Metaphor.  I think essentially, for me, writing is grounded in metaphor—the talking about one thing as if it were another.  Aptly used, it’s like being let in on a secret, or falling headfirst into insight.

If stumbled on by accident, metaphor delights us, makes us laugh.  Or it may trigger sudden tears or release a long-held sigh.

Sometimes metaphor grabs us by the scruff of our necks and shakes us to our senses.  Always, it has the capacity to transform, enlarge, reshape how we view ourselves and the world.  Going beyond a single image, metaphor opens a relationship that gives a layered depth to both literary and visual work.

 

When i taught school, the students and I spent hours making our way through words: combining them, taking them apart, looking for meaning.  What was it each of us knew that noone else knew in quite the same way and how could we say it so the other “got it?”  What made a piece of writing “work?”

I gathered a set of criteria useful then, and and useful now,  not only for writing but also for the work made with my hands. It reads like this:

a large vision

evidence of honesty

clear, interesting voice,

fresh, vivid imagery

layered meanings

evokes a response

unselfconscious work, modest

apt metaphor

risk in tone/form/content

I don’t write much poetry anymore, about as often as I cook a supper.  But I read it often.  It nourishes my soul and helps me look farther out, beyond the pieces rolled up in the closet waiting to be loved by someone other than me.

 

Edward Hirsch, past poet laureate, said in an interview, “You’re not sending your message necessarily to communicate with your family or your friends, or even the people of your time.  You’re writing to whomever you can speak most deeply.”

Publications:

“Pop moved my mother-in-law today,” Kaleidoscope: Reprise of Selected Works, Fall 2004

Poetry in Chiron Review, Vol. No., Pudding Magazine, Comstock Review, Kaleidoscope 1995-2004

“Journal of Love,” Kaleidoscope: Exploring Disability Through Literature and the Fine Arts, 2001

“Like Moving Mud: Poems of Decomposition,” rwt: the magazine for reading writing, thinking, 2000

“When Spirit Moves, Children Sing,” Teaching Writing from a Writer’s Point of View, Ohio Arts Council 1998

“Moving Out is Coming In,” “Living in Context,” “We Simply Played Together,” “The One and the Many: Connecting the Web,” At the Crossroads 1992-1994

“Beginnings: The Story of the Carbon Atom,” The Augustan Age 1993

“Change and the Educational System,” Prima: Journal of the Elementary Teachers of Classics 1991

“The Stories People Tell,” Forum 1991