My English Is a Skeleton Key

I began class my usual way. “Get out your pens or your phone or whatever you want to write on,” I said. “We’re doing a freewrite.”  I like starting class with a freewrite for many reasons—it buys me time to take attendance, for one—but, most importantly, it creates the structure that I aim for in every class: to go from the personal to the general.

I did not come up with this structure, but I first remember hearing it articulated by the writer, storyteller, and cultural geographer Dr. Carolyn Finney, who told a group of us at a lecture at Middlebury College that if we wanted to get someone to care about trees, we should start by asking them about a tree that matters to them.

This made sense to me. In creative writing, we strive for specificity: we tell a specific love story to learn about love. We tell a specific war story to learn about grief and resilience. We create a specific fantasy to learn about good and evil. So why not do the same in our class structure?

In creative writing, we strive for specificity: we tell a specific love story to learn about love. We tell a specific war story to learn about grief and resilience.

On this particular fall day, I was in a windowless room in Harlem teaching a class that was made up half of high school students in CUNY’s Early College Program and half of college freshmen. I projected their freewriting prompt, and the students readied their thumbs over their phones (I’ve given up trying to convince them to write longhand, and since the department can’t buy notebooks, I’ve embraced writing on the phone). Here was the prompt: “What is your personal relationship to English or any other language you speak?”

I set my stopwatch for four minutes, and they began.

When the time was up, I did not ask for volunteers to share as was my usual pattern. Instead, I immediately transitioned to a Button Poetry Youtube video of poet Melissa Lozada-Oliva reading her poem, “My Spanish.” The students sat and watched the performance, but once it was finished, I went back and replayed the video, this time projecting the text of the poem while she read in the background. I try to present each poem we read in class at least twice: once when students are just listening, and once when they can see the words.

Here are the opening stanzas of “My Spanish” by Melissa Lozada-Oliva:

If you ask me if I am fluent in Spanish I will tell you
My Spanish is an itchy phantom limb: reaching for a word and only finding air 
My Spanish is my third birthday party: half of it is memory, and the other half is a photograph on the fridge is what my family has told me 

My Spanish is puzzle left in the rain
Too soggy to make its parts fit so that it can look just like the picture on the box

After re-reading it together, I asked the students if anyone knew what a metaphor was. Two students were able to give the definition in relation to a simile—which I’m sure was drilled into their head by some previous English teacher—while one of the high school students, an outspoken sophomore who liked to write romance stories, said, “A weird comparison.” I told her that was as good a definition as any, and I changed my slide to display the definition of a metaphor: “a figure of speech wherein two unlikely objects are linked.”

Then, I clicked to the next slide and projected the following: 

Which of the following are metaphors? Why or why not?

“My English is sharp”

“My blue English”

“My English is a way of communicating”

“My English is as strong as an ox”

“My English is a strong ox”

We then went through the sentences with different students raising their hands and explaining why something was or wasn’t a metaphor.

Once I felt confident that they understood the definition, I returned to the opening stanzas of Lozada-Oliva’s poem. I asked the students if they could list the metaphors within these stanzas. While they called out their answers, I recorded the following on the whiteboard:

“itchy phantom limb”

“my third birthday party”

“puzzle left in the rain”

Then, once we had generated these three, I asked them: “What effect do you think Lozada-Oliva is trying to conjure in the reader/hearer?”

The same student who had defined “metaphor” raised her hand. “You can’t really remember your third birthday party,” she said. “So, it’s maybe you’re kind of sad that you missed it?”

Then, we went on a slight tangent to talk about phantom limbs, which some of the students hadn’t heard of and were slightly blown away by the seeming supernatural-ness of the phenomenon. But we talked about trauma, severing, violence, and missing a part of you.

They were less excited about the puzzle metaphor, and one student noted that “nobody does puzzles anymore,” which started a small argument with those students who did, in fact, enjoy puzzles because they’re “really good when you’re watching TV.”

At this point, I refocused the class and made a note about the efficiency of metaphors. They are so potent that, in a few words, they can conjure an incredible number of feelings and associations in the reader. “The key,” I said, “is evocation.”

I turned to the next slide, which laid out the following assignment:

STEP 1

For 3-ish minutes, review your opening freewrite and then distill your writing into a single metaphor.

• Example #1: My Spanish is an itchy phantom limb (Melissa Lozada-Oliva)
• Example #2: My English is a skeleton key that opens every door (India Choquette)

STEP 2

In groups of 3, share your metaphors.

STEP 3

Based on ONLY YOUR METAPHOR, have your group members try to describe your relationship to language.

• Example #1: The writer’s Spanish is uncomfortable, it feels like a part of them is missing.
• Example #2: The writer’s English is good enough to get them in anywhere, but it also might allow them to break into places that they don’t belong.

The room went quiet as students bent over their freewrite, rereading their work and transforming it into a metaphor. I gave them a few minutes to work on their own, then I circulated around the room, checking in with students who caught my eye. One student, who was an actor, wanted to say that her English made her feel like she’s flying high in the sky, and we quietly brainstormed things that mimicked that feeling (rockets, eagles, clouds, dragonflies), and then I left her alone to pick the best one.

After five or so minutes were up, I broke the students into groups and allowed them to share and interpret each other’s metaphors. Incredibly, there were duplicates (“My English is a bad hair day”), but most were unique and expressed a completely individual relationship to language (“My Spanish es un mapa.”)

I think it’s a misstep to approach creative writing classes with the idea that we need to help students “develop their voice” without fully acknowledging that each student already enters the class with a fully complex voice of their own . . .

I’ve done this exercise several times in the past years, and I’ve wondered about doing it twice, once at the beginning of the semester and once at the end. I think that might give students a snapshot of their evolution within the class, but that repetition assumes that something we do during the semester is going to fundamentally shift their relationship to language, which I don’t consider a goal. In fact, I think it’s a misstep to approach creative writing classes with the idea that we need to help students “develop their voice” without fully acknowledging that each student already enters the class with a fully complex voice of their own that’s deeply tied to their relationship to language or languages. When I give students the opportunity to turn that relationship into a metaphor, I’m inviting them to define an existing relationship rather than assuming they need to create something completely new.

Whenever I do this exercise, there is at least one student whose metaphor is: my language (insert whatever language) is my home. Not just home—my home. And my dream for my creative writing classes is that, through their writing, a student learns to invite a reader into their home, their language, their mind, that their writing is a way of pulling out a chair for the reader, thereby saying, “Take a seat and experience the way I, and I alone, see things.” This celebration of each student’s perspective, I think, extends the structure of my classes, and instead of just going from the personal to the general, we move from the personal towards connection. Indeed, my students laughed and chatted as they interpreted each other’s metaphors, sometimes exclaiming loudly or calling me over to witness a classmate’s brilliance. And with each metaphor, we saw each other more clearly.

Photo by Alp Duran on Unsplash.