My Father Is Not A Swan

From the Archive: Lit Salon on what a "narrative turn" really is, why it matters, and how you can include them in your writing to make it more compelling, surprising, impactful, and, yes, more alive.

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What does it really mean, to turn? Merriam-Webster offers eight main definitions (with dozens of sub-definitions) of the verb turn, and fifteen main definitions of the noun. Apparently, it means a lot to turn.

Which explains, to some degree, why it is so hard to accomplish a meaningful narrative turn in our writing, especially in the tight, compressed, mean, lean container of flash.

If you tried yourself to create a meaningful narrative turn in Week Three of Strange Containers last month, and discovered some creative friction and frustration in the process, you were not alone.

Indeed, I wrote about just that in the next week’s Lit Salon feature—Want to Write Better? Get Uncomfortable—which answered a direct question from Lisa, who wrote saying the following:

I looked for how to create the turn without losing the concreteness of the image and action.

I toiled and grew frustrated, my imposter syndrome reared. Defeated, I screamed, ‘This is supposed to be fun!’ I slammed my laptop closed and climbed into bed where sleep would not come.

I answered Lisa in depth—and, again, you can read that whole post here—but I spoke mostly about creative discomfort, why it matters, and how we can surrender to it, even celebrate it, as a catalyst for creative growth, versus avoid and resist it at our own creative peril.

This week, however, I’m thinking specifically about narrative turns themselves, what they really are, and how we can more effectively execute them in our work to deepen revelation, heighten surprise, and underscore meaning.

Because all of this not only helps us get closer to the center of the aboutness of our work and therefore makes it matter more to readers, but raises the chances that we ourselves might discover something truly new and alive about ourselves, someone else, or the world through the writing process.

So what I want to do is practice narrative turns, and I’m inviting you to join me.

And what I am offering you as inspiration and nourishment for this exercise includes:

• Several clear, published examples of narrative turns in flash

• An excerpt of the best craft essay and description of narrative turns and how they work that I’ve ever come across

• A stepwise exercise for writing a short piece with a narrative turn that should also, even if the turn doesn’t work, give you some material you might use anyway, because… zero waste writing is the name of our game, and, also, we have to take risks and make messes if we want to be “real” writers/artists

Before we dive into all that good stuff, I wanted to unpack a narrative turn in my own work, so you can see an example where I created one that did, I think, work fairly well. I’m choosing this snippet because:

• It’s short (which demonstrates we can do this relatively quickly on the page, even though it’s hard)

• It’s experimental (which gives you permission to write weird things and STILL use specific, intentional narrative devices)

• It’s emotive (which is the kind of work I myself care most about, so, best to show that example where I can)

Also, and this is purely personal, this piece is about my father, who died on August 27 2024, so it speaks to where I am right now and all that is rushing through me. It’s called Void and it comes from a five-part prose poem published in 2015 called Wingless Bodies (later adapted for my memoir The Part That Burns):

Void

My father is not a swan. His bones are not hollow inside his flesh. The spaces between the phalanges of his feet are not spanned by delicate black webbing.

My father has never once trumpeted.

My father has no air sacs on his lungs. The doctors would have seen these when they cut through his not-hollow breastbone to expose and unblock his heart. The idea is, use an open artery to make a new pathway. The conclusion is, close the original wound.

My father’s chest was pried open in Florida, who knows how many curves of the river from Minnesota, where I stood with the phone in my hand as he lay on the table. Minnesota, where my father was born and my mother was born and I was born with weak lungs and a spine that grew crooked toward the window.

Florida is far from the saltless amniotic waves of Lake Superior, far from the sulfur and stench and seduction of this river that flows through our bodies toward the sea, toward the Gulf of Mexico, where my father lives, recklessly, without air sacs.

Air sacs and hollow bones are like life preservers.  They keep swans afloat. I have never seen my father float. Partly this is because he does not care for water. Partly it is because I have so rarely seen my father, who, unlike a swan, did not mate for life.

In this piece, I would say the narrative turn is slow—perhaps more of a “slide” as defined in the turn analysis below—and begins around the halfway mark with “my father’s chest was pried open in Florida.”

Still, though, even with that revelation, which takes us momentarily away from the negation and fabulism of “my father is not a swan,” we don’t yet know what this piece is really about. Is it about heart surgery?

No.

We begin to understand that later in that same paragraph, which tells us the speaker of the poem is on the phone in a different state, and ends with the speaker of the poem saying she was born with a spine that grew crooked toward the window (you can make of that metaphor what you will—for me, it’s a literal, organic metaphor: I have scoliosis and I left/was evicted from my home—out the window—while still a child).

The next paragraph/stanza underscores the distance between father and daughter by highlighting the distance between Minnesota and Florida, states that bookend the full length of the Mississippi River.

This penultimate stanza prepares us for/earns the final stanza, which returns us to the original swan negation device and establishes the father’s abject absence from the narrator’s life.

And with that, the turn (or slide?) is complete and we know this piece is about something very different from fathers, swans, and trumpeting.

Okay, so let’s see what we can do together with another perspective on how narrative turns work and five more published examples with very clear turns.

As always, I’m excited to see what you come up with. You’re probably executing narrative turns all over the place in your work already, without always realizing it.

But bringing narrative turns to consciousness and playing around with doing them on purpose is so empowering. It’s like learning to do a jump on ice skates—exhilarating, freeing, and kind of dangerous because no matter how skillful you become, you still don’t know exactly what will happen when you come back down.