I’m just exploring some famous women of the West who may have been lost to the history books (written by us white men). I’m using some biographical material to write poems, layering the poems on an image (as best as I can verify), and hoping to expand the narrative of the Wild West. The other day I wrote about Stagecoach Mary.
Here is a poem for Etta Place. She apparently was part of Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid and all them others, but when they were either captured or killed, Etta disappeared.
My editor at Middleweb, John, saw some of my tweets about #Western106, so he sent me a collection of Western magazines (how cool is that?) and an interesting book by Stephanie Bearce entitled Top Secret Files: The Wild West. It’s a non-fiction book for middle school readers that has some cool information in it and some fine myth debunking, too. Bearce also gives over quite a few pages to the forgotten Women of the West. As I read these profiles, I got inspired to write some poems about these woman. I used Canva to create these as digital static poems.
I intend to share one every day or two this week. The first poem is about Stagecoach Mary (Fields), a black woman who worked hard to gain respect and used her physical strength to silence those who would question her.
I gathered the images online, and given the time period we are talking about and muddy history of these women (a mix of those who followed the law and those who broke the law), I can’t vouch for the accuracy. I did my best to use the pictures of these woman from Top Secret Files with the images I found online.
We’re still hoping to do a Tall Tale radio project for some of us stragglers on the open range of #Western106 but, as Alan Levine noted, since we are A Course with No Course, there’s no time rush on it.
Still, I was listening to a Tall Tale the other day, and thinking of the narrative arc that such a story of hyperbole often follows. The diagram above is my attempt to make sense of the story form, knowing that not every Tall Tale follows this pattern.
If you want to join in on the collaborative Tall Tale story venture we aim to cook up, add your name to this open document. We’re going to keep entry point low and simple, but hope to have fun spinning a tale or two around the campfire.
The other day, I shared out the song that I wrote and recorded as part of inquiry with #Western106 open storytelling adventure. I thought it might be interesting to share out my notebook page, showing the scribbles as the song took shape. I can read it. Can you? (I did a little filtering in Flickr, to spice up the image).
This is pretty typical for me, crossing out words and using arrows to show where things might go. I’m working out structure with my pencil as I play the guitar and sing.
The Carolina Panther’s star quarterback Cam Newton is called a “gunslinger.”
The meeting between Patriots (Tom Brady) and Broncos (Peyton Manning) was a “showdown” or predicated to be a “shoot-out” (it wasn’t) between the two great athletes.
Manning says his visit to the Superbowl might be his “last rodeo.”
Reading the sports page these days under the lens of the #Western106 reminds us how the National Football League has co-opted the violent language of the Wild West for entertainment value. Just think of some of the team names: Cowboys, Broncos, and more.
Even when team owners meet, the media uses the Wild West as its central anchor point.
I get why this language has seeped into the culture of the National Football League. It is a violent sport, and the violence is part of the entertainment value. By connecting the language and rhetoric of the Wild West to the NFL, the media and NFL support a narrative, particularly that of the Lone Quarterback who leads his team/town to Victory over the Enemy in a time of great need.
It’s Clint on the football field. Or Shane. Or ….(insert hero) The language creates a story that people can connect with, and that the NFL can “sell” as a brand to its audience and the world.
I get it, but I remain fascinated by it, and worried about the violent nature of the rhetoric, too, and I know I will be more attuned to it now.
With all the inquiry of the symbolic meaning of “The West” in our #Western106 open course, I started to wonder if I could write a song that might capture the essence of moving West. I struggled with the writing of a song, though. I am no Western singer, so I began to rethink the narrative. Maybe the narrator is giving up on the East and heading West, and maybe the time period is rather elusive. It could be set today, or yesterday, or years ago.
The phrase “Everything is West of Here” began to settle into my mind, and as I heard the drum track — the loping, clip-clopping rhythm — I found the heart of the song, particularly when the chorus of “I’m moving out West, into the break of day” arrived on my paper in my handwritten scrabble (I guess I wrote it, right?) A variation is “I’m heading out West” in the second verse.
So, this song is about leaving a life behind and moving West to start anew, with all the struggles and hardship both the leaving and renewal will bring. And hope, too. There’s hope on that pony as our rider head up over the mountains.
