Punctuation

I am a volunteer Crisis Line Advocate for the Durham Crisis Response Center. This means answering calls from individuals who are seeking help in situations of domestic violence or after experiencing sexual assault. A recent shift left me without words. The callers had described horrific situations, and I felt I needed a nap to release some of the tension. But as I lay in bed, I could not sleep. Instead, my mind kept picturing a single image - a giant exclamation point. Sometimes in the face of brutality and intimidation, that's the best I've got. But then I want to do something.

The giant exclamation point turned into an idea for a quilt (detail on left). My nap was over before it began, and I raced downstairs to start sketching and cutting.

In case you worry that I neglected my needed self-care in this time of stress, a clinical study by Dr. Robert Reiner, commissioned by the Home Sewing Association, found that sewing is more relaxing than reading a newspaper, playing cards, or painting. We get in our flow, cortisol goes down, dopamine goes up. Without it, I'm a total stresscase. I used to get relief from running and kickboxing, but I've been rehabbing a knee and glute injury for many months now. Sewing it is.

I decided to design the quilt in black and white, and cut a pile of 6" squares from each. Some I would leave blank, to represent the missing words. On others, I would center a single punctuation mark. I began with the basics - exclamation point, question mark, comma, period, colon, semicolon. I expanded my scope to include quotation marks and apostrophes, brackets and parentheses, en dash and em dash, ampersand and ellipsis. With a nod to the digital age, I included the hashtag, at-sign, forward slash, AND back slash.  A caret and asterisk (thank you Origen) for editing. But now I had run out of marks.

I arranged my empty squares and punctuation marks in a tentative layout on the "design-sofa" (I don't have a design-wall, so I use the couch) and called my son in to consult. His first reaction was that he wanted this quilt. He is a young writer, and a grammar nerd to boot. How could I say no? His second reaction was that there was too much empty space. We needed more punctuation. Where would we get it? Where else? The internet.

A bit of speed-googling led us to into a world of nuanced excitement. The ElRey mark, proposed by one Ellen Susan, conveys roughly half the force of an exclamation point. It is named for Ellen's dog, who "was a master at communicating feeling with graceful understatement." So if you, a person of dignity and restraint, abhor the overuse of the exclamation point in texts and emails, but nonetheless wish to convey your moderate enthusiasm, this one is for you.

If you lack enthusiasm and instead trade in sarcasm, irony, or uncertainty, there are marks for you as well. My renderings appear below. Counterclockwise from upper left are: 1) Alcanter de Brahm's irony mark; 2) Herve Bazin's doubt point, introduced in his 1966 book Plumons l'oiseau; 3) Card Chronicle's "don't take that too seriously" mark; and 4) the patented SarcMark, to make sure people know you meant the opposite of what you said, and not in a nice way.

These marks completed our quest for punctuation. For the border, I used pandas, in honor of my favorite punctuation book, Eats, Shoots, and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. The book's title is based on a grammatical joke:

"A panda bear walks into a bar and orders a sandwich. The waiter brings him the sandwich. The panda bear eats it, pulls out a pistol, kills the waiter, and gets up and starts to walk out. 

The bartender yells for him to stop. The panda bear asks, "What do you want?" The bartender replies, "First you come in here, order food, kill my waiter, then try to go without paying for your food." 

The panda bear turns around and says, "Hey! I'm a Panda. Look it up!" The bartender goes into the back room and looks up panda bear in the encyclopedia, which read: "Panda: a bear-like marsupial originating in Asian regions. Known largely for it's stark black and white coloring. Eats shoots and leaves."

Incidentally, overabundant commas have been known to induce violent behavior in college professors as well.

Birds join the pandas in the upper right corner of the quilt, in honor of Bazan and because birds are punctuation in flight. Together, the pandas and birds form a giant right bracket.

Punctuation quilt top

My son wanted black for the quilt back, but I didn't have quite enough. I used the black that I had along with white scraps from the quilt top and other black and white prints from the scrap bucket. I pieced improvisationally, which is my favorite way to work.

improv backing

For the quilting, I chose cursive writing. Using a white thread that alternately disappears and reasserts itself against the white and black background, I wrote out the first lines of one of my son's literary compositions, "Mute." The piece is an emo-magical-realist vignette about a young man who has ripped out his own voicebox. Though he narrates in the first person, he expresses his deep pain at his inability to speak what he feels. "Mute" symbolizes my son's own frustration at how hard it is to put thoughts and feelings into words when they spin so fast and far. It was a perfect pairing with my own speechlessness with which this quilt began.

cursive quilting

Ampersand, frozen

 If you think you noticed some ink blotches on the quilt top, you are correct. I prewashed all my fabrics, but made one critical mistake. I appliqued the ampersand from vintage 1930's trim, and did not think to prewash it. When I washed the finished quilt, the ampersand bled profusely. #%$^@!

The quilt went in the freezer while I took a trip to the store to get dye-catcher sheets and special detergents. Seven washes later, some, but not all, of the ink came out. The sarc and irony marks took a beating in the process. But my son, God bless him, likes it just as it is. He says the ink blotches remind him of the imperfection of writing. And maybe it's ironic - or just appropriate - that the irony mark still can't get the respect it deserves.