slowking4, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons

I finally dived into Ellen Bass’s Living Room Craft Talk Series (half-price sale ends today) and so far, I’m finding it well worth the value. Though I usually find it hard to focus when listening to online lectures, Ellen has a way of making you feel as if you are truly in her living room. But make sure to have a notebook at your side to jot down the countless gems of tips and inspirational tidbits, and be prepared to press pause to play things over. However, even if you miss stuff, Ellen has graciously included handouts of all the quotes from her lecture in their entirety, as well as the sources of the books they’re in, so you can read more of what grabs you most.

While I might have arrogantly thought that after a lifetime of writing poetry I knew everything I needed to know about metaphor, I was surprised how much I learned from Ellen’s examples of the different ways writers use metaphor. And while I often express things in metaphors in all sorts of writing–including even emails–I’m often not super conscious of when and how I’m using metaphors in my poems, and whether I’m milking their impact to the fullest.

So yesterday I reviewed all the poems in the packet Ellen used to supplement her lecture and highlighted all the metaphors. While on my first read I’d recognized the ones that stood out in the wow zone… (e.g. grief as a homeless dog from Denise Levertov’s Talking to Grief & hands that “fly up like two birds while I speak” from Tim Siebel’s Ode to my Hands) I was amazed at how many metaphors there were, and how smoothly they flowed through the poem… to the point where I barely noticed the comparisons.

This led me to thinking more about metaphor as a conscious tool, rather than a momentary flash of subconscious inspiration (which is where I probably get 90% of my metaphors). Ellen talks about the importance of really working metaphors… choosing where to insert them by creating little slits in a poem in places where the message/meaning/image can be unpacked to create more emotional resonance or exploration of nuance. So I looked at one of my poems in progress, surprised to discover that in this particular poem there were no metaphors–just a generative rehash of a difficult emotional situation broken up into lines and made to look like a poem. I wasn’t sure this poem would have legs for anyone but me, but I spent some time consciously inserting metaphors and detail… and lo and behold, something with perhaps a little more staying power began to emerge. I’m still not sure whether the poem will have enough meaning for others, but I do believe the details and the comparisons have the capacity to generate more places for others to connect.

I know that people have different degrees of tolerance for metaphors. There are some folks who can find meaning in an amorphous avante garde play and others who prefer more directness and clarity. So, it’s important to think about what our audience(s) might need and how we want them to respond to our writing, and then craft our metaphors with care. Ellen points out the importance of grasping for the unusual metaphor, rather than the expected one, but not so unusual that people can’t make the leap. But I also know that not only have metaphors improved my  writing by giving more life and possibility to images and details, they’ve also helped me communicate hard stuff to others through a story or image that’s more relatable than a common abstraction.

And I love how metaphors often take on more than I might have originally intended through the lens of a reader/listener’s interpretation, unveiling possibilities that neither of us might have previously considered.

Subscribe at https://ddinafriedman.substack.com

My father died a week ago, in the early hours of Saturday morning March 1, 2025–in his sleep, in his own bed, at the age of 93 with his wife of 72 years sleeping by his side. While he’d been failing in recent weeks and on hospice, the quickness still came as a surprise, but I’m enormously grateful his death was peaceful and pain-free. 

Last week, I wrote about being in a still space, unable to grasp the words that captured the profound sadness I was feeling about my father’s imminent death. While I remain in that foggy place, punctuated by a few rushes of angry winds and smatterings of quiet rainy weeping, I’ve managed to unearth a few more words about my father and his impact on my life.

As a child, my father played stickball on the streets of the Bronx. He was “the extra man,” which meant that when the other players were chosen, the team captains would once-twice-three shoot for the extra man. And then, whoever won would say to the captain, That’s okay. You can have him. Then they’d send him off to right field, which he had to share with Harry Jupiter. My brothers were lucky to inherit my mother’s athletic ability, but I spent my childhood being picked last on every time in school and day camp, and when I stood at the volleyball net, the team captain made sure to tell me not to even try to hit the ball if it came toward me. Someone else would cover. When I complained to my parents about this shame and humiliation, my father would once again tell me, what I came to think of as the “Harry Jupiter story.” (Underlying message: it’s your genetic fate; there’s nothing you can do about it).

But while I’ve often lamented inheriting my father’s unathletic genes, since his death, I began to wonder if being out there in right field, where there wasn’t too much going on, or being on the bench while Harry Jupiter took his turn, enhanced one of my favorite qualities about my father–a way of stepping outside the face value of the moment and taking a sidelong, irreverent view of the world, which seemed to be the genesis of the ironic and witty one-liners he was known for. I’ve never been a one-line comic, but like my father, I’ve always been a daydreamer. By example, he taught me that it was perfectly okay to take respite in the fog of my own mind and develop my own ways of expressing whatever I perceived.

