“A Tornado, a Turnip, and a Minotaur Walk into a Bar: An American Memoir”—a 105,000-word narrative completed in April 2025—imagines a world where characters possess complete knowledge of their past and future and where popular culture shapes society into a kind of mythology. As experimental fiction, it responds to a challenge faced by many contemporary writers: how to innovate storytelling without sacrificing engagement by readers accustomed to traditional forms. Authors want to keep their readers reading—even while navigating content that may be perceived as odd, absurd, or disconcerting. To keep a reader’s experience balanced, even in the face of heavily fragmented text passages, the creative development of “A Tornado…” built a “handrail” with familiar elements. This narrative has clear story arcs with rising action, climax, and resolution, as well as compelling characters with strengths, weaknesses, and intent to attain goals in the face of obstacles. These aspects, however, offer much more than reliance on familiarity; they actively reframe the experimental passages, guiding thematic interpretation. The “handrail” in A Tornado… aligns with thoughts and best practices of scholars and authors working with threads of post-structuralism, reader response theory, literary allusions, recurring motifs, and black studies. Functionally, this type of “handrail strategy” has the capacity to guide readers, whether novice or sophisticated, as they make their way through experimental passages and unlock meaningful statements about fear, social injustice, and identity.
This exhibit features three instances of what the author calls neon poetry, so named because they typically occur in “A Tornado…” in monologues performed by a character named Neon Sign. Certain words highlighted within these speeches, if read in sequence, comprise free-form verse that evokes the spirit of the beat poetry of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The strength of each neon poem, however, depends upon its interplay with the entire speech as visual support.
