Where a poem or a story changes direction. A short lesson built from poems in Crossings and from a short story, with the complete texts, a few questions and three exercises for a writing class.
A turn is the moment a piece of writing changes direction. In a story, it may be a reversal, when events go the opposite way, or a recognition, when someone finally sees what was true. In a poem, it is often called the volta, the place where the poem’s thinking shifts. Readers of every kind of writing look for it, because it is usually where the meaning gathers.
The lesson begins with three classic readings, linked in the box below: Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” and Thomas Hardy’s “Channel Firing.” Beside them are poems from Crossings, each given in full, and a story from the forthcoming collection The Weight of Small Mercies, given as a short summary and a page of the text, chosen because their turns are easy to point to and easy to talk about. The notes describe what can be seen on the page; they are one way of reading, not the only one, and students may well find turns that are not mentioned here. Everything is shared in case it helps a class or a writer; take whatever is useful.
Beside the classic readings, poems and stories by James Mulhern are included as working examples, for a practical reason: he knows what was in the drafts, what changed and what he learned in changing it, so he can show a class how a piece came to be and not only how it ended, while working through the same questions every writer brings to a draft.
I · The Idea
What a turn is
E. M. Forster offered a famous example. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story, a sequence of events. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot, because the second event happens because of the first. A turn lives in that small word “of”: the moment one thing causes another and the direction changes.
A simple test helps. If the parts of a piece can be joined only with “and then,” it may be a sequence. If they can be joined with “but” and “therefore,” something is turning. This works for a novel, a poem or a page that explains how the world works.
Reversal. Events go the opposite way from what a character expects.
Recognition. A character, or the reader, sees what was true all along.
The volta. A poem shifts its thinking, often on a single word or line.
Preparation. A good turn surprises and still feels right, because something earlier in the piece made room for it. Writers sometimes call this planting.
Classes that study turns in classic texts, such as Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” or Thomas Hardy’s “Channel Firing,” may want to read those first; the poems and stories here can then serve as working examples of the same devices.
II · Reading One
A story with two turns
“Keep Calm and Carry On”
Aiden lives with his grandmother, Nanna, while his mother is in a psychiatric hospital. Nanna is broke. Over one long day she tells her friends that Aiden has leukemia, sends him upstairs to take a friend’s jewelry, collects a check for his “medical expenses,” and leaves a healing service at Mission Church with a gold chalice in her handbag, hoping it might cure her daughter. That evening, at home, Aiden asks her two questions.
A page from the story · the last scene
When we were home, listening to talk radio in the living room, I asked my grandmother if she believed in miracles, like the ones she talked about earlier in the day with Margie.
“Sure, sure,” she said, not looking up. She was taking the jewelry and chalice out of her bag, examining them in the light. I saw bits of dust in the sunrays streaming through the bay window.
“You’re not listening to me, Nanna.”
She put the items back in her handbag and stared at me. “Of course, I am.”
“Well do you think I’ll have a miracle and be cured of leukemia?”
“Aiden.” She laughed. “You haven’t got leukemia. You’re as healthy as a horse, silly.”
“But you told everybody I was sick.”
“Sweetheart. That was to evoke pity.”
“What does that mean?”
“Make people feel bad so we can get things from them. I need money to take care of you.” She spoke hesitantly and looked down, like she was ashamed. “I’m broke. Your grandfather left me with nothing and I gotta pay for your mother’s medical expenses. If Margie notices her jewelry gone, maybe she’ll think you took it to help your Nanna. I told her I was having difficulty paying your hospital bills.”
“Sorta like a tribulation?”
“Exactly, sweetheart.”
“Is my mother a tribulation?”
This time my grandmother’s tears were real. They gushed like water from that rock in the Middle East. I knelt before her and put my head in her lap. She hugged me, bent down, and kissed my face several times. Then she looked out the window. It seemed the tears would never stop.
“Don’t worry, Nanna. I believe in miracles, too. Someday Mom will come home from the hospital.”
And we stayed like that until the sunbeams dimmed and the dust disappeared and her tears stopped.
In the quiet of the room, she whispered, “Keep calm and carry on” to me or to herself. Or to both of us.
From The Weight of Small Mercies.
