Unit Content
This will be a year-long unit which breaks up novel studies and academic writing, ultimately preparing students for the college essays they will write in April. Each essay type will be taught on a Friday with notes about the type of essay and a mentor text given to read and annotate. Monday, we will discuss as a class the essay and the author’s rhetorical choices. Then they will begin drafting their own 400-600 word essay in class, emulating the style and type studied. On Tuesday and Wednesday, their drafts will be workshopped anonymously and students will rank the essays. On Thursday, the AI competition will be held and there will be an in-class written reflection. For all types of essays, students will record notes about each essay type as well as their notes from the mentor texts in their writer’s notebook. The beauty of this unit is that it is malleable; so if a teacher wants to teach creative non-fiction in 5-6 weeks rather than broken up throughout the year, they can.
Humorous Essay
The humorous essay is a must to teach in a high school classroom, and starting with it is also a must. Life and Literature get too serious sometimes, and we really need to laugh more. This is where the humorous essay comes in. Sarah Garfinkle and Julie Vick break down a few components students will need to develop writerly voices that come across as funny. I will have students write these down in their Writer’s Notebook. One is the rule of three.19 This is where you create a list of three things – the first two are more serious, and the last one, a little more silly or absurd. Hyperbole, or exaggeration, is the second tenet of creating a humorous essay.20 Third is being weird and quirky with your details and comparisons.21 Other than those suggestions for humorous writing, the creative possibilities are endless. While I have chosen comedian Samantha Irby’s “My Taste is so Basic. So What?,” a teacher could use pieces from David Sedaris or David Foster Wallace. Ibry’s essay is focused on observations of unfashionable preferences, so you can have your students emulate the humorous idea or let them choose anything. I will use the parameters of Irby’s essay for my specific writing assignment.
Analysis of “My Taste is so Basic. So What?” by Samantha Irby
At the beginning of Samantha Irby’s “My Taste is so Basic. So What?,” she uses a series of questions and answers to set up good practices from society and then completely negates them with excuses which characterize the narrator as someone who goes against the grain while employing humor. In the fourth paragraph, Irby uses a run-on sentence to convey a sense of spiraling anxiety for liking something that is not considered sophisticated. Using a script structure for a me vs. them imagined dialogue is an effective way to characterize the judgey “shitheads”22 Her use of the parenthetical “Them (feigning shock):” has a hyperbolic effect as well as the word feigning which has the connotation of being fake. The “Them” dialogue also includes elevated, pretentious language such as “sophomoric” and “implausible,” both words students should look up. When describing these judgmental humans, Irby writes about “a satisfied smugness spreading across their slimy face.” This euphonious consonance creates an irony that highlights their ugly behavior. Discussing her defense of her liking a Mission Impossible movie, she apologizes until she “shrivel[s] into a husk and die[s], vowing to never again publicly express joy or excitement." This hyperbole with the absolute “never” helps to drive home Irby’s point that having to defend yourself for what you genuinely like to people who judge is absolutely ridiculous. When readers get to the crux of the essay where Irby describes having to defend a place she recommended, she simply says, “I like it!” and uses descriptions of how she says it “in my highest octave” and “chirped” and how parenthetically she writes, “(the exclamation point is necessary).” She uses this simple phrase to disarm judgmental friends and, in turn, shares with us her solution to destroy them. Irby then explains the phrase’s effects by assuring readers that “it’ll swipe their legs out from under them” and they will “splutter and try to choke out a response.” These metaphors provide a comic effect as the short affirmative sentence “I like it!” does not allow their judgement to matter, and Irby makes us laugh even more with her hyperbolic description of how you will “stand over their quivering body with your subpar tastes and laugh your face off.” One other thing students may point out is her use of colloquialisms “I dunno, man” and “Gotcha, bitch.” This word choice showcases how fed up she is, and we readers can relate to dealing with overcritical and unforgiving people.
