The Onion

It all started with a yellow onion in a dark kitchen. 

My hands were in the sink, fingers rounding the edge of a soapy dish. I looked to my right to find a wooden bowl on my countertop. Inside sat a mesh bag of aging onions, their skin fraying. Yes, I thought. An onion. 

Each week, I find myself in a similar position: scouring my mind for a spark to use in our after-school creative writing club. One that will captivate our students, make them feel something new. Most times it’s left until the last minute, though not because I’m a procrastinator. Rather, I believe in the divinity of an idea, preferring that it should arrive in front of me as if it’s floated down from the great wide sky. 

When seeking a spark, I operate under these guidelines:

The idea is an appendage of all the things we’ve studied in the weeks before. The idea considers each student’s particular affinities and extends them. The idea is just an idea. The idea should metamorphose within the student’s hands. 

As a writer, I hold myself to the same standard. I seek ideas with wings. And so, I made a promise to myself when we started our workshops: I will never provide a prompt to our students that doesn’t inspire me to write. If it doesn’t move me, it won’t move them. After all, that was why we conceptualized our writing club in the first place. Children deserve a place to play with language, to go out and get mud on their hands, to find value in their thoughts. 

Creativity is elastic. It expands as you use it. 

I turned the water off and dried my hands. An onion, I thought. Write about a yellow onion. 

I will never provide a prompt to our students that doesn’t inspire me to write. If it doesn’t move me, it won’t move them.

The next morning, I pitched the idea to my business partners. It was met with trepidation and moderate concern for my mental balance. “An onion? I’m not . . . sure?” But I was sure. Like one of those painting classes, we’ll muse over the object. We’ll turn it on its side. We’ll see it anew. At its best, that’s what writing is: to be a kid draped over a bed, head upside down, seeing the world at a strange angle, euphoria rushing towards your eyes. The wonder of writing is the wonder of living. 

“Well, how about a different object?” My other partner suggested. “Maybe a pair of shoes? An onion is, well, a bit . . . odd.” “Precisely,” I said. “It’ll disarm them. That’s exactly why it’ll work.”

I was right. 

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A somewhat symbolic feat of our class is that all of our students sit on bean bags on the floor. As well as setting a relaxed atmosphere, we believe it equals the room and grounds everyone. Desks are too stubborn, too serious. Furthermore, we wanted to delineate our workshops from school. A more  pervasive learning occurs in this space. Learning that stems from genuine comfort and curiosity. Students know that all we ever ask of them is to write. So they do, wholeheartedly. 

We hide the onion until it’s time and then I place it in the center of the circle in a glass bowl. One boy meets my eyes first with an amused expression. Are you serious? His face seems to ask. The others display a wide range of sentiments: curiosity, confusion, suspicion, skepticism—as if to say, perhaps my teachers really are insane. Perhaps I don’t get them at all. 

Because discomfort is a strong feeling, and it sometimes produces good thinking.

For a moment we sit in the discomfort. Because discomfort is a strong feeling, and it sometimes produces good thinking. Then, at last, we begin to talk about the silly little onion in the middle of the room. 

“What do you think about when you see it?”

“It’s ordinary,” one girl says.  

“A grilled cheese,” another adds. They all cackle into their hands believing it inappropriate for the moment. Instead, it’s just right. We affirm it. 

 “The smell.”

 “My mother doesn’t cry when she cuts them, but my dad does.” 

Their thoughts go on and we add ours in as well. I talk about how it makes me think of a remedy for a cold—an old wive’s tale that if you put a raw onion in your sock when you’re feeling ill it absorbs the toxins, and how that dates as far back as medieval times and the bubonic plague. It was then that they placed cut up onions around their households to ward off contagion. We talk about how the object lends itself to a metaphor. What do we think about when we regard the object as a series of layers? Where do you see that in your life? In your being? I mention how I’ve just learned of the spiritual significance of an onion’s role in ancient Egypt and how it’s often been depicted in Egyptian tomb art. Pharaohs were buried with onions because in Egyptian society the object was a symbol of eternal life. 

As the instructors, our job is to show our students how ideas can grow tentacles. Before we send them off to their own writing, we show them some of our own. Sometimes the best mentor texts are those that come from ourselves because they allow the students to see that we’re writers, too. We’re willing to take chances and feel foolish. We’re not above the spark. I show them a small excerpt from the novel I’m working on, one in which I’ve incorporated an onion. I’ve barely gone back to edit the sentences. It’s raw and unpolished, but it’s mine. They always respond strongly to our own writing as mentor texts. It bonds us. Like any team, it’s our way of saying that we’re in this together. 

Just before they peel off to write in solitude for the next 30 minutes, we remind them that there is no wrong writing. All they have to do is notice something, anything, about the onion. 

When we come back together, and find our spots on the ground, the room becomes electric. I can tell from their body language that they’ve had fun. Fun, I believe, is the first order of business when it comes to teaching creative writing at their age level.

Their pieces move me. One student writes a story about an oil tanker called the Onionshoe. Another concocts a vibrant story about “Grilled Cheese Wars” in the likes of Dr. Seuss’s The Butter Battle Book. A third young writer uses the onion as a vehicle to write about their anxiety. And yet another student writes a poem. 

Abby, one of our high school students, uses the onion to write about her heritage. She offers to read it aloud to the class: 

Maybe the whole point of suffering is never to feel yourself suffering, but rather appreciate the times when you are not. 

Like how an onion tastes bitter by itself, but if you fry it or drown it in vinegar it might not taste as bad. 

In fact, you might even start to appreciate the taste.

Not for burning your mouth, no, but for the nutrients that it provides you. One thing is for certain: it tastes great on pickled herring. 

Of course, no one in my family actually calls it pickled herring. Certainly not when the potatoes are steaming, the onions are glistening, another shot of amber liquid is held up towards the light, and Babulya urges us to eat the potatoes before they grow all cold. 

It’s too much of a mouthful then. Too American, too strange even for those of us born on U.S. soil. 

We call it силодька instead, and stick to it. 

Someone must keep up the tradition after all, like the drinking and the fares from Bobruisk and the inevitable conversation about the destruction of our people. 

Of parts of us, though each generation has luckily felt less and less as time goes on. But the air of it remains.

The shadows in the corners, the ice in my veins.

The family heirlooms, marred with love and blood.

Sometimes, I think about the cup my grandfather was gifted with, in the midst of such topics. It sits silent in the darkness of his office, as it had probably sat in the corners of Dachau. We don’t know the name of the child who had it. 

We don’t know where they went. 

We know nothing but a memory of an event that our souls need to remember. 

We know nothing but the fact that it’s happening again. 

Maybe not pogroms, maybe not even burning, but the hatred always returns. 

It makes me cry sometimes, like how the smell of an onion makes me cry. 

But we eat our onions on top of our силодька, which balances just right on top of our potatoes, and the company is good and the light above is golden. 

And the onion doesn’t taste bitter. Not anymore. 

And maybe the whole point of suffering is never to feel it, but to appreciate the times when you are not.

—- Abby, 17 

When Abby finishes reading, we clap. 

“Can we make it our mascot?” A boy asks. 

“What?” I say. 

“The onion. Can we make it our mascot?” 

Of course.

I think, for some of them, it was the first time that they understood that art is everywhere. Even in a silly little onion in the middle of a room. 

Featured photo by Bhautik Andhariya on Unsplash.