For most of its length the story reads like a comic caper. Then, on this last page, it turns twice: first when Nanna laughs, “You haven’t got leukemia,” and again when Aiden asks, “Is my mother a tribulation?”
The first turn is a reversal for Aiden, though perhaps not for the reader, who has had reason to suspect the illness was invented. The second is the one that changes the story. A comic day of schemes becomes a grandmother’s grief, and a boy’s simple question lets her, and the reader, recognize what the day has been about.
Notice how the story prepares the second turn, so that it surprises but still feels right:
Fake tears, twice. After she cries for the policeman, Aiden asks if she is sad. “Don’t be silly,” she says. “That was an act.” Later, at Rita’s, he thinks, “More fake tears.” So when the story says, “This time my grandmother’s tears were real,” the words “this time” carry the whole day behind them.
Water from the rock. At the church she flatters the priest: the Holy Spirit “came out of you like the water that gushed from the rock at Rephidim and Kadesh.” The same image returns for her tears. A joke has become a sorrow.
One word. At the altar she cries out, “I don’t know how many more tribulations I can take,” and outside Rita’s house she tells Aiden that “a tribulation is a problem.” At the end he uses the word himself, first lightly (“Sorta like a tribulation?”) and then in the question that turns the story.
The passages above are quoted from The Weight of Small Mercies. The story can be read whole in its 2021 printing in Impspired, which differs only in small points of punctuation.
III · Reading Two
A poem that turns on one line
“Piano”
That gray day, you took an axe to the Steinway.
Yellow and red leaves scattered as you raised your arm,
smashed the instrument apart on the hard earth.
You shattered the shiny veneer—
wooden ribs, dovetail joints,
padded hammers, strings.
Split the spruce soundboard heart
as small planks of air-dried wood
joined the miscellany on the ground.
I thought of my mother,
the day she moved out,
how you changed the locks,
emptied closets,
erased every vestige of your shared life—
glistening strings
on the soundboard
of a broken heart.
For three stanzas the poem watches a man destroy a piano. Then one line, “I thought of my mother,” turns it. The axe, the shattered veneer and the split soundboard are suddenly about a marriage ending. The poem never says so; the turn lets the reader see it.
The ending is prepared in the third stanza, where the poem names the “spruce soundboard heart.” When the last lines arrive, “glistening strings / on the soundboard / of a broken heart,” the image has already been planted, and it now means something else. A reader may also notice the dash at the end of the fourth stanza, which holds the poem open just before the final image.
Students who have read Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” may recognize the device; his poem turns on the single word “Till.”
IV · Reading Three
A question that comes back
“Copacetic”
My brother and I are packing for a trip.
My father stands in the doorway.
“Everything copacetic?” he says.
Once, I asked him where he learned that word.
“Korea,” he said, “a Marine word.”
Years later, in the hospital,
the Jell-O quivered on the spoon.
“Don’t want it.”
“You’ve got to eat, Dad.”
“I’m not hungry.” He pushed it away.
I sat by him until shadows
crossed his face. Mostly, he slept.
Sometimes he asked the time.
I left at nine. Soon, the nurse called.
“Your father’s agitated. He wants to leave—
something about a trip.”
When I returned, he stood at the window,
wearing the robe my sister said
brought out the blue in his eyes.
“Everything copacetic?” I asked.
He turned. Looked at me. “It was tough,” he said.
I guided him to the bed and slept in the chair beside him.
By dawn, he’d gone.
His robe, folded,
on the table by the door.
Here the turn is built from repetition. In the opening, the father stands in the doorway and asks, “Everything copacetic?” Near the end, the son asks the same question in a hospital room, and the roles have reversed. The father’s answer, “It was tough,” is the plainest line in the poem, and it lands as a turn because for the whole poem the family word has been standing in for things that were not said.
The poem also prepares its ending with a single word. The first line is about packing “for a trip.” When the nurse calls, the father “wants to leave— / something about a trip.” The reader may understand that trip before the speaker does.
A short companion: a turn made by a mistake, “Carol”
I was twelve.
You were thirty-four,
living in an apartment by Wollaston Beach.
On your porch, we loved to watch
waves crash on the soft, pebbled shore.
