By Roger Kuhns

First published in the Peninsula Pulse, October 25, 2002

Men like you. Mark Turcotte’s words rumble and rattle through the emotional landscape of his childhood and through a journey to North Dakota. Turcotte is Chippewa and the events recounted in Road Noise (Published in Exploding Chippewas; TriQuarterly Books, 2002 – and as a live recording CD on www.musictoears.com [this website: see catalogue]) returned him to North Dakota’s Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation to bury his father. The journey became a larger thing in his life.

“The focus is about one thing – the entire poem is about me walking through the doors of the church toward my father’s casket. You could say this is a poem about me opening a window. The construction of it lends itself to be more intense; more personal.”

Turcotte’s work is very personal and as he reads Road Noise he relives the elements of the experience. “When I perform it there is an intensity that has personal ramifications because of its length, it keeps winding deeper and deeper. Just the construction of the piece makes it different. Some times as I get towards the end I have trouble getting through it because I’m so involved, so affected – issues of an estranged father. I hope those things are expressed in the poem.”

Being a writer of stories is one thing, but conveying the emotional gut of an experience in such a way that an audience is impacted is part of the event is not so common. Turcotte’s style of writing is instinctual, not trained. He has to write, he can’t resist that natural force. “I always move through the world the way I move through the world – as a writer,” he said. “I didn’t consciously think of writing when I was going through this. I don’t do that. It’d be callous of me to think of the writing when I was going through this. I wrote the poem four years later, but I wrote it ‘in the moment’ not like reflecting back on it. Because I am the odd strange writer person I am I write this way.”

For some writers the product is therapeutic – writing heals the wound or unveils the revelation. Not so with Turcotte. “What was therapeutic for me was living the experience of going to bury my father – not writing the poem. Reality of doing this – this life-changing thing – the poem is just the artistic response of what I did. Since other people can’t live it, I write about it so they can hear it. I think you have to live life first. I wouldn’t have written Road Noise without having gone through this and buried my father.”

A big part of Road Noise is the involvement of musician Mitar Mitch Covic. “First of all having Mitar’s music there is like a cue. I wrote the words in such close proximity to the music. It’s like returning me to my experience. The first notes by Mitar take me back, like a sensory reminder – like a smell takes me there.”

This was a true collaboration; I feel it is two artists feeding off one another, and it’s different every time. Here in this collaboration Mitar’s music is affected by how he feels just as my work is affected by how I feel, a real symbiosis. Each performance and each audience influence is different.” < BR>
When the music and the words intermingle one does indeed feed the other. If you’ve ever driven a long distance accompanied by a heavy heart, maybe a fearful heard, and uncertainty, and your senses are heightened to the low heart beat and traveling sounds around you then you begin to get a sense of what Turcotte is feeling as Covic’s music reverberates through his being. That almost sub-audible booming and rumbling of life is mimicked by Covic’s bass guitar. It adds a sense of urgency to that part of the brain that is primal, not hearing words but taking in the environment. Turcotte and Covic have achieved that artistic joining. The audiences know this.

“We’ve had really strong audience reaction for both words and music,” Turcotte said. “Individual audience members have come up to me with tears in their eyes to tell me about their fathers; it’s a very personal but universal thing. I think it helps with the audience that we start with this commonality. Some say it’s a very male piece, others say it is very accessible. There are subtle differences, points of view, but this reaches people and that’s what art is about. It’s nice when people reach back.”

But Road Noise also continues to impact Turcotte. Each time he performs this with Mitar he feels he’s taking the next steps toward forgiveness. “It’s a recognition of who he was, who I am. I had to go through this, deal with hundreds and hundreds of ghosts and if I hadn’t done this I’d be different. This was life changing; almost everything wonderful that happened in my life did so since this experience. When I buried my father I wasn’t a writer in a professional sense; that all came since. I wouldn’t have gone to Chicago, met my wife, it is where my son was born, it is where my first two books were published.”

One gets the sense, when hearing Road Noise, that Turcotte will be dealing with and reacting to his father’s actions and death for as long as he walks the earth. Forgiveness is a big part of this for Turcotte, and it is the way he sees the reinforcement of forgiveness in essence have made Road Noise a time capsule for the writer. The presence is there, and this is evident in Turcotte’s realizations. “The situation of being a young man with few memories of a father except for those that are horrific and terrifying, and wondering growing up if I would become my father,” Turcotte said. “That’s why I have trouble getting through it; it wasn’t a resolutions, it was a beginning. I could say I decide to forgive you but then you have to forgive me and do that every day. < BR>
It is the every day in the “men like you” and the travails of sons who are born to deal with their father’s actions that make them remembered and forever. This is glimpsed in Turcotte’s words of Road Noise and in the heartbeat of Covic’s bass guitar. It is here we learn something about ourselves.