As a public high school teacher in Harlem, I frequently write poetry and microfiction that is designed not to be appreciated aesthetically, but rather to provide perfect laboratory conditions for students to practice a particular critical or creative skill. The exercise I have to offer today emerged from that approach.
One of the vital skills good readers have is the ability to maneuver in uncertainty, but I have found this ability sorely lacking among my digital-native students, who lunge for the easy answers of search engines and AI at the first sign of the discomfort that leads to productive struggle. I set about writing a piece of microfiction containing a word with absolutely no meaning to make that lunge impossible, and the results from my kids were truly impressive.
Prompt: In the piece of microfiction below, how does the author use word choice and simile to communicate the experience of grief?
My dad died when I was very young. He was sitting on a bench in the park, and a dog on the lawn behind him lapated. It must have startled him–enough to bring on a heart attack. Now his absence is always with me, like a predator stalking me, sniffing for a moment of weakness–like this afternoon, when a building across the street lapated and the grief closed on my heart like a mouth full of teeth.
There was resistance, of course.
“The building collapsed down, and it reminded her of her father,” said one student.
“The building didn’t collapse. It lapated,” I pushed back.
“But what does lapate mean?!?!”
“Nothing.”
I was holding the line, because I knew that personal relevance was the key to students being willing to struggle, and this exercise touched the all-too-common nerve of family loss and the intrusive thoughts it can evoke. They would get there.
“Think about it like this,” said one of my students to a tablemate. “If, God forbid, your mans got shot, right or wrong, you’d think about him every time you walked down that block? In the story, he thinks about his dad every time something lapates.” I danced my teacher dance—they’d done it!
Across two years of using this exercise, I have seen my students achieve that moment of realization as they successfully analyzed a piece of literature despite it containing a word that would literally never provide certainty, then deploy that ability in future lessons.
As I write this, I have finished a lesson where my kids moved from the lapating dog to a story chosen specifically for its unfamiliar language and cultural context, Chekov’s “The Death of a Government Clerk,” in Constance’s Garnet’s venerable translation rather than a modern one, and they analyzed it successfully. For homework tonight, they will be writing their pieces with meaningless words, and, I venture to hope, producing pieces that expect the reader to endure the vital discomfort of uncertainty.
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Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler teaches AP African American Studies and AP English Literature and Composition at a public high school in Harlem. His translations of novels by great contemporary Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan have been published by Deep Vellum and Yale University Press, and his poetry collection, The Eleusinian Mysteries, is available from Aubade Publishing.