Segmented Essay
Segmented essays are a type of essay that can cover a large amount of time in shorter bursts. In some ways they remind me of graphic novel panels, moving through time, but calling attention to a thematic thread without being too overwhelming. A segmented essay is known for its spatial breaks, either with numbers, asterisk, or white space. Robert Roots notes that “These are essays that call attention to their segmentation; they announce to the reader very early on that progress through them will not be linear, although it may be sequential, and that the force of the segments will come from their juxtaposition with one another and their cumulative effect.”23 This will allow students to be more concise with their thoughts and less intimidated with getting every minute detail over a larger span of time.
Analysis of “Making Sandwiches with My Father” by Lisa Van Orman Hadley
In Lisa Van Orman Hadley’s essay “Making Sandwiches with My Father,” she numbers her segments. The first segment is time-marked by mentioning that she is almost a sophomore. She jumps right to her thread which is making a Reuben sandwich with her dad. She never mentions the word father in the first segment, but we get that the “he” she is referring to is her dad because of the title. This event, at first, seems not particularly special. Students should notice that this is a simple act that she uses throughout the essay as each segment gets more and more emotionally complicated. Van Orman Hadley uses asyndeton to list the ingredients of the sandwich, parenthetically adding her dad’s soggy sandwich advice. She writes, “When we talk, it is only about the sandwiches.”24 Readers should notice that there is a distance in their relationship, but one that can be common between parents and teenagers. Her use of shorter sentences mimics that emotional distance as well. She describes her mother’s dislike of the sandwich and their obsession with making it as a sort of contrast to the father/daughter secret Reuben- making fun. She ends the first segment by describing how by the end of her senior year of high school, she and her father have elevated their Reuben-making, by making their own dressing and pickling their own cabbage to make the sauerkraut– this straightforward, on-going activity becoming a symbol of their relationship.
In the next segment, she is now 23 years old and breaking up with her fiancé. While staying at her parents’ house, she grieves her relationship ending while her parents are vacationing in Alaska. Students should look up St. John’s Wort which she mentions taking; it's used for depression and anxiety. Students should explain why she mentions the detail about buying her ex groceries after she broke up with him as it is a detour for a writer to take; why does she make this rhetorical choice? The essay subtly discusses emotional distance and guilt. When her parents return and she tells them about the break-up, “They say nothing. Nothing.” This repetition of “nothing” signifies a withholding or maybe judgment; it is not quite clear. She further mentions how “You could slice the silence with the ulu my mother had just given me.” Students will need to look up the word ulu which is a curved knife from Alaska and a teacher might want to point out the loaded use of the ulu in this violent personification. A reader may think that the ulu set the parents bought her could have been a gift for her wedding. Are her parents disappointed? After the silence, her dad goes to make a Reuben which feels like a peace offering and avoidance at the same time.
About two years later is when the next segment takes place and she describes the day her grandmother dies. It starts with her father answering a phone call and she captures what his responses were. Students will point out how matter-of-fact he sounds; his tone was like he was saying the “printer was out of paper.” Then he yells at her from the top of the stairs that her grandmother had died. The delivery of this news in such a way starts to feel reminiscent of his reaction to her break-up with her fiancé – robotic and unfeeling. She repeats three times that her hands are very cold – the coldness descriptive of not only her hands, but of her and her father’s emotions. She uses metaphor to describe how she wants “to blister with tears,” but can’t. This segment ends with her father and her making a Reuben, instead of crying, in response to her grandmother’s death.
The last segment does not give us a time stamp, but signals that it is some years later because her parents were visiting her in Boston. Much has changed, and she indicates this by writing, “My father is looking out the window and my mother and I are talking about his mind. How it’s going.” The fragment reveals how something is wrong. Readers learn that he most likely has dementia or Alzheimer’s because he is having memory issues. When Van Orman Hadley writes about looking at her hands, a sweet memory is triggered. Her syntax gets more complicated and the details more specific as she cries about the memory. It ends with her making her father a Reuben. Her father helps her. She writes, “My father—he doesn’t miss a beat.” This use of dash, a caesura, emphasizes that although he may be losing his memory, this rote action is deeply ingrained. While eating this sandwich, he forgets the name of the sandwich. When he asks what type of sandwich it is, she writes, “I say, ‘That’s your favorite sandwich, Dad.’ And he says, ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’” It is a touching ending and the segment format covers many years in a short amount of time and leaves readers with a nuanced understanding of the importance of making a Reuben with her dad.