My father also modeled another way in to the realm of the imagination, which was through playfulness. When I was a kid, all the inanimate objects in the house had their own personalities. Every day at breakfast, my father would flap the tea kettle’s steamy spigot open and shut, and let it utter its croaky greeting, daily kvetch, or philosophical witticism. And bath time was an adventure with Sammy the Soap and Tommy the Towel, characters that my children and nephews grew to love, and which I’ve tried to resurrect with my grandchild. By example, my father taught me that when playing with characters we could be as ridiculous and uncensored as we wanted to be. And this may have been why it felt so easy and normal to have imaginary friends as a kid, when I didn’t have too many real ones. All this childhood practice also made it easier when I started writing fiction. I could just close my eyes, dive in, and imagine my characters’ voices.

I believe this trait of embracing the unbridled mind, whether through play or daydreams, with a no-holds barred first-draft permission to probe the world of the subconscious without editing or self-censorship, is an absolute necessity to becoming a writer, and far more important than any genetic predisposition or so-called talent. But since I came from a family that emphasized the limitations of my genetic inheritance early on, I’m glad that writing was in our family’s genes. I fell asleep every night to the sound of my father’s manual typewriter clacking away at scripts for the documentaries he wrote and produced for WWOR TV.

In sharing stories with my family this past week, one of the key things that stood out was my father’s humility. My nephew, for example, who knew his grandfather only in his retirement years, was unaware until quite recently that my father had received several Emmy nominations and two awards for his documentary work. My father just wasn’t the type to mention it. Somehow this makes me feel validated for choices I’ve made to focus on my writing, rather than hyping my work, my brand, all that sh*t. Even in blogging, which is about the one marketing-related thing I regularly do, I’ve made the choice to keep it personal and hopefully focused on insights that can help others, as my father did. The people I spoke to this week who worked with him told me he always encouraged their ideas and inspired them to take leadership.

Dad and me at my wedding (Mom in background) October 1983. Photo by Brian Goldman.

So whether it’s genetic or not, thanks, Dad, for showing me the path forward to writing, playing, and dreaming.

Subscribe at https://ddinafriedman.substack.com

More than forty years ago, when my grandfather died, my father, who was sitting next to me at the funeral home, gestured to the person giving out the prayerbooks and said, “That man has a walk-on in my life.”

As usual, he was going for the one-liner, squeezing the humor out of a sad situation by taking a step back and focusing instead on a random absurdity.

Even now, at 93 and in the end stages of his life, as he drifts in and out of moments of confusion, he’ll claw his way to clarity by finding a joke. When my mom gave him back his wedding ring, which had to be removed when he was treated in the hospital for swelling due to congestive heart failure last weekend, he put it on, looked into her eyes, and said, “I do.”

It was another sweet moment in their 72-year marriage, a number my mother proudly managed to work into the conversation with all the “walk-ons” of the past week: the doctors, the nurses, the hospice intake workers… I think she would have even told the insurance people, if she hadn’t asked me to make the phone call for her.

I could write about more about my father and about my own struggles with sad moments, of which there have been far too many this week–in my own life, and in what’s happening to our country, and I’m sure I will in weeks to come. But what I really wanted to write about in this post was the idea of “walk-ons”  in writing: how to use what could be considered extraneous details and incidents to our advantage.

One big difference between real life and writing, whether it’s fiction, non-fiction, or even poetry, is that anything one chooses to include in a piece of work needs to matter. Real life is full of irrelevant happenings like the man giving out the prayer books at the funeral, but readers don’t want the minutia unless the minutia means something. The objects, metaphors, place descriptions, and incidents we choose to include in our work need to create an layer of meaning that resonates, adding an extra glow. So, it’s helpful to ask ourselves when writing (regardless of whether it’s fact or fiction) what a particular image or set of details adds to a piece. Is it worth including, or does it simply bog down the pace?

Take the case of the man handing out the prayerbooks at the funeral home. If I describe a heavy man lumbering down the aisle under more prayerbooks than he can comfortably carry, I’m setting a different tone than if I’m describing a man with a nervous tick who grins at everyone as he hands them a prayer book and tells them to have a nice day. Either of these could add to the weight of a story or essay. But if I simply say, “a man handed us a prayerbook,” I’m wasting words with a flat sentence we don’t really need to hear.

Or, as in the case of my father, the point of a “walk-on” might be how one of your “characters” reacts to it–especially if your character is relatively quiet, the way my father is. Sometimes you can do a better job bringing people to life by emphasizing the smaller moments in a scene, rather than the larger ones. And showing people in action, rather than simply writing about them, is nearly always more effective in showing who they really are.

It’s those smaller moments I’ll remember about my father. As well as what they convey about the essence of his character: how he used humor to sidestep difficult emotions, and yes, like all of us deep-secret attention-seekers, he thrived on our laughter and appreciation of his jokes.

So I’m glad to have the memories, and glad for the opportunity to make scenes out of them, as I’m sure I will as the weeks and years unfold, letting the stories tell themselves and hopefully, through those stories, enabling him to live far longer than the time he has left.