What the heck is a metaphor anyway?

by

A metaphor is symbolic of something else. It is definitely a great literary tool to describe something. Sue William Silverman talks about finding the metaphors of your life and in her latest memoir, How to Survive Death and other Inconveniences she likens that time in life as a road trip…. I would say for me, taking my first ever writing workshop and walking into a room of other writers and feeling like I’d found my real family. How’s that for a metaphor?

I hope you’ve been thinking about this and planning your entry for our contest.

At first she felt special, she was young and beautiful, life was fun,
but by the end of their relationship, she began to feel like
gum on his shoe…
(describing a bad ending for an imaginary relationship
in an as yet unwritten story by me)

~jennifer simpson

Photo by Joseph Costa on Unsplash

Poets are really good at this. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” writes William Shakespeare in Sonnet 18. Robert Burns calls is love a red, red, rose…  Poet Matthew Dickman called grief a purple gorilla. I feel like the metaphor and the image come naturally to them.

But prose writers have employed metaphor effectively also. Especially when describing grief. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver likened grief to the heaviness of a swimmer’s long hair dragging in the water. For author Claire Bidwell Smith grief became a giant sad whale she dragged behind her. 

A writing exercise I like to do with the kids from the Children’s Grief Center is to respond to the prompt, “Grief is…”  And the answers can be very revealing–one kid called grief a friend who doesn’t want you, but won’t let anyone else have you either.

Here’s what I wrote the last time I did this exercise:

  • Grief is a pillow I can lay my head on when I am tired.
  • Grief is a presence, ephemeral, something I can’t touch or hear, but feel in my gut. Sometimes grief is indigestion.
  • Grief is a fashion style–my collection of black sweaters, my propensity for black shoes, black headbands, and my black leather coat.
  • Grief is a blanket that is too heavy and warm and makes it hard to get out of bed in the morning.
  • Grief is a fog around my mind’s eye keeping me from seeing, imagining my own future, or remembering the times before cancer, before death, the times when life was good and we were a family taking picnics to the beach or talking over dinner.
  • Grief is annoying, I want to be done with it. I want to move one, kick it to the curb, put it on a funeral pyre and watch it go up in flames.
  • Grief is like a small rock I put in my pocket. I’ve fingered it smooth. Sometimes I take it out and show people.

What is grief to you?

What’s your metaphor for life?

Plume’s metaphor contest rules

  1. Share the image on Instagram with a caption of 100 words or fewer explaining the metaphor. Use the hashtag #plumemetaphor and tag @plumeforwriters and @suewilliamsilverman.
  2. OR Share the image on Twitter along with a tweet of 100 words or fewer explaining the metaphor. Use the hashtag #plumemetaphor and tag @plumeforwriters and @suesilverman OR
  3. Email your image and 100 word explanation of the metaphor to encouragement@plumeforwriters.org with the subject line #plumemetaphor.

Contest Deadline:
Saturday, August 29, 2020

Your entry (via post on Instagram or Twitter or via email) must be visible or received by 12 midnight (MDT).

For more info, read the post, “What’s your metaphor”.

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