Daily Themes Week 7
favorite week ever probobs. metaphors!
3/4
Prompt 4A: craft your own theme featuring a catalog of metaphors.
After Michael Ondaatje’s “Sweet Like a Crow”
Psalm 22:30: “Deliver my soul from the sword, my darling from the power of the dog.”
You make me sick like a dog, run laps like a dog, drool saliva and trail spit, gnash teeth and chew bones, play fetch and bark like a dog. Shove my face into kibble like a dog, sit nice, roll over, good boy, like a dog. I yelp as you step as my tail, forgive you the instant later. Throw the tennis balls so they bonk me on my nose, scratch my head, wag my tail, forget to feed me, poke me while I’m sleeping. Throw me a bone and let me lick your fingers and tell me to shut up when I speak. Hush me and lock me in a room and throw away the key and find the key and grind the key into dust with your heel. Throw me up into a tree and turn me into a fruit, set up a basket with spikes so I stay in place once I’m down, mash me up and serve me with turkey, set up beside the asparagus. Tell me my insides determine who I am, tell me my pit is my defining pomological feature, tell me I’m no fruit without a seed, then cut me open and dig my heart out and throw it away. Feed the rest of me to the dog beneath the tree and then kick me to the street.
3/2
Prompt 3B: Write a theme (fiction or non) in which extended metaphor is either a. embarrassingly overdone or b. carefully controlled
I have a tea set that I bought in Taiwan over winter break. The teapot is sand-colored, with the texture of gravel. It fits easily in the palm of my hand. The matching teacups are made of the same sand as the teapot, and each could probably fit a single mouthful of tea.
I drink mostly loose leaf tea, shriveled little balls of black crackle, and when I add hot water to them, they exhale, release. The tea’s little hands unclench and rehydrate into recognizable leaves, waving around in the water.
The way you make a cup of tea is by adding hot water to tea leaves to release their tannins and caffeine. When I first meet a friend, I like to watch them unfurl in the hot water. I like when people open up to me slowly, with no sudden movements. Most of the time I’m closest with the people I see every day, where I can drink up a little of their life story at a time. There’s a reason why my teacups were made so small, my teapot with so little volume. Sipping too much at a time burns as it goes down.
I’m scared off by large teapots, teacups, and volumes of tea. It’s something about the sheer vastness of all the tea to drink in the world, all the flavors and colors, and I feel like I’m floating in a hot ocean of orange, with nothing to really savor. I like to know people in small teacups, with small jokes and trivial stories.
And I don’t like to think about the inevitability of having to throw out the leaves.
2/28
Prompt 2: Placing a metaphor at the end: Write a theme in which you place a metaphor conspicuously at the End. Then offer a second version of the theme in which you either (a) omit the closing metaphor completely or (b) replace it with more literal language.
My roommate always says that she can’t wait to get out of New Haven. She’s usually in Camden, in North London, right next to a great, rolling slope of grass called Primrose Hill, just down the street from Camden Market, where English punk and grunge fashions first developed their grime. She grew up walking distance from the Italian grocer, the wine shop, even a kitschy Banksy graffiti work.
New Haven is the biggest city I have ever lived in. I love it, I think. I love how you can walk everywhere if you really wanted, and that there’s a Shake Shack, because I used to work at a Shake Shack in high school, and there are also mountains for hiking and big tall deciduous trees that hold the snow up above the ground.
When I went to visit my roommate’s house over the summer, I thought it was beautiful. Her house smelled like leather-scented candle and coffee. She lives by a big green hill. I like the way people dress there.
My home is the size of a city smaller than London and bigger than Carlsbad, California. Pretend my house is a city.
Omitted:
My roommate always says that she can’t wait to get out of New Haven. She’s usually in Camden, in North London, right next to a great, rolling slope of grass called Primrose Hill, just down the street from Camden Market, where English punk and grunge fashions first developed their grime. She grew up walking distance from the Italian grocer, the wine shop, even a kitschy Banksy graffiti work.
New Haven is the biggest city I have ever lived in. I love it, I think. I love how you can walk everywhere if you really wanted, and that there’s a Shake Shack, because I used to work at a Shake Shack in high school, and there are also mountains for hiking and big tall deciduous trees that hold the snow up above the ground.
When I went to visit my roommate’s house over the summer, I thought it was beautiful. Her house smelled like leather-scented candle and coffee. She lives by a big green hill. I like the way people dress there.
My home is the size of a city smaller than London and bigger than Carlsbad, California. Imagine if my house was very big.
2/27
Prompt 1: Placing a metaphor at the beginning: Write a theme (fiction or non) in which you place a metaphor conspicuously at the beginning (as Baudelaire and Mary Ruefle do in this week’s handout) Underline the metaphorical language
Then offer a second version of the theme in which you either (a) omit the opening metaphor completely or (b) replace it with more language. This second version might be less compelling than your first version (maybe not?), but should nevertheless be able to stand (or stand steadily enough) on its own.
My motivation to write is the joy of a Californian playing in the snow. She is struck with the sudden feeling of never experiencing life like this again, feeling the flakes catch on her lip, surrounded by the swirls of soaring snowballs, feeling the coldness of her cheek in the wind. She feels like she could stay there forever, cold and inexplicably happy. Because she had never seen it before, and it’s exciting when you can be there for the brief moment that the snow is actually falling.
When the inspiration strikes, it first comes in as a brief flurry, and then nothing at all. Writing is fun to me when it is fresh, when it feels like there is something that really needs to be said, heard. I like to sit down for hours and do nothing but read and write down quotes and think of ideas for books and short stories. And then when there is no longer the motivation of being swept up in the notion of being The Seminal Artist-Writer of My Generation, of realizing all the half-formed plots and characters, I stop. And it all melts away.
Omitting:
When I write, it comes to me all at once and then not at all. I can sit and read, and write story ideas, and listen to music and write some more, and think about writing while I make myself a snack, and then think of every original idea that has never been thought about before. And once that is good and done, I can finally shut my laptop, close my notebooks, and not write another word for three months.
It feels like when I go out into the falling snow, and stand there for a while, smiling a little foolishly, and twirl around in the cold, and walk around for half an hour. Everything is new and fresh, and I am so glad to be alive in this wonderful snow. And then it all melts away
.