Skin Deep: An Inspirational Ode Sung In The Vast Grandeur On The Western American Plains
© Robert Edward Bell
The American West has always been a place where dreams were sprung releasing those inner desires that have led men and women into her vast wilderness; seeking some unspoken reason for the expression of the wants and needs lying inside the human soul. From the California gold rush that inspired the miner forty-niners to seek their fortunes, to the sometimes mad writers of the fifties, hip songsters of the sixties, or the morose scientists lurking beneath the hills of Berkley; California has always seemed to attract the essentric sort of intellectual rebel holding onto some sense of their original being testing their wits and hopes against the natural forbidden fronteir. Often, the myth of the American Dream has run into conflict with the reality of the material world, but this has never stopped different characters of various sorts from chasing their dreams.
When the dot-com boom of the nineties crashed in Silicon Valley, it should have come as no small surprise, once California has been viewed from an historicl perspective. Like the thousands of pioneers arriving from the East seeking gold, many dot comers discovered the heat of the noon-day sun drying their expectations in the desert of lost stock options or inflated budgetary assets. It should be remembered that for every young man who found success in following the poet's advice to "go west young man", hundreds left their homes only to find the hot summer sun flaking their bones in a death-like caricature to gold left hidden and buried in the rolling California hillsides. The modern West of the 20th century has been no different, but there is a feeling that something is changing in the deserts running along the outskirts of mountains and hills.
In her novel, "Skin Deep Tatoos, The Disappearing West, Very Bad Men, And My Deep Love For Them All", Karol Griffen attempts to capture the spirit of the American West, while examing the contradictions between myth and reality sifting beneath the surface, and ways that these contradictions find transcendence in the modern landscape surrounding the seemingly eternal struggle to bring the long sought-after dreams of youtful destiny into reality.
This facet or method of approach that she uses to express her artistic viewpoint of the Western genre is through the description of her personal exposure to the world of tatoo piercing/art, and how this world has served as a literary metaphor for the mythos of the American West to come alive on the printed page. An artist and photographer living in Laramie, Wyoming, Griffen "received the 200 Wyoming Arts Council Doubleday Award, an annual grant" to honor a
