Craft Corner – Mid-American Review Blog

Craft Corner: Art in Conversation with Itself: On Bob Dylan, T.C. Cannon and Joy Harjo No. 6

By Nathan Fako

Photo Caption: All the Tired Horses in the Sun by T. C. Cannon (painted between 1971-1972)

two horses (one red, one blue) are standing on a green prairie under a n abstract yellow background with white blobs which mimics a very bright sky with clouds

In 1970, Bob Dylan released Self Portrait, his tenth studio album. It was met with poor reviews and disdain from fans, the long history of which is well-documented online. Curiously, Dylan made a choice that alienated fans, whether intentional or not. The opening track, “All the Tired Horses,” does not feature vocals from Dylan at all. Where had the dynamo gone? Where was the “Rolling Stone,” the Dylan of “Corrina, Corrina,” the young man “Blowin’ in the Wind?” What did he mean, foregrounding a voice, a choir of voices, that didn’t belong to him?

Around the time Dylan’s song was released, a young Kiowa-Caddo man named Tommy Cannon–popularly known as T.C. Cannon–returned from the Vietnam War and painted two horses under an ochre sky. One red horse, one blue. He named the piece All the Tired Horses in the Sun. Cannon tragically died eight years later, just a few months before his big opening show at the Aberbach Gallery in New York. While his life was short, Cannon was a prolific artist, known as both a painter and a poet. Was his painting a response to Dylan’s song? Inspired by it, surely, but carrying the message forward somehow? Transforming it?

Finally, in 2018, a year before being named United States Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo was commissioned to write a piece for a book about Cannon. She wrote “All the Tired Horses in the Sun.” The piece has to do with Harjo’s Mvskoke identity and issues faced by Indigenous communities; perhaps, the piece has something to do with not just Cannon’s painting, but Dylan’s as well.

Artists respond to the world around them; the world is filled with artists. How do we make sense of intertextual connections like those presented here? I don’t have an answer. We engage with art, think about it, are moved by it, and in some cases, make art in response. We keep our minds open. One avenue of entry that often proves to be interesting, if even as basic exploration, is the use of one work to frame another work. This is sometimes called a lens. So let’s use the Harjo poem as a lens for viewing the Cannon painting, and then listening to the Dylan song.

First: Harjo.

The poem begins with “Forever.” Harjo creates a landscape with anaphora and end-stopped lines. Readers have the sense of a weary propulsion. A tired procession of family, “my cousin. Auntie. Uncle. / Another cousin.” The poem opens in the center, and the subject is complexified. Up to this point, we are given context through the title, made to think of family members like horses in the sun, and then: “Vending machines and pop. / Chips, candy, and not enough clean water.” So we are handed food insecurity. Harjo’s choices are very intentional. The harshness of the end-stopped lines, the word choices having to do with junk food, and the absence of enough clean water paint a picture of a landscape that is difficult; it is hot, dry, “waiting and tired.” The final line of the poem is a call to action: “Go water the horses.” We the readers have the ability to positively impact our communities.

Applied to the Cannon painting, Harjo’s poem provides the figures with further meaning. The two animal shapes are so close to one another that they touch. The blue from the horse’s coat is echoed in the lighter-toned saddle of the red horse. Their heads are down, likely to indicate that they are grazing. This is a family, pressed down under the weight of a sky that takes up two-thirds of the canvas, a hot ochre with marshmallow clouds. The saddles indicate these are working animals. It wouldn’t be a stretch to link a working horse conceptually to the grim reality of Indigenous dispossession in our American history. So we have the sense of hot work, with one’s family, in an open landscape with no space for shelter.

To my eye, the Dylan song–stay with me, I know it’s odd to go backward–ties the three works together. Making a lens of the poem makes the song quite simple, and in my opinion, poignant. There are only two lines of lyric in the song:

“All the tired horses in the sun, / how’m I supposed to get any ridin’ done? Hmm.”