This is one of the slowest songs I have written. My bandmates often chide me for bringing in songs that I write that fall under the 3 minute mark. “Give it another chorus” or “Where’s the break” or “Write another verse” — this is what they tell me. I don’t often listen to them (they know this). I’m from the Elvis Costello School of Songwriting: Say it under three minutes, or risk boredom or repetition. But I kept myself patient here, letting the horse amble its way forward towards the last verse in this one.
I recorded the song first a scratch demo on the day I wrote it, but it sounded awful. (I’m no singer, so that doesn’t help). I then found time to use Soundtrap (my fav recording platform right now) to re-record, adding the drums, and then using some synth sounds to capture the twangy guitar chords and the slide-guitar-ish lead. I was trying to use some of the tropes of Western songs to give mine the same feel, even if it isn’t really a Western song.
I’m past 20 now. Twenty-odd daily comics for The Wild West Adventures of the Internet Kid, an idea that was sparked by my participation in the open Western106 story adventure. I thought I would take a breather here to reflect on how it’s going for me, the writer (I make an appearance now and then in the comic, usually for criticism for not writing better comics or not paying attention to equity issues. Guilty as charged!).
Well, breather, plus today’s comic:
So far, so good with my idea of a daily comic, although I have very little idea if anyone is reading them. A few comments and reactions trickle in now and then. I’m still more focused on the question for myself: Am I having fun making the comics? I am and so, I keep on going forward. In fact, I have at least another 15 comics in the bank, set to go forth, including one story arc that will invite readers to play a game. I also have an ending comic, for when I get there.
The way I have been writing them is in bursts. In fact, the first weekend when I had the idea for the Internet Kid, I had a deluge of comic making. I cranked out about 15 of them in a three-day weekend, just keeping up with the ideas. I won’t claim that every comic every day is great, but I hope they add a little entertainment chuckle value for folks now and then.
What I am really trying to with The Wild West Adventures of the Internet Kidis to combine some of the elements of the Western genre (the cowboy, the horse, the villain) with some insights into the modern culture of technology. It’s trickier than it seems to pull that off in an entertaining way. I am often trying to make fun at the stereotypes of gender, making the so-called villain — Anarchist Annie — an interesting character, or so I hope. Her goal is to poke holes in the bias of our world. Sometimes, she blows things up to make her point crystal clear.
In fact, a few of the storylines and comics are pulled directly from my reading of Participatory Culture in a Networked Era, a slow-read in the Digital Writing Month community. If you have read that book (and you should), and if you read The Internet Kid (which, of course, I hope you do), you will start to see some parallels of ideas around technology and learning and young people’s interactions in the Digital Age that surfaced there in that study of participatory culture by Henry Jenkins, Mimi Ito and danah boyd, and then got woven here into this comic.
The app I used to make comics — Comics Head — has limits, particularly to expressions of characters (although an upgrade this weekend with a ton of new art seems to open the door for adding more elements .. still checking that out). But I do appreciate the flexibility of the Comics Head app for what I am doing as a comic strip writer. (And I have not yet used the Audio element on The Internet Kid … which allows you to layer in audio tracks on top of the comic .. on my list)
I am purposefully posting the comics in different places — on Twitter with the #western106 hashtag, in Flickr in an album, and on a Tumblr site that I set up just for the comics (it turns out Tumblr is a perfect space for daily comics). Sometimes, I share on Google Plus. I also have the feed of the Tumblr site spilling into the DS106 course. I wonder if anyone else other than me uses an RSS Reader to peruse the posts going there and make comments?
Can I just give a shout-out to my favorite character in my comic?
The Horse with No Name just cracks me up. I hadn’t even thought of a horse until I had the Kid in mind, and then .. of course he needed a horse. The Kid is a cowboy. But not just any horse. The Horse with No Name (cue: America song) has his own personality.
He refuses to let The Kid ride him and the Horse even negotiates an agreement with the Kid on this matter (The Kid agrees but worries what other cowboys will think of him). Yet, the Horse with No Name remains a funny and insightful sidekick to The Kid.
I think, as the writer, I am the Horse with No Name more than I am The Internet Kid. (Maybe I have some Anarchist Annie in me, too.) This particular comic of the animals having a farmyard chat about The Kid, in particular, still makes me giggle. I love how the Horse has the tablet and the image of The Kid on it. Look at The Kid’s posture and expression. Priceless. We know who is really in charge of their partnership.