When asked why she used this segmented essay format to write about this very difficult subject matter, Van Orman Hadley said she used it “to create distance from a situation that was still raw and unfolding.”25 This is an interesting thought about using this format. It can be expansive and cover a decent amount of time, but a writer has to be concise and to the point. When asked about having to be succinct due to this being a segmented essay, Van Orman Hadley says, “When I can contain a story in a small space it feels much easier to tame it. Concision is actually liberating for me; fewer words are less intimidating.”26 My students may find comfort in this fact, and this mentor essay is simple with clear syntax, carefully placed rhetorical choices, and simple symbolic act of making a sandwich, all while discussing a complex matter.
Defamiliarization Essay
Apparently, the word defamiliarization (or ostranenie) was coined in 1917 by Victor Shklovsky.27 Shklovsky was a prominent Russian literary figure who believed the importance of “see[ing] common things in an unfamiliar or strange way, thereby enhancing perception of the familiar.”28 Using this technique in writing can create humor, unease, and a different perspective. Students should write down in their Writer’s Notebook the definition of defamiliarization which “involves using techniques such as complex syntax, unconventional punctuation, unusual word choices, and narrative structures that disrupt readers' normal expectations.”29 It also can be about looking at something ordinary and seeing it in a fresh way as if for the first time. This can be done by using unconventional syntax or just by noticing parts of it that no one ever comments on. I have chosen Jenny Slate’s “Going to the Restaurant” for its unique humor. Teachers may want to look at Joan Didion’s “At the Dam” or Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland. Students should have fun with this essay type because they get to look at something normal and mundane and look at it from a new perspective.
Analysis of “Going to the Restaurant” by Jenny Slate
Jenny Slate’s hilarious defamiliarization essay “Going to the Restaurant" is an essay I know my students will get a kick out of. As they read, I want students to annotate for the words, phrases, and descriptions Slate uses to make the normal action of going to a restaurant strange. They should write off to the side what she is really describing. For example, at the beginning of the essay she writes that she lives on a “blue-and-green sphere” and that there are “noodle-shaped guys squiggling silently in the soil.”30 Out to the side, students will write Earth and worms respectively. Her weird word choice for the normal makes this essay so funny while subtly commenting on our bizarre human existence. Students should pay attention to organization and how she starts with a zoom-out perspective before she zooms in on humanity. Starting by describing the earth and the animals that inhabit it, Slate writes of birds and elephants by calling them “feathered, beaky skeletons flying through the environment, and big, heavy creatures that are tusked and trunked and have sad, long memories and wash their bodies in cold mud puddles and know who their babies are.” She then takes us to the Earth’s weather – lightning is “arrows of extra electricity,” thunder is “loud drum noises,” oceans are “wide dents filled with water,” and rain is “wet water bloops.” Throughout the essay, students should notice her odd choice of nonsense words like “doinks,” “bloops,” “blinkers,” and “gloop,” just to name a few. The nonsense words also aid in the act of defamiliarization.
Slate then zooms in and we get the narrator of the essay going to the restaurant finally, but before she can go, she has to get ready. She “put[s] skin-colored paint all over [her] face and dab[s] pasty red pigment on [her] lips”; she is putting on foundation and lipstick. She has her readers recall a curling iron by writing that she “she heat[s] up a metal stick” so that her “face is surrounded by spirals,” representing curls. For a bra, Slate uses the term “boob bag.” A tight form-fitting dress is described as “a piece of fabric that has been cut and sewn into a certain shape so as to remind others that I have a butt and a vagina, but without showing the actual butt or vagina that I have.” Students should recognize her play with words by juxtaposing defamiliarizing words next to blunt or low register words. This juxtaposition helps with the strangeness and humor of the piece.