If we apply the connotative landscape we have built by working backward, we have a picture of the horses in our minds. They are family members, moving through life under a hot sun, without enough clean water. Our families are working, the sun can be oppressive, and there is not enough. There is never enough. How can an artist–existing in a political landscape like the one inhabited by Dylan and Cannon in the 70s, the one Harjo has inhabited throughout her long career–rationalize the act of making art? How do you unpack the choice to be creative when there are so many practical problems in the world that need fixing? And how do you grapple with becoming a symbol–as Dylan was–for something you may not want to stand for?

Simple: you focus on what you have to. You make the art. There’s no sense in hand-wringing.

You go water the horses.

Craft Corner: The Art of Diversion in Fiction No. 5

We’ve all heard the phrase, “Life is not a straight line.” This holds true not just for our own experiences, but also for the types of stories and lives of characters we encounter in stories. Yet, in fiction, the temptation often exists to create linear journeys, with heroes marching steadfastly towards their goals. But what about the detours, the unexpected turns, the moments where characters veer off course? These diversions, often dismissed as mere plot twists, can be the very essence of a character’s arc.

To many writers, diversion is the creation of a surprise in a narrative, and the thrill of that surprise is what keeps the reader involved in the story. The word “diversion” has its first recorded use in England in the early 1600s. It is believed that the concept of diversion bore some similarities with some elements of writing discussed in the treatise “On the Sublime” by the Greek philosopher, Longinus, but it became popularized by eighteenth-century writers who employed digression as a form of diversion. For Longinus, diversion, as a crucial literary device, suspends the reader’s sense of disbelief. Generally, in literature, it refers to the practice of including stories within the main story. The stories within the story are usually very brief and are often used to expound on a particular element of the main story. As Peter Selgin notes, by its very essence, a story is “an exercise in controlling information.” Writers must skillfully dole out knowledge to create patches of unknowledge – i.e., suspense – and keep the reader interested. Such diversion, in the form of well-timed revelations and withheld information, does not happen solely according to the creative strategy of the individual writer but adheres to a tradition as old as the stories themselves. The main purpose of a diversion is to create a sense of anticipation or to build enough suspense to keep the readers interested in the main story. A writer could also use this technique to provide the reader with some necessary background information that cannot be included in the main story or to help set up a climax. By using the different stories within the main story, the writer has a chance to provide a much wider view of the world. The reader gets various perspectives on different elements of the overall story. This can serve to make even the most fantastical of stories seem more real because it is demonstrated that different characters have different, opposing views and so on. Also, by giving the reader ‘breaks’ in the main plot where they get to read other smaller, self-contained stories, the writing becomes a lot more accessible and targeted to all kinds of readers.

In simple terms, diversion in fiction, like other forms of display, seeks to do more than to decorate or to entertain the audience. When one witness in a court trial declares that, for example, defendant A did not break into a house, it is so easy for the audience to keep making wild, imaginary scenarios of how the burglary took place. However, the narrative, fabricated in their minds, is abruptly cut when the same witness suggests that in fact, the burglary did not even take place on the previous night as he claims to know, but on the night in question. By offering new, surprising twists to an on-going temporal narrative and deconstructing the audience’s version of the known events, the narrative gets a boost. Through diversion, we see the writer cleverly creating situations in which the reader’s anticipation is crafted to naturally expect a certain chain of events. This then allows the writer to break this chain and surprise the audience.

It is of course important that writers should discern when to use diversion as a literary device in such that subplots, creation of cliffhangers at the end of chapters, adding in unexpected twists, deceptions, strategic revelation of information, and creating an open ending, all contribute to keeping the reader diverted. The reader feels smart when they catch the hints and forms expectations on how the story will unfold. At the same time, they become curious to find out whether the predictions are accurate as the plot progresses. In turn, by being engaged in the reading, emotions are evoked as the story takes the reader through different methods of diversion, making the reader experience the special and stunningly galvanized into plot and characters. For example, a well-timed twist can suggest hidden correlatives and themes. Or it can inject an unexpected viewpoint that might add a fresh sight or serve to emphasize thematic elements. Well-disciplined use of diversion often profound the reading. Readers may continue to explore to find out what each new turning and twist may uncover and can be delighted by success at prediction or stunned by a wily and subtle deception. This act of provocation is a delight to many readers who find the discovery and unraveling of solutions highly satisfying. In this manner, diversion enables the reader to be active on a metaphysical and emotional level.

