Telling Stories Without Words

Poetry, I’ve come to believe, is a conjuring (yes, magic) of the senses. It’s vision, but with words. And it’s music without an instrument. It’s the scent of low tide with no seaweed and no sand. It’s texture with no physical object to touch. You conjure an image, a smell, a sound, a touch, a taste, using only words. It’s a kind of synesthesia – a jumble of one sense on top of (or underneath) another. So why does it surprise me, over and over again, when this confusion of senses happens in art, that is, when something purely visual speaks?

Yesterday I read an article in the New Yorker (“Quilts That Keep You Up at Night” by Nina Mesfin, 10/23/23) about a Black quilter named Michael A. Cummings. He’s a storyteller who uses fabric patches instead of words. He creates characters, populates a setting, and challenges us to stay with him as he opens a window on a scene. We use our imaginations to follow his narrative arc, and we fill in the gaps with what we’ve learned about the world ourselves and what we’ve lived in our own lives.

For this blog post, I don’t want to use too many words. I’d like you just to look at some of the work Cummings has created and to ask yourselves to “read” the stories they tell. Think of them as writing prompts. Choose one and think of it as a short story, or even as flash fiction. What’s the story in this quilt? Who is this person, who are these people? Where are they? Have hearts been broken? Has a stranger come? Has someone set out on a journey? What’s happening? What’s about to happen? What is the mystery at the core of the story (because what is a story without a deep mystery to it?) Look for details. A mermaid, a monster, a cross, a snake, bags for cotton, repeated fish, and water, water, people in water, people on ships, ships in water.

Here are photos of a few of Cummings’ quilts.

“I’ll Fly Away” by Michael A.Cummings

The last image is just part of a quilt – here is what the actual quilt looks like on a wall.

Maybe that quilt is not flash fiction, not a short story. Maybe it’s the Great American Novel.