She oddly zooms out again, throwing us off kilter. She does this to now cleverly juxtapose the vastness of the universe with the smallness of being a human. She writes of the earth: “ancient ball that rotates along with a collection of other balls around a bigger ball made up of light and gasses that are science gasses, not farts. Don’t be immature.” Again, she uses a simple word like ball for planets and then uses a more low register word “fart.” The imperative sentence she uses in the aforementioned quote directly tells the reader to not be so base, which, of course, is too late: we are already laughing out loud because of “fart.”
Zooming back in for the last time, Slate tells us that she is an actor by writing that she “earn[s] [money] from pretending to be other women,” and that the whole reason she earns money is so that she can go to restaurants all over the globe to “eat a killed and burned-up bird and drink liquefied old purple grapes, and also I will swallow clear water that used to have bugs and poop and poison in it but has been cleaned up so that it doesn’t make us ill.” Although this excerpt is from a previous paragraph, she repeats the sentiment in the last paragraph too. Students should notice the use of polysyndeton and its exaggerated, humorous effect. She ends the essay with a final zooming out. Slate writes, “I repeat this cycle so that I can go to even more places on this sphere, as it revolves through eternal darkness and endless space,” leaving students existentially wondering what’s the point of it all.
The Braided Essay
One of the essays I want to focus on is the braided essay. This is a complex one, but can yield some beautiful results for a personal essay. According to Sean Glatch, “A braided essay is one that weaves two or more distinct “threads” into a single essay. A thread can be a story with a plot or simply a string of thoughts about a specific topic.”31 Essentially, students will use three stories with a common thematic idea—so, will be writing the whole in increments. Glatch clarifies this process: “For something to count as a “thread,” it has to be sufficiently distinct in terms of style and/ or content. To braid these threads together, break each into fragments, then alternate a fragment from one braid with a fragment from another braid.”32 It is important to somehow visually distinguish your threads by means of “an additional section break or an asterisk between fragments.”33
With this essay, students will be able to explore complex ideas such as love, violence, identity, race, class, gender in a multifaceted way. I have chosen “Woven” by Lidia Yuknavitch, but teachers can find other essays such as “Time and Distance Overcome” by Eula Biss or Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter.” I chose “Woven” because it was shorter than the other two, which matches my students’ attention spans, and because it made me cry.
“Woven” by Lidia Yuknavitch
I have chosen Lidia Yuknavitch’s “Woven” as the mentor text for the braided essay. This particular essay weaves together three threads: one about a particularly violent night in the author’s early adulthood; the second, about past moments in her life from little girl to woman; and the third, a Lithuanian myth about Laume. She beautifully braids together these stories that center on violence, love, loss and womanhood. Critic Erica Quinones observes how in this essay Yuknavitch “faces domestic abuse, bigotry, violence, both manifested and contemplated, and shame. At its core, there is also the contradicting theme of love as she weaves in tales of the Lithuanian water spirit, Laume, and the people who both confronted and comforted her violent experiences.”34 As she braids her stories together, Yuknavitch clearly explores “the divide between love and violence.”35 The following analysis is one way you can approach discussing the essay with your students.
The essay begins with the first thread which is centered on a moment as a young adult with her girlfriend on Halloween night in New York City. She uses similes, humor, and varied sentence structure to paint a night of carefree fun. I would make sure students pointed out examples of these devices. For example, Yuknavitch writes, “At twenty-two we could drink like beautiful androgynous unafraid fish.”36 This simile helps set the tone of innocent, reckless abandon. She also uses repetition to create humor, describing how her girlfriend was “pointing, pointing at my midsection, because my skirt was tucked up into my neon-blue tights enough that my neon-blue butt was showing.” Yuknavitch ends the section by mentioning “Mythic youth”- a thematic element of myth, of storytelling that weaves the essay together.
The next section begins the second thread which seems to span past experiences, starting with a memory of her being a little girl locking herself in a bathroom. This is where her mother first tells her about Laume, a water spirit from Lithuanian folklore. Her mother tells her this story to comfort her. Roughly akin to the American tooth fairy and Santa Claus, if you are a child and have been good, pure, and work hard, you will be rewarded. If not, you will be punished. This thread ends with her finding a “star woven from straw” under her pillow. I would make sure students point out the author’s use of hyperbole, asyndeton, successive subordinate clauses, and where she introduces the motif and symbol of weaving. There is definite foreshadowing or hints of her father being abusive, possibly physically and definitely sexually.
