JESSE LEE KERCHEVAL, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW
Problems with Words
If the next door neighbor at a dinner party speaks softer and softer until no one can hear her, what are the odds she is:
- on meds
- off her meds
- has Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a fatal neurodegenerative neuromuscular disease, but has no idea yet
If the fiction writer faints at a reading just as he gets to the part where his character is getting divorced, what are the odds he has:
A. terrible stage fright
B. too much empathy for people he creates from mere words
C. an undiagnosed fatal oligodendroglioma
If the poet, sitting alone at home, posts on Facebook that she will not go see a doctor because she does not believe in doctors, what are the odds she:
- is fine
- trying to use axinomancy in a poem and experiencing alysm.
- is never going see all the posts from her friends frantically asking if she is okay
If person, very much like me, is about to have surgery in the morning, what are the odds she is:
- a 65 year old woman with health problems common in the first world
- a hypochondriac with Cadillac health insurance
- a person so afraid she can’t hear what the surgeon is saying
The problem with words is they are dangerous. The problem with words is they can be deadly. In the time it takes to google the terms the doctor is using, the door on the world can clang shut. The problem with words is we do not really know what they really mean until the last moment we are standing or sitting and then they mean nothing at all.
So, a different type of word problem. Look these words up instead:
Live life as if each morning was full of euneirophrenia, as if you were an airgonaut.
May your life be bonifate and celeberrimous.
May your life be a gardeviance of all things beautiful and good.
Jesse Lee Kercheval on “Problems with Words”:
“Problems with Words” is a hermit crab essay, a term invented by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their book Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction. A hermit crab essay takes on an already existing form of writing the way the hermit crab disguises itself inside the shell of another sea creature. One may start with a structure or idea of a restaurant menu, tourist brochure, crossword puzzle or obituary—then go on to play with or deconstruct that form. I wrote this one in a wonderful day-long asynchronous online class with the writer Cheryl Pappas on writing flash or short hermit crab pieces. I’ve been a creative writing teacher for over 35 years but I never get tired being a student. Pappas gave us prompts, then time to write and post our essays, then another prompt. It was a marathon day of hermit crabbing. This one was in response to a prompt to write one based on that bane of my high school math live, the word problem. You can read Pappas’s own take here: “Hunger”
Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, writer, and translator. Her recent books include the poetry collections, I Want to Tell You and America that island off the coast of France, winner of the Dorset Prize, and the story collection Underground Women. She is the Zona Gale Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.