By Ashleigh Cochran
“I tried not to think about all the other guns in the other vehicles on the highway with me. Handguns and long guns, in trunks and glove compartments and under seats and stuffed into diaper bags, belonging to owners who are sure their guns are loaded.”
– “Smoking Guns,” by Laura Johnsrude, River Teeth 25.1, Fall 2023
In creative nonfiction, many essays will feature a “through-line,” a motif that continues throughout an essay to aid in connecting complex ideas. We can find many types of through-lines, including song lyrics, popular book characters, famous quotes, historical moments, and so much more. One example of an essay featuring a through-line is Eula Biss’s “The Pain Scale.” Biss pulls the reader through the essay by counting through the doctor’s pain scale and titling each section as a different number from said scale. In each section, Biss examines her relationship to chronic pain, and the scale itself keeps the reader tied into the subject of the essay.
Now, a through-line doesn’t have to be separate from the main content of the essay. In “Smoking Guns,” the through-line is nothing other than a firearm. In the essay, the narrator explores how to get a gun decommissioned and how to turn it into something other than a “gun.” The gun becomes something that cannot harm but stays with the audience the whole essay. The major through-line here is a literal, formerly smoking, gun.
“Smoking Guns” is not the first piece of writing to do this. In River Teeth’s weekly online magazine Beautiful Things, many authors focus on a concrete object. One piece by Deb Werrlein titled “Ashtray” focuses on the narrator’s relationship to the ashtray that their father smoked with. In another piece, “The Monkeys Don’t Care” by Lisa VanderVeen, the narrator focuses on monkeys in Kathmandu, and uses those monkeys to discuss popular themes of life. When we read “Smoking Guns,” we wonder how a gun, an object filled with such terror and force, can carry us through an essay that focuses so heavily on fear and violence. This is exactly what Laura Johnsrude wants us to ask ourselves.
As the narrator embarks on a journey to have the gun decommissioned, we see it at every step. We see it theoretically loaded, empty, and silent as it sits in the car. We see its death as Stan cuts the gun into pieces, so it is no longer considered a firearm. We see it travel to the post office, and finally we see its prophesied return to the narrator, hopefully as a shovel.
“I hope they send me a trowel. I look forward to plunging it into the dirt, a gun no more.”
Yet as we see the physicality of the gun, we also see its emotional impact on the narrator and what has happened to those around her. The narrator describes the feeling of the guns being in the house and the fear of what could happen if they were to one day go off. As the narrator drives down the highway to get the guns decommissioned, we see the emotional toll that the guns have on her. Only when they are cut up does the narrator breathe a cautious sigh of relief.
Finally on the last page, the narrator recounts all the moments and people in her life who have been affected by gun violence. She recounts stories of teenagers, mothers, sons, grandchildren, and daughters, all of whom had their life taken by a firearm. As the essay builds to the moment when Johnsrude calls for more gun control, the narrator continues the through-line with the physical firearms. The audience only receives this call to action after the guns have been decommissioned in the essay.
“Not sure I could have explained why I destroyed two guns that never hurt anyone. The demise of two hunting weapons made no dent in the over 300 million guns American civilians own. No one’s sure the exact number, of course.”
Once the guns have been literally cut up, Johnsrude’s fear is also figuratively cut up. The gun cannot be the object of fear any longer because it is no longer a gun. How can this affect our own fears as writers? Once we cut up what we are afraid of, does it still have the power to terrify us? Does that change what we write about the things that scare us?
When confronting this idea of fear, in its literal and figurative forms, Johnsrude decides to touch the gun directly. Johnsrude connects the whole essay with the firearm, once it is no longer a technical “gun” it changes from an object of terror into a beautiful thing. “Smoking Guns” takes on the transformation of fear and examines how fear can lead us to tackling the things in life that we find difficult or hard to process. The things that need to be written about.
How can a cold, metal machine carry an essay about fear? It’s simple, you just have to look at it and take it apart.
Exercise:
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- Take something that scares you, snakes, spiders, guns, etc. and look at it for five minutes. See how it makes you feel, jot down notes about the object and what it feels like for that thing to take center stage.
- Now imagine the object cut up. Maybe that snake becomes three different parts, the spider becomes split in half with a detached head. Write for five minutes about the object now. Do you still fear it in the same way?
- Write a short paragraph centering that object, explore the journey as it gets disconnected. Describe how fear can change when an object loses its power to scare us.
Ashleigh Cochran is a poet from northern Missouri currently working on her Master of English at Ball State University. Her writing draws on the lines of fantasy and reality as she toys with topics of grief, heartbreak, and eulogy. Her poetry is most recently published in Queen’s Quarterly and focuses on her time spent living in Costa Rica. In her free time, you can find her running races or looking for new things to bedazzle.
Photo courtesy of Charlie Seaman via Unsplash