Actual folktales of Laume make up the third thread. This first one is about a Laume named Egle whose daughters and earthly brothers betray her. Her husband Zilvinas is brutally murdered by Egle’s brothers and so she curses herself and daughter by turning them into trees. This folktale seems to be a meditation on violence and family. After this, Yuknavitch returns to thread two, writing about her second husband pulling a gun on her – with the same meditation as the folktale. Here students might point out her use of fragments, simile, absolute phrase, and imagery, specifically the sentences, “It’s a bit like a little malformed myth still lodged between my heart and my rib cage” and “The gun was pointed at my chest. The air in my lungs concrete.” These two examples make the tension of this experience palpable.
Next, Yuknavitch moves back to thread three with more explanation of Laume. She explains their duality through the use of juxtaposition: “Laumes were both benevolent and dangerous. They could tickle men to death and then eat their bodies. They could protect women and children or punish them brutally.” Students may point out her use of polysyndeton and the use of the word “breach.” Make sure to have students look up and write down the definition of this word because it comes up later on in the essay when she discusses the death of her daughter. She returns to thread two, ruminating about her three husbands. Yuknavitch uses listing or cataloguing to reveal her husbands’ characteristics. Her use of colloquialism, the allusion to Laume, and her overuse of the word “or” should be noted. With her overuse of the word “or,” we see Yuknavitch musing about what type of story she is telling us. Is it one of womanhood, violence, or failure?
She returns to the thread of Laume, thread three, and tells a story of a god’s jealousy of Laume for falling in love with a man on earth and having a child with him. The god kills her son and cuts off her breasts. This tale is one of violence against women. Her use of fragments is prominent in this section, building an uncomfortable tension that leads to her next section.
Yuknavitch finally returns to thread one, the Halloween story, where we find out that she and her girlfriend were brutally attacked for being gay. This section’s tone is the antithesis of the beginning of the essay. Students may note her use of personification, hyperbole, and asyndeton before the act of violence which remind us of their innocence. Yuknavitch writes, “Then I saw her head lurch forward in a not-right way, and she made a sound—or something did—like someone smashing a pumpkin with a bat. Something hard at my back, and then my side imploding.” The repetition of a series of “I saw” sentences ends with her seeing the two men who attacked them– she thought they were skinheads. Students may need to know what skinheads are – racist, organized neo nazis. After this, we are back to thread three where Yuknavitch tells a story about how the Laume rewarded one hardworking woman and her child with treasures and then punished one greedy woman by killing her child. One can wonder if Yuknavitch uses this Laume tale to make sense of herself as a woman in the next three threads – is she really a good, hardworking woman? To answer these questions, we have three back to back number two threads – one about when she lost her daughter. This one is very short, but she repeats the word “breach” twice. Have students consider the meaning of the word and its use. There is a direct connection to the Laume water spirit in one of the definitions. The definitions of breach are “1. The act of breaking or faulting to observe a law/ agreement. 2. a gap in a wall, barrier, or defense. 2. rise and break through the surface of water.” The next section is a discussion about women committing violence. She has two examples: a description of her thinking about violently hurting her son’s bully – all imagined and the other of actual violence – her grandmother cutting the tip of her father’s tongue off when he was a kid. Next, is a memory of her having a skinhead in her writing class, where she gave him a C when he deserved a better grade. Students may note the use of short sentences and rhetorical questions that create a tone of uneasiness with this memory. Again, all three of these past experiences focus on her worthiness as a woman.
