. When the plant burned down in 1994, he decided to give university another try and studied administration of justice. But since high school he had been haunted by the power of words after learning TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. “It blew me away. I felt such a connection with the character being an outsider,” he says.

So he swapped justice for English, wrote a short story that won an Illinois Arts Council award and landed a place on Western Michigan University’s MFA programme. But by the time he completed it, he was burned out and disillusioned.

“I didn’t have any more publishing success. Writing is mostly rejection,” he tells me.

So Dawkins became a car salesman, had children with Knutsen and bought a house in Kalamazoo. He swapped to a better paid job as the rep for a meat casings company, but that required him to be on the road and the loneliness led back to alcohol and then drugs. He began with muscle relaxants and Xanax.

“Then I started using heroin. Even though it’s completely deadly, there is the romantic notion that this is the drug. And it is. It is intense and immediately addictive,” he says.

Knutsen asked Dawkins to move out and he found a flat. Then came the events of October 2004 that he is not permitted to write about under laws barring criminals from profiting from their crimes.

“There are parts of that night I remember. Parts I honestly do not remember,” he tells me. “The police and prosecutors will say it’s a convenient loss of memory, but I think the mix of drugs and trauma wipe things out.”

Dawkins said that night he wanted to get “oblivionly high”. “I bought some crack. It was the first and last time. I smoked it,” he says. He topped up the crack with a bottle of vodka. Then he went out with his gun, dressed in an evil leprechaun mask because Halloween was around the corner.

Dawkins tells me he was just looking for fun and randomly firing his gun in the air. “It was completely demented behaviour.”

I ended up inside his house. Here it gets foggy. I shot him once. He was dead instantly Curtis Dawkins

But within a few blocks of his flat, Dawkins got into a confrontation with 48-year-old Thomas Bowman. “I ended up inside his house. Here it gets foggy. I shot him once from 10 or 15ft. He was dead instantly. I shot him right through the heart,” he says.

Someone called the police after the earlier shots and an officer was a block away when Dawkins killed Bowman and heard the gunfire. He called in a Swat team.

Dawkins ran to the flats above Bowman’s. A succession of witnesses described him pointing the gun at them, firing in the air and, in one case, shooting through a door after a man slammed it in his face. Then he took a hostage until he was talked down by a police negotiator who described him as distraught and demanding to talk to Knutsen.

Knutsen and Dawkins both make a point of saying the primary victims in this tragedy are Bowman and his family. But they also say prosecutors were after the maximum sentence for Dawkins without any consideration of his issues with addiction. If he had gone to trial as a man hooked on drugs and alcohol who was not fully in control of his actions, he would still have landed a long sentence, but could have expected the opportunity for parole. Instead prosecutors alleged Dawkins was attempting to rob Bowman which upped the charge to a felony murder carrying a mandatory life sentence with no possibility of release.

Dawkins told me he admitted to asking for money, but argued that his actions were driven by drugs not an intention to rob. “I should be in prison, but it shouldn’t be for the rest of my life. It’s more inhumane than capital punishment. If you’re going to kill me, have the balls to stand me in front of a firing squad and shoot me. They basically are sentencing me to die passively.”

As things stand, his only hope of release is if the state governor reduces his sentence, an unlikely prospect in the present political climate. But Dawkins does not accept that he is condemned to be locked up until he is “released by death”. “No. Never have accepted that. I believe in God and I believe he has let me know I will get out. I think my writing will be instrumental in getting me out.”

Until that day, Dawkins is working on another book. It imagines a time when Michigan decides that the cheapest way to keep its 40,000 or more prisoners is in a form of suspended animation in a hole in the ground. But they are still aware enough to comprehend their situation.

Inmate 573543: Curtis Dawkins. Photograph: Michigan Department of Corrections

‘The boy who dreamed too much’: edited extract from The Graybar Hotel

It rained the day six of us rode to quarantine from the county jail. I remember because I knew I would want to write about the trip someday and I was sure the rain would sound like a prop – something to foreshadow the darkness of prison. But it isn’t – it just rained. If there was anything that could serve as a prop, it was the windows. The windows of the van were completely fogged over, effectively erasing us: we were there, but we weren’t.

I was cuffed by my right hand to Ray, my cellmate for the past five months. We used the hour-long ride to Jackson, Michigan, to dream aloud about the perks of quarantine. What it would be like to go outside, to smoke and drink coffee, besides that it was the time between county and prison where we would be evaluated extensively (medically and mentally) to determine which of Michigan’s 40-plus prisons we would be sent to. We would have a single cell and a little more freedom than we’d previously had, and we all looked forward to Jackson as if it were a tropical island resort.

We couldn’t see out the van’s windows, so we got our first view of prison when we stepped out into the rain and even then all we could see was a half mile of concrete wall with one white metal guard tower at each end. The enormity of the wall was enough to shut us all up.

We were a chatty group before, but now each of us stayed quiet, looking down the length of what seemed to be the rest of our lives.

The Graybar Hotel by Curtis Dawkins is published by Canongate at £14.99. To order a copy for £12.74, go to bookshop.theguardian.com