Tracing the Threads of Toni Jensen’s “Carry”: A Visual and Rhetorical Making

with Rhonda Waterhouse

“I could see that “Carry” wasn’t simply braided; it was woven. This was an organizational logic and symbolism that I couldn’t ignore.”

The tapestry filled my iPad screen, a digital rendering of Toni Jensen’s essay, “Carry.” Her craft choices, recast as line and color, shimmered with rhythms I’d felt, but couldn’t name. The hours I’d spent color-coding her text and drawing her craft into visibility dissolved into something like a trance—my Apple Pencil translating her rhythms into light and color, watching the pattern emerge exactly as I’d imagined it, then realizing this precision was Jensen’s first, her mastery of craft becoming mine to behold.

Jensen’s essay, “Carry,” published in a 2018 issue of Ecotone, is a personal narrative that weaves together violence against Indigenous women, mass shootings, and exploited land. At first, I thought it was a straightforward braided essay. But as I read—and reread—the piece over several days, the patterns emerged. I realized Jensen’s rhetorical strategies were far more intricate than I first understood.

Because I have a reading disability, I read white text on a black screen using Word’s read-aloud function (which has a surprisingly pleasant voice, in case you were curious). I didn’t get through “Carry” in one sitting. Most mornings that week, I opened the document again with chai in hand, letting the voice read back the same paragraphs I’d listened to the day before. Sometimes a phrase sounded different the second or third time—its rhythm landing differently in my ear—so I added new notes or changed earlier ones. I left brief thoughts in the comments—usually just a word or phrase—to help me remember what the individual paragraphs and sections held. For example, for section I, I noted “Memorial garden on campus for gun violence,” and for the next paragraph, “Memorial garden. Things we carry # 1 – water.” These snapshots became anchors, helping me to scan the essay quickly and identify emerging thematic patterns.

As I read, I also highlighted recurring topics or phrases as they appeared, choosing a different color for each one. One morning, I decided “quiet” should be yellow; the next day I changed “campus” to green because it reminded of the grassy quads. “Bag of snakes” was neon pink from the beginning—there was no other choice for something that vivid. Color-coding let me visualize patterns of repetition across the page, revealing themselves with time.

After completing this initial coding, I drafted the analysis quickly. I could see that “Carry” wasn’t simply braided; it was woven. This was an organizational logic and symbolism that I couldn’t ignore. I researched weaving vocabulary—“yarn,” “choke ties,” “block”—and used the waft and weft as organizational tools. When I finished the essay, I knew it was good. I could feel it in my shoulder blades, in my kneecaps—a quiet internal confirmation that the work had landed.

My friend and usual editor, Leigh Kresge, read the piece and suggested tightening the weaving metaphor, which made a significant difference. In several places, I had slipped back into braided terminology or my weaving metaphor unraveled all together. She also pointed out places where I should make the metaphor more overt. After several weeks of reworking, I submitted the essay to the journal Assay which accepted it—with the provision that I expand my analysis. The editor recommended a book—Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton’s Shapes of Native Nonfiction—which reshaped my understanding yet again. The examples in the book made it clear that “Carry” was more than a simple braid or flat tapestry; it was a textual replication of Jensen’s ancestors’ fingerweaving.

Returning to the text with this new knowledge, I dove deeper. Over the course of several days, I resumed color-coding with new energy, uncovering a complex sash woven of campus violence, stolen Indigenous land, and oppression of the less privileged. With each pass, I noticed something new. I used Word’s find function to track down repetitions I had missed earlier. Some words like “concrete” appear only within a paragraph or two; others, like “snakes” recur many times throughout the entire piece and help to tie the ending together. Themes emerged the same way: violence opened up into “guns,” “shot,” and “muskets.” Stolen lands branched into “removal,” “Cherokee territory,” and “land taken from the Umpqua.” I read and re-read “Carry” in long stretches and short bursts, fitting the work around meals, classes, and the drift of family life.

“One night, after failing to fall asleep, I found myself tracing the lines of color in my mind, trying to understand how they moved in the piece.”

During this time, I watched countless videos and read articles about Métis fingerweaving, Often, these were late afternoon explorations, my eyes tired, but my mind alert as I paused frames to examine the crossing of fibers. In my analysis, I wrote, “Like her Métis ancestors, Jensen combine[d] a First Nations’ sense of rhythm and design with European yarns of language into a meaningful yet beautiful finger woven sash.” I began to see the strands of her essay—multiple threads woven in complicated patterns—not as metaphor, but as structural truth.

In typical Rhonda fashion, I realized I needed to actually make the sash—or at least, do my best approximation. The idea grew over several days of studying finger-woven sashes online. One night, after failing to fall asleep, I found myself tracing the lines of color in my mind, trying to understand how they moved in the piece. Eventually, I turned to my iPad and Procreate to attempt a digital version, selecting traditional Métis colors for the strands based on my research. I knew I couldn’t replicate the Métis’s complex arrow patterns—they require physical tension and movement created with one’s fingers—but rectangular lines felt close enough for my purpose. Since “Carry” has four numbered sections, I created four blocks, each roughly proportional to the length of the corresponding sections. I started over multiple times when the strands refused to fit. The hand-drawn lines aren’t perfectly straight or even, which feels true to something handmade.

The actual drawing took many hours over four days. Some afternoons I sat rigidly at my desk, zoomed in so close that each digital line blurred into pixel dust. When my back grew tired, I moved to the sofa, balancing the iPad on my lap desk while watching TV with my husband. I’d erase entire sections and redraw them over the next hour. I drew a vertical line to represent the warp thread inside each section for individual instances of repetition in the essay: red for no repetition, green for “campus”, gold for “quiet,” gray for “carry.” Then I added dashed weft lines in roughly the same order since this is what would happen with fingerweaving. The final two sections of “Carry” were the most demanding: long, dense with repetition, requiring more—and much thinner—lines to keep the proportions accurate. The repetitive work became unexpectedly meditative—draw a line, see it’s wrong, erase, redraw, breathe.

When the visual representation of Jensen’s sash of repetitions was finally finished, I was elated. Repetitions were placed in relation to moments without repetition so that viewers could see the scope of Jensen’s skill in using repetition as a rhetorical devise—an echo of her craft rendered in digital thread.

Completing both the analysis and the tapestry deepened my understanding of Jensen’s craft. Her use of repetition isn’t merely stylistic; it’s a deliberate rhythmic method that carries meaning across the essay, echoing her Métis heritage and the histories she engages with. Translating her words into a visual medium allowed me to experience the essay in a new dimension—to see the intricacy of her rhetorical choices as if they were textile patterns. Analysis

isn’t just reading and noting; it’s inhabiting the text, feeling its structure and rhythms, and finding ways to respond that honor the original work.

In the end, writing about writing—and weaving about writing—became more than an analysis. It became a practice of attention, patience, and respect, a small way of carrying forward the care that Jensen’s essay demands.

More information about Toni Jensen's writing and books can be found on her website https://www.tonijensen.com/.

More of Toni Jensen's books:

Image © Europeana

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Rhonda Waterhouse holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction with an environmental writing focus from UNC Wilmington and an MEd from Penn State University. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, American Submariner, Coastal Review, and storySouth, among others. A semifinalist for North Carolina Literary Review’s Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize, 2nd place for the 2026 Rose Post Contest, and a Brauer Fellow, she is at work on a memoir about brain injury and the healing power of trees. She writes about science, disability, family, and nature. With their five children now grown, Rhonda, her beloved, and their dog often greet the sunrise on Wrightsville Beach, experiencing the connection between healing and the natural world.

rhondawaterhouse.com