There is a short return to thread three where she writes a warning of Laume: “If you do not tend to your family and fire well, she burns your house down. With everyone inside.” Then we get to the kicker— the part that made me cry – a return to thread two and, in a sense, thread one. She tells her Halloween story to her college writing class one day where she writes “it shot out of my mouth”... “Sig-Sauer-like.” This brilliantly connects her Halloween story to her second husband, who pulled a gun on her which was a Sig-Sauer. She reveals to her class that it was not skinheads who violently attacked her and her girlfriend that night, it was two Marines. One tattooed student stood up and said, “‘I apologize on behalf of Marines.’ His sentence was perfect. The air in the room vacuumed.” Readers feel the enormity of the situation and the shame and sadness of her experience. That student then hugged her and said it again, in which she explains that she heard, ‘You don’t have to punish yourself for love.’” Students should note this powerful moment. At the beginning, she repeats the word “shame” but ends with forgiveness. We return to our last Laume thread where Laume punishes parents for sending their kids to war, a commentary on war and violence and connection to the Marines – the ones who attacked her and the one who apologized to her. Yuknavitch ends her essay with the idea of the different roles people have in their lives and how telling our stories is a way of connection and making sense of our world, our lives. She returns to the symbol of weaving by writing, “I like that idea. A woven person. Little misshapen stars made of straw” – that is what us humans are.
This particular essay takes a subject and three different threads and braids them together, exploring its complexity in the most moving and powerful way. This may be a challenge for my students, but I am confident that they can come up with something better than the robots.
Hermit Crab Essay
Students will love this type of essay as it allows students to really play with form. A hermit crab looks for shells to inhabit. A hermit crab essay does the same thing. Students can borrow a form that seems playful and experimental while tackling difficult subjects. When teaching the hermit crab essay, Xochitl Bentley suggests that a teacher provides a list of borrowed forms: a recipe, how-to article, rejection letters, crossword puzzle, medical pain scale, math problem, encyclopedia entry, real estate ad, dating profile.37 The possibilities are endless. I have chosen Brenda Miller’s “We Regret to Inform you” for our mentor text. Teachers can also use Samantha Irby’s “An Instagram Frittata” which is in the form of a recipe posted on Instagram or Maya Jewell Zeller’s “A Wrong Turn in American ______: An Essay in Parts” which is in the form of a multiple choice test. All three examples show how the form can help invoke humor, but all are tackling serious subjects.
Analysis of “We Regret to Inform you” by Brenda Miller
Using a series of rejection letters, Brenda Miller cleverly uses the hermit crab essay format in “We Regret to Inform you.” The letters are written in chronological order from elementary school to adulthood. The first four rejection letters center on her adolescence. With these first four, have students pay attention to her negative word choice and her use of quotations to create a very sarcastic and self-deprecating tone. First, her drawing gets rejected from an elementary school art contest. When she uses the word “smudges”38 and the word “‘drawing’” (in quotation marks), students immediately understand her use of sarcasm and negative word choice to create humor. With the school dance rejection, she describes herself as a “rejectee,” “awkward” and “sweaty,” to perfectly paint a picture of standing all alone in a school gymnasium - a scene of adolescent terror. The letter is signed by the “Boys Council of Patrick Henry Junior High,” characterizing the hierarchy of middle school gender politics. The gender politics continues in high school as she is rejected for the “coveted” position of girlfriend to star basketball player, but is humorously encouraged to “continue hanging around the lockers as if [she] belong[s] there. This selfless act will help the team members learn the art of ignoring lovesick girls.” The word “selfless” and “the art of ignoring lovesick girls” have a hyperbolic and ironic effect that makes readers laugh. The last of the adolescent rejection letters revolves around not joining an “elite” Irish dance team because she is “simply not coordinated enough” and that “It’s not [her] fault; [she] just [has]n’t quite ‘grown into’ [her] body yet.” This matter-of-fact word choice magnifies that her developing body has betrayed her, a familiar experience in middle and high school.