Once, you showed me a painting—
a gyre of blue-green shapes.
A black stroke, apostrophe-shaped, stood out.
“That’s me lost in a crowd.” You laughed.
I thought the painting was the ocean.
You, the apostrophe,
tumbling headfirst toward the shore.
I saw no crowd. Only waves—
and you, curved like a question mark,
diving toward the shore.
I don’t like contractions—
something is removed. Ellipses bother too.
When I’m somber,
these simple marks
usher the memories
of Dad and brother Mark,
and my fear of losing you returns.
Now you’re eighty-one,
and I’m fifty-nine.
I wish I could enter the past,
change the apostrophe
to an exclamation.
No—my heart.
A steady pulse in the light.
Beating like the waves,
green and blue,
assuring you with their rhythm—
You were not lost,
just part of the current
carrying you safely home.
In “Carol,” a twelve-year-old misreads a painting he is shown. Carol says its black stroke is “me lost in a crowd”; he sees only waves. The poem’s last turn grows from that misreading: “You were not lost, / just part of the current / carrying you safely home.” Students who know Thomas Hardy’s “Channel Firing,” in which the dead mistake gunfire for Judgment Day, will recognize the device.
Both poems are quoted from Crossings. The revision of the ending of “Copacetic” is shown in Lesson on Endings in From Draft to Page.
V · Exercise One
Find the turn
Working in pairs, students might read each short poem below twice, mark the line where it turns, and say in a sentence what causes the turn. Each poem has a brief note that can stay closed until the discussion.
“Leaves”
That fall day, we raked leaves behind the shed.
Smell of earth and wet decay rose in cold air.
We saw our breath in a blast of wind.
Worms and beetles scattered from the pile.
I saw dirt,
thought we had finished.
“Not yet,” you said.
The sky grew darker, wind colder.
Your flashlight showed not a speck of leaf.
You said, “We’re done.”
Today I kneel at your grave,
clearing wet leaves.
Again, I smell the earth,
feel the biting cold.
Leaves are blurry through my tears.
“We’re done,” you whisper in my ear.
I recite a prayer,
cross myself.
You’re no longer here.
I stand and leave.
One way to read the turnfor after the discussion
The poem turns on “Today I kneel at your grave.” The same three words, “We’re done,” appear on both sides of the turn. The first time, they mean the raking is finished. The second time, whispered at the grave, they may mean a life is finished, or that the speaker is being released from his work. The poem prepares this with “Not yet,” the refusal to stop too soon.
“Turbulence”
The twenty-something blonde offered
to lift my suitcase to the overhead compartment.
My principal inquired, “When will you be retiring?”
My neighbor, close in years, has cancer.
When the young woman looked at me
and offered to take my luggage,
I thought of rites-of-passage—
a first kiss, the first date,
marriage and a child,
and the Last Rites, too.
The plane rose through clouds.
Turbulence. Rain-pattered darkness.
I saw an old man
in the window’s reflection.
Behind: everything lived.
Ahead: the solid blackness.
When we landed,
the suitcase seemed heavier.
My exit was clear.
One way to read the turnfor after the discussion
This is a recognition. The opening lines give three small signs of age: a young woman offers help, a principal asks about retiring, a neighbor of the same age is ill. The turn comes in the window: “I saw an old man / in the window’s reflection.” The speaker sees himself as others have been seeing him. After that, even the suitcase changes: it “seemed heavier.”
“Last Supper”
The phone’s ring slices the dark.
His wife, voice flat: “It’s for you.”
“My father’s dead. Can you shine my shoes?”
Downstairs, something crashed.
They walked in silence
because that’s what he liked.
In the living room,
the cheap print of The Last Supper
lay on the floor,
its frame splintered.
At the wake, he knelt
beside his father’s casket,
said an Our Father
kissed his Pa’s forehead.
Leaving, he asked his wife
when they’d last seen him.
“Just before Easter.
We took him out to dinner.”
At home, he knelt
beside the shattered print.
His shoulders drooped,
his back shook.
She knew he was thinking
of that last supper—
what he said,
what he wished he had said.
She watched,
offering silence,
offering time.