Again, when we think of how diversion can become a shrapnel for crafting the character arc, it becomes clear that characters are not robots programmed towards a predetermined conclusion. They are complex beings shaped by choices, experiences, and the unforeseen twists and turns of life. Through diversions, the writer can add depth, nuance, and a touch of the unpredictable to their journeys.

Why does there need to be a twist in the plot in every story, you may ask? It is an interesting point to focus on, the real thing is that if one diverts someone’s attention, and then that other person will most probably be focused on other things, instead of finding out the truth. So, the reader will not try to discover the writer’s true opinion or where the story is set if it is made clear. If a writer is telling a story directly, then diversion would be in the form of flashbacks and maybe the introduction of more than one small puzzle, maybe a few more than two! It is remarkably interesting because if you take the definition out onto the internet or open books, you will find that diversion covers many different parts of stories, from characterizations to distinct types of diversion.

It is important to consider some real-life examples of how diversion works. Fans of this literature will find various examples of distraction at work in short stories across the ages that have been written by a range of authors as well. A great example to start with is “The Purloined Letter,” written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published over 150 years ago. This classic short story is about the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin as he attempts to retrieve an incriminating letter that is being used for blackmail. Throughout the story, there is a sense of deliberate, misleading information that is being given to the reader, which distracts from reality and makes it more difficult to discover the truth. This kind of diversion could further be used to create suspense within the reader as one avenue is explored after the other, each with its own sense of partial logic and progress. Another prominent example of diversion in short stories can be found in the work of Shirley Jackson and her famous short story called “The Lottery.” This tale of a small town that commits human sacrifice as part of the harvest ritual was first published in 1948, with some readers dismissing it as being nothing more than mere sensationalist horror. However, when looking deeply at the themes within the story, it becomes clear that Jackson has intentionally used diversion to guide the reader towards shock and distaste for the characters and society within the story. The use of detail to distract from the grotesque occurrences of the “lottery” and to prepare the reader for something entirely different is a key strategy; the fact that the ending comes as it does shows that diversion has been used effectively in this piece. Through exploring these examples of diversion in short stories, the message of how this works to create interesting and absorbing literature becomes clearer.

While the town is small and it seems everyone knows each other, the truth is that it is completely isolated. The village serves as a dehumanizing environment that is resulting in a change in society. First, we can observe the irony of the town’s and the lottery’s name, as the lottery is commonly known to be a good thing to win and be a part of, but in this situation, the ‘prize’ is death. The first mention of tradition comes when the boys see each other and make a pile of stones. Soon after, the parents, especially the dad, are with the boys. He’s reminding the boy of how to arrange the stones and Jackson writes, “Bobby Martin has already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones…” (Jackson, 2009). The author wanted to clearly show how even the youngest of the village knew what they were doing, what is the underlying meaning of this ritual, and how to bring the evil of the event to its success. This creates an atmosphere of horror as even the audience becomes aware that a successful prize of winning is death, as they see that everyone, children and adults, had taken part in organizing the lottery and preparing for it for the past few weeks. Finally, when the victims gain a voice after the winner has been selected and is going to die, they use ‘it isn’t fair, it isn’t right.’ It is a reminder that people and society do have the power to change things and that they’re not losing their voice to fear.

-Aishat Babatunde, Mid-American Review

Craft Corner: Collaborative Writing Exercises

A massive ugly face sits on a long neck, attached to a mess of tentacles for arms and the skinny legs of a flamingo. You might see a drawing like this on the walls of an art classroom: an exquisite corpse. Most of us remember this activity from our childhood. You begin by folding a piece of paper into three pieces. First, you draw the head, then fold it over and pass it to the next person to draw the body. It’s passed again and the last person draws the legs. Until the paper is unfolded, no one sees what the ‘exquisite corpse’ will be. This collaborative art game teaches children about creative thinking. What can it teach us about writing?