I’ve been thinking of Tall Tales with the #Western106 open course, and have even pitched the idea to everyone to collaboratively write and record a Tall Tale radio program. We’ll see how that goes. (Hey, of course YOU are invited, too. Invent a persona. Add to the script. Venture out West with us. It is loosely labeled Smoke Signals.)
I went into Storybird, a picture book story-making site with an interesting art/writing twist, thinking I was going to start writing an original Tall Tale. Instead, I came away with this story that is definitely not a Tall Tale. I went with the Muse. This one is informed by my reading, listening and watching of Western narratives — of the incursion of White Settlers on traditional American Indian lands, and the great and devastating Changes that would happen. That did happen. That are still happening.
I suspect my story has stereotypes and pillars of the Western genre, but I hope it comes across as a heartfelt ode to remembering the power of Stories to heal and to help the Earth. I know Stories are not enough. But they are something.
Storybird is a site that allows you to write stories, by using professional illustrators’ work. It’s an interesting process because you call up art based on keywords or artists, and then build a story around the images you have available (not the other way around … traditionally, you would write a story and then make images to go with the narrative). So, I took time to absorb the artwork before beginning the story after searching “West” as my keyword. I like how it came out, so much so that I paid a few bucks to get a download of the picture book to save (and share).
I later moved the PDF over to a Flipbook creator for better sharing but you really have to use full-screen mode to get the flavor. Or you can read it over at Storybird.
Here, in the #Western106 open course, we are tackling into the idea of the Western narrative and genre. I am an East Coaster, so as the saying goes in the hashtag, Everything is West of Here. But I have traveled a little bit in my life, and been in some areas on the other side of the Mississippi, and I have been stunned by the majestic beauty of the Western areas of my country.
I was mulling about these memories the other day as we were working on a Daily Create related to remixing the words to Home on the Range. I was also thinking of the references that some participants have made to Country Music as touchstones of the West. For me, though, the Country reference just doesn’t work. I am drawn to Nashville more than Montana when I think of Country music. Nashville and Country feel South, not West.
When I think of Western music, all I can hear is Chris Whitley in my head, and the way his steel guitar, falsetto voice, stories, and production created an aural landscape of open skies and landscapes when he came bursting into the music scene in the 1980s, and how for me, his music became the West when I listened to it.
Listen to Big Sky Country and pay attention to the space in the song, the way Whitley is purposely leaving aural gaps for us as listeners. It’s guitar as mood and setting. You can see forever in those spaces. We’re taking in a view of the modern West with the music in our ears.
Chris Whitley died young, of lung cancer. He went West of somewhere, and still is there.
Also looking west for aural inspiration was U2, with their Joshua Tree album. As Wikipedia (so it must be true ) notes:
“Throughout the sessions, U2 sought a “cinematic” quality for the record, one that would evoke a sense of location, in particular, the open spaces of America. They represented this in the sleeve photography depicting them in American desert landscapes.”
I happened to be listening to Joshua Tree (one of the earlier titles of the album was Desert Songs) the other day in my car, not long after revisiting Chris Whitley in my headphones, and again, I could hear the wide open spaces in the production.
The East coast is crowded; the West is wide open. Music has a chance to bring us there.
(This is a post for Western106, an open online digital storytelling course, that will focus around the Western genre. I’m dipping in with my own experiences with the Wild West narratives.)
When each of our three boys were young, my wife and I made a conscious effort to avoid any kinds of toy guns in the house. It didn’t matter. They would pick up a stick, point it at a squirrel, or each other, or at us even, and go “bang bang bang.” The more we talked to our friends, the ones with boys, the more we came to realize that the stereotypes of boys and guns (and trucks) seemed to be something true, despite all that we did to avoid it.
Strange, right? But true, at least in my circles. We could not shake their obsession with guns.
One time, we were visiting a friend of my wife’s from work and her husband was a retired police officer. Before we even knew what was happening, he had pulled out an unloaded handgun from his gun safe to show our youngest son (he must have been about six years old). I was furious at this man and frustrated by the look of reverence on my son’s face as he was so close to a real gun. One that shoots real bullets. One that kills in a second.
We never went back to that house, needless to say.