Later, she would hug him,
and she wouldn’t say a thing.
One way to read the turnfor after the discussion
The broken print is planted early: “something crashed,” and then “The Last Supper / lay on the floor.” At the wake comes a question and its answer: “Just before Easter. / We took him out to dinner.” The turn is the moment the title changes meaning, from a painting to a son’s last dinner with his father: “She knew he was thinking / of that last supper.” The poem also shifts its point of view to the wife, who understands without being told.
VI · Exercise Two
But and therefore
This works well as a quick spoken game. One student begins retelling “Keep Calm and Carry On” and each student adds one link, but every link must begin with “but” or “therefore,” never “and then.” Here is one possible chain:
The grandmother is broke and her daughter is in the hospital, therefore she plans to take a chalice she has read can cure the sick. But she needs money, and a reason to reach the altar, therefore she tells everyone Aiden has leukemia. But at the altar the priest pushes Aiden’s chest, therefore Aiden, remembering their plan, falls hard and knocks over one of the old men, and in the commotion the chalice goes into her handbag. But at home Aiden asks whether he will be cured, therefore she admits the lie. But he asks whether his mother is a tribulation, therefore her tears are real at last.
For poems, the same game can be played on a smaller scale. “Last Supper” makes a good second try: the phone rings, therefore a man learns his father has died; but something crashes downstairs, and so on.
VII · Exercise Three
Write a turn
Each writer drafts a turn for a project of his or her own. A few possibilities:
For a story or novel. Write a page in which a character is sure of something, and let one line of dialogue reverse it, as Aiden’s question does. Before you write, decide what earlier detail will make the turn feel right.
For a poem. Describe an object or a task for several lines, then turn on a single line that brings in a memory, as “Piano” does with “I thought of my mother.” Try ending on an image you planted before the turn.
For a poem or a scene. Use the same words twice, once before the turn and once after, so that they mean something different the second time, as “We’re done” does in “Leaves.”
For writing that explains. A discovery is a turn too: the moment the reader’s first idea is overturned by what the evidence shows. Set up the first idea fairly, then turn.
Afterward, each writer might read the draft aloud while the group names the turn and the detail that prepared it.
VIII · For Discussion
Questions for discussion
In “Keep Calm and Carry On,” which turn surprised you, and which did you see coming? What made the difference?
Why might the story let a child ask the question that turns it, rather than letting the grandmother explain herself?
Find the earlier line that makes the phrase “this time” in the story’s last scene so strong.
In “Piano,” what changes when the poem says “I thought of my mother”? Read the poem again without that stanza. What is lost?
In “Copacetic,” the same question is asked twice. Who asks it each time, and how does the answer change?
Do the turns in these poems arrive near the end, the way a sonnet’s volta often does? Where would you place the turn in your own draft, and why?
Which turn on this page feels most earned to you? Point to the line that earned it.
In Sum
A Few Possibilities
Patterns noticed in these readings, offered as suggestions rather than rules
One line. A turn can rest on a single line, or a single word.
Plant it. A turn feels right when something earlier made room for it: a phrase, an image, a pair of fake tears.
Repeat it. Words used twice can carry a turn, if they mean something new the second time.
Let a question do it. A plain question can turn a story more quietly than an explanation.
Leave it unsaid. The turns here are rarely announced; the reader is trusted to feel them.
✦ ✦ ✦
Read the complete poems in Crossings. To see how some of these poems and stories were revised, see From Draft to Page.
Questions and Activities on the Classic Readings
These add to the exercises above and draw on the classic readings at the top of the page.
Questions for Discussion
In Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” where is the first turn, and where is the second? What in the story’s first sentence prepares the last one?
In Whitman’s poem, what does the word “Till” separate?
What mistake does “Channel Firing” turn on, and who corrects it?
Which classic reading works most like “Piano,” and which most like “Keep Calm and Carry On”? Why?
Activities
Turn chart. In pairs, fill in a chart for one classic reading and one poem or story by James Mulhern, with four columns: the text, the line where it turns, what causes the turn, and the earlier detail that prepares it. Share one row with the class.
One-word turn. Write a poem or paragraph of six to ten lines that turns on a single word, as Whitman’s does on “Till.”