Writing is a collaborative process. It’s cooperative not only in how we learn to write from others, but in how we create feedback, workshop our work, and read and understand literature. Collaborative writing exercises can teach us creative thinking and help us flex our writing muscles because it forces us to think outside ourselves about how our writing looks to others.

When you adapt the exquisite corpse for writing, the exercise can work in a few different ways. You might start a story and pass it to the next person to finish. You could continue passing a story amongst a group of people, allowing each to add a page. Or, you can try to write a single narrative amongst a group, with each person given only the last section of writing to work with.

These collaborative exercises can look like a party game or a serious exercise, but either way, they have more value than social entertainment. They may have basic practical value, such as the challenge to write to time and length constraints. Focusing on writing games could be methods to break out of routine and help conquer writer’s block. Collaborative writing forces people to write out of their comfort zones and develop essential skills.

First, collaborative writing teaches us to look at our writing through another’s eyes and understand how our audience reads and interprets our work. When writing for another writer, you’re under a different kind of pressure from your audience. You have to read through the eyes of your audience and the writer who follows you. You have to consider what information is necessary and what is significant: What does the next person need to know to continue writing?

You must also be adaptable. When responding to another’s writing, you are met with the creative challenge to match their style. Their tone, style, and the rhythm of their writing voice may not match your own. To continue other authors’ narratives, you have to be flexible. You might try to replicate their voice or find a way to explain the shift. By examining your own style in comparison to others’, you learn more about your own work.

Collaborative writing also makes us incredibly vulnerable. The actual writing of writing can be the least collaborative part of the process, often practiced alone in the safety of your own space and mind. When you give part of that process to someone else, you are opening yourself up to possibilities and being vulnerable.

We may be beyond our childhood art’s exquisite corpses, but we aren’t done learning how to be creative thinkers. It’s important to remember why collaboration is key in writing: it helps us to grow.

— Sarah Urbank, Mid-American Review

Craft Corner: Character Counterpointing

Characters lie at the heart of many great stories. The things that happen to them, or their desires, are often the impetus for plot to take shape. The way we give information about these characters: their wants, their likes and dislikes, their backstories, etc., are all part of characterization. This is the process of making these characters into people readers can connect with. One surefire way to engage in meaningful characterization is to use a technique called counterpointed characterization.

Counterpointed characterization is a technique used by writers that positions two or more different characters against, or, indeed, alongside, one another in such a way that this positioning helps to elucidate aspects of these characters that would not otherwise be clear to readers. In addition to doing characterization work, this technique can also be a natural way to create dramatic tension in a narrative. It is important to note, though, that counterpointed characterization is not the same thing as creating a foil for a character. To counterpoint two characters, they do not need to be opposites or versions of one another. They can be two distinct character types who exist alongside one another and who the writer wants to see what their proximity to each other might yield.

There are many famous examples of counterpointed characterization that might help make this technique clearer. Jo March is the main character in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. She is counterpointed against the responsible, proper Meg, the sickly, saintly Beth, the feminine, sometimes vain Amy, and the rich, aimless Laurie. By putting Jo alongside these characters, Alcott gives the reader greater insight into who Jo is. Readers see what she envies about her sisters and Laurie, and what she judges them for.

Another excellent, and more contemporary, example of this technique is found in Raven Leilani’s wonderful novel, Luster. The novel tells the story of Edie, a 20-something Black woman in New York City who forms a romantic relationship with a man in an open marriage who has an adopted daughter, Akila. While the man and his wife are white, Akila is Black. These two characters are counterpointed, not against, but alongside, each other:

“…I take a moment to really look at her, her shiny brown cheeks, her soft frown and Adventure Time nightshirt, her towering hair and balled fists. Because once upon a time my weird adolescent breasts were subject to the dissection of aunties everywhere, my BMI always a hot topic among the Jamaican deaconesses in our SDA church, I would like to mind my own business when it comes to the subject of Akila’s hair. However, it is a massive, two-foot condemnation of her limp-haired parents, who had clearly made some previous effort that did not pan out.

‘You’re the girlfriend,’ she says with no ire or judgment, which somehow makes it worse.”