It had me thinking of my own childhood as a boy, though, and my own obsession with the same. I distinctly remember watching The Lone Rangerre-runs on television with friends, as soon as it was over, we would run outside and playact out the episode we just watched. We’d use sticks as guns, and bikes as horses, and string as lassos. Cats sometimes would be our cattle, if we needed. (They were never very cooperative. We didn’t have dogs in our apartment complex. Only cats. Yeehaw. Kittyup.)
As I got older, I still gravitated to the idea of the Western, which I see now through my adults eyes as having many flaws — from gender issues to animal treatment issues to violence issues to … well, there are a lot of issues — and yet the theme of Good vs. Bad (another complicated issue) and of Hero vs. Villain (same) and Cowboy vs. Indian (more of the same) are timeless storytelling devices, made so visible it’s as if a mallet is pounding you on the head.
As kids, we liked that. Mallets made the story clear. There were no ambiguities. Cowboys were good,. Indians were bad. (But thanks to Alan Levine’s gathering of Western stories and narratives, I see now that even the stories I thought had a clear divide maybe never really did … look at the peaceful Tonto, who saved The Lone Ranger’s life more times than a viewer can count … and I am probably over-stereotyping the genre completely anyway .. writers do that to make a point, right?)
What began to change my mind and alter my perceptions of that narrative as a kid was the reading of a book. This book.
The Indian in the Cupboardby Lynn Reid Banks brought a whole new perspective to the Cowboy/Indian narrative that Hollywood had created to sell stories, showing me instead how proud the American Indians were of their place on Earth and how mistreated they had been, and continue to be in so many places (It is a travesty that the Pine Ridge Reservation has some of the deepest pockets of poverty in the United States and that casino operations are what keeps some tribes afloat here on the East Coast).
The novel, telling the tale of a boy who brings his plastic toys to life and then realizing the consequences of his actions, humanized American Indians for the first time for me, in a very powerful way that never left my head or heart. It later resonated with other books about the American Indians that I would read, too, such as Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and The Heart of Everything There is. This was the real history of our country, the kind that I was not being taught in history classes.
Move ahead a few years, and, as a young adult, I got hooked on the Western-themed television show, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. What an odd one. It was a mashup of cowboy and science fiction, told with humor. It didn’t last very long, but I loved that show, and watched it religiously. It skewered the conventions of the Western in so many ways while also maintaining the elements that attracted me to Westerns as a kid. That later led me to Firefly, the short-lived series that is a natural successor to Brisco, with its Western-in-Outer-Space theme. Add in Deadwood and others that I have forgotten over time.
And then came the discovery (or rather, the rediscovery with new eyes) of the Spaghetti Westerns with Clint Eastwood in college, with a friend who wanted to go to Hollywood to work on movies (he did do that, eventually) and listening to him dissect the movies over and over again through a filmmaker’s eyes was interesting, as was the experience of watching Eastwood later in Unforgiven, where he tries to dismantle the whole notions of the Hero as Avenger and Violence as a Way of Life.
Just last week, I was watching The Hateful Eight with one of my sons, now in high school, and thinking of how the myth of the Western permeates so much our media lives, in ways that are often unseen. I didn’t care much for The Hateful Eight (we had it on disc, as our neighbor is a filmmaker who votes for Oscar movies so she gets discs to sway her decision) and gave up on it, but my older sons (the eldest one had already seen it in the theater) enjoyed it, and it brought me back around to the opening of this post.
Neither of my older children are still obsessed with guns. Maybe they have grown out of it or been horrified by the front pages of our newspapers. The younger one still seems to gravitate towards toy guns whenever he can. It still rattles me.
And it raises some questions for me, a father.
At what point does media influence us, and at what point do we influence media? Do Westerns glorify violence or reflect our society’s interest in Outlaws and Justice? Is this notion of boys’ interest in guns innate? And if so, does the interest in guns lead to the potential of violence? Researchers are no doubt trying to figure that out.
Of course, I sure hope not, and I know that our struggle as parents to explain our violent culture to our kids over the years, expressed through exasperation with the proliferation of guns has been an ongoing process. I’ve even used my own experience in the military as an infantry soldier to talk about guns, and the powerful danger they possess in the world.
Here at home, we promote peace in this world of violence. That’s just how it is, I guess. It’s not that we never had Nerf guns in the house. It’s not that we took every stick out of their hands. But it’s also not that we have bowed to the overwhelming wave of pop culture, either. Our family conversations about guns and violence, though .. those continue. They have to. They always will.