The next four rejection letters span her college years; the first two are more humorous and the last two, while attempting humor, go somewhere darker. The letters also seem to get more biting. The first of this series is a rejection of being a star actor in her college drama department. Using words like "prestigious," “rigorous,” and “je ne sais quoi,” Miller gives readers a sense of the pretentiousness of the program. The letter uses absolutes, like always, to abolish any hope of acting. Miller writes, “always be relegated to the ‘second girl’ or the waitress with one or two lines that you’ll belt out with imperfect timing.” The letter uses a rhetorical question when suggesting that she should work “behind-the-scenes” which creates a condescending tone. Finally, this letter ends with acknowledging the fact that she wrote her own play and used the fragment “Cute.” Ending this letter with this word and fragment magnifies the insult and is just plain mean. Next, another rejection letter is about her dropping out of college. She uses allusions to “Jim Jones” and “Harvey Milk” that students will need to look up in order to understand the historical context of 1979. Miller uses asyndeton to make fun of how she sought “refuge in the music of the Grateful Dead, dancing until you felt yourself leave your body, caught up in their brand of enlightenment” which trivializes her actions, especially juxtaposed next to the violent deaths of the Jonestown Massacre and Milk’s assassination. This letter speaks of her "histrionics and unrest” on campus and then her wanting “to play house” with some boy she met at a Grateful Dead show. This word choice again minimizes her experience as a woman and, again, seems self-deprecating. The next two rejection letters are darker and shorter. One has to do with a miscarriage of twins and the other explains that she cannot have children. Miller uses words like “host home,” “residence,” “carnal acts,” and the idiom “Water under the bridge” to detach herself from her loss. The last letter explaining her inability to conceive starts off by mentioning her “reproductive abnormalities” and the word “barren.” Students should discuss the negative connotations of these words, especially in regards to being a woman. She then uses more elevated language like “surmise” and “in utero,” and then ends with this lofty, hyperbolic sentence about her taking this “misfortune as a sign of God’s displeasure and torture yourself with guilt and self-loathing for many years to come.” Teachers may ask students: does this distance the writer from the experience?
The last four rejection letters are of her exploration of adulthood and center around her relationships with men and finding her identity. The first is a damning critique of her playing white savior to her Native American boyfriend and her appropriation of their culture. Miller uses polysyndeton to evidence her audition of “‘pseudo–Native American white girl,’” which creates a hyperbolic effect of her trying way too hard. Although the letter acknowledges she was well-intentioned, the letter uses asyndeton and zeugma to show how she felt used by her boyfriend by saying how the Yukon elders appreciate how she “let him borrow [her] car, [her] money, [her] time” which creates this laundry list of things she did for him. The next rejection letter is about her getting fired from a hot springs resort. The use of parentheses is particularly interesting here because they are acutely critical about her relationships with tenants and her work ethic. Students should note the effect of her varying syntax and the effect it creates. She juxtaposes a use of asyndeton with a use of polysyndeton in two consecutive sentences that seem to poke fun of her spiritual journey and her futile attempt of making meaning of her life. The short sentences and anaphora of “You will” at the end do end up creating a sense of optimism that the other letters do not possess. Her grad school boyfriend writes the next rejection letter and addresses it as “Potential Wife” which is a loaded greeting. Her use of parallelism is used to show that they did everything from the mundane to traveling the world together. Readers get an expansive sense of their relationship. She does mention a fight while traveling but then uses the idiom “Water under the bridge” again; students could explore why she uses this twice. This feels like the quintessential break-up letter. Then we have her rejection letter to be a stepmom. Written as a numbered list providing feedback as to why she was rejected as stepmom, this letter is devastatingly raw. The children remind her with repetition and absolutes that “The children will always, always, come first, trumping any needs you may have.” The children bring up her “deep-seated wounds” for being a mother in the first place which while that metaphor is cliche, we understand the trauma because of her inability to have children. The Stepmom movie comment is funny, and students may need to look this up to understand. In the fourth numbered piece of advice, the children bluntly and imperatively state, “You are not our mother.” Last in this series of rejection letters, is FINALLY an acceptance letter of her dog adoption. Although this comes with a list of tips and a little more self-effacing comments, ultimately there is hope. This hope comes from her subtly referring to comments in past rejection letters: “It’s an indication of maturity, of finding your niche and settling into your life as it is.”
Students should also find humor in the detachment style of the rejection letters, but, at times, the deep sadness of the events that shape our lives. There is humor in reflection and there is reflection in humor – this is the essence of a hermit crab essay.
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