This example is so rich and illustrative of how counterpointed characterization can serve a story. The moment above, in which Edie meets Akila for the first time, gives the reader an example of Edie seeing herself in Akila right away. By putting Edie and Akila in this situation, Leilani has a vehicle to weave pieces of Edie’s backstory and emotional landscape into the story with a light touch.

Counterpointed characterization is just one way to utilize counterpointing in general. Though this technique is the focus of this specific post, one might also benefit from seeing what counterpointing can do for other elements of a story. A writer might also counterpoint settings, ideas, desires, and more to see what surprises it might open the door for in their story.

— Debbie Miszak, Mid-American Review

Craft Corner: An Argument for Non-Linearity

Eggs for breakfast. Turkey sandwich for lunch. Spaghetti for dinner.

Short stories and novels tend to use the same structure over and over again: linear. Probably because linear stories make sense. The story starts somewhere, character A makes a mistake or changes their life or meets character B, and then conflict arises out of that change and, look, there’s the middle of the story, until finally the ending, where everything is either nicely resolved or wrapped up in a fiery death. Humans experience time linearly, so they write linearly as a default. And that works well for many stories, but the presence of a default implies the existence of an abnormal structure that has the potential to be, well, abnormal. Always using a linear structure is like eating the same thing every day. Eventually, you get sick of eating eggs each morning.

Deciding to use a non-linear structure should not be taken as an open invitation to create a story structure that confuses the plot and character arcs. Those and other elements should still be preserved in the narrative. But it’s possible to start somewhere that isn’t quite the beginning. Maybe a particular story began a long time ago, and the main character is desperately trying to escape it. Or perhaps two, or more, stories are intertwined, fighting for presence in the structure before coming together. A story that jumps around in time creates intrigue and tension that compels readers to push on.

The 1957 short story “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin is a great example of non-linearity working to the benefit of a story. The story opens with the unnamed narrator finding news about his brother Sonny getting arrested for the selling and use of heroin, and, after jumping ahead a couple years to his release, the story moves to the past for a whopping twelve pages. There, the story lingers on a moment where both brothers are on the cusp of a new version of adulthood. The narrator has joined the army and is about to get married. Sonny, still a teenager in school, struggles to pin down his future. He wants to be a piano player, but the practicality of this dream begins to chase him down as he grows older.

If the story had been linear, opening with the brothers when they were younger, the reader would be just as in the dark as the characters. However, since the story gives readers the information that Sonny has been arrested for drug use, it provides a different interpretation of the backstory that Baldwin shifts to, lending a darker tone to these early moments in the characters’ lives. One scene on page twelve, a conversation with the narrator and his mom about Sonny, is particularly harrowing knowing where Sonny is headed:

“I want to talk to you about your brother,” she said, suddenly. “If anything happens to me he ain’t going to have nobody to look out for him.”

“Mama,” I said, “ain’t nothing going to happen to you or Sonny. Sonny’s all right. He’s a good boy and he’s got good sense.”

“It ain’t a question of his being a good boy,” Mama said, “nor of his having good sense. It ain’t only the bad ones, nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under.” She stopped, looking at me. “Your Daddy once had a brother,” she said, and she smiled in a way that made me feel she was in pain. “You didn’t never know that, did you?” – “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin

She goes on to tell him about how his dad’s brother was carelessly run over by a car full of white people, killing him and traumatizing his dad in a way that he never recovered from. Though time and history is linear, its effects against oppressed minority groups are often not. The past imposes itself onto people in the present. In creating a plot line that frequently jumps around in time, with his familial history pushing forward into the story’s present, Baldwin mirrors this non-linear aspect of history in the struggles Sonny and his brother face in 1950’s Harlem.

Linear stories offer a neat narrative, where backstory might be added in through dialogue or a throwaway line to give any needed context to a character’s life. Done right, a non-linear plot line can be just as clean, and it grants writers freedom to give details as they see fit. To adapt the clutches of time to their own interests. To deviate from one of the most standardized elements of storytelling. So, please, enough with the eggs.

– Haley Souders, Mid-American Review