Oh, I could name each flower I tended in a rapture of taxonomy and parental devotion, even though I grumbled about the unanticipated hours spent watering—the almost umbilical tether of care that shortened my freedom—and nursed a petulant feeling of having been misled about the work involved.
“Reciprocity,” by Aaron Shurin, from the essay collection King of Shadows.
With the opening, “Oh,” I hear Aaron Shurin as if he’s sitting across the table from me, telling me about the flowers. (full disclosure: Aaron is a friend of mine.) The phatic utterance, that little “oh”—such intimacy and so quickly woven into the sentence. I keep finding sentences that begin this way, but you can put that little “oh” or “oh, god,” or “wait, what?” anywhere that aligns with the speaker’s emotional state.
Shurin uses a right-branching sentence and balance, the pairing of twos for more rhythm, “taxonomy and parental devotion” and more specificity about the rapture.
Then comes his subordinate clause that provides nuance; not everything was rapturous: “even though I grumbled about the unanticipated hours spent watering.”
But the subordinate clause, which has two verbs, is interrupted by a parenthetical. He uses an em dash to insert the parenthetical, explaining why the grumbling. Usually, a parenthetical is an aside of not-as-important-information compared to the other parts of the sentence. Except here, tucked away, almost hidden, there’s the adjective “umbilical.” With one word, we have a truer sense of the narrator’s relationship to the flowers. The word “umbilical” invokes a metaphor comparing the narrator to the flowers’ mother. Of course! mothering involves a tremendous shortening of one’s freedom. That the narrator would use this metaphor suggests a deep love for the flowers, despite the hardship, despite the curtailment of freedom. It’s a paradox: caring for a living being can be so taxing and so full of rapture.
If we return to the sentence’s opening, the sense of care is right there: “I could name each flower.” To do that requires care and love. The narrator’s relationship with the flowers is also suggested by “parental devotion.”
After the em dash, Shurin returns to the subordinate clause and adds the second verb, “nursed.” This word extends the metaphor of mothering/nurturing.
Your Turn
Open with a colloquialism, followed by the base clause. Include balance, the pairing of two things. The things can be adjectives, nouns, phrases, adverbs, and so on.
Add your subordinate clause, which will have two verbs. “Even though,” suggests a turn that is opposite the base clause. In Shurin’s sentence, there was a feeling of immense joy. In your subordinate clause, inject a feeling different from the base clause.
Now, write a parenthetical, which will interrupt your subordinate clause. In the parenthetical, can you introduce a metaphor through an adjective that deepens and clarifies the relationship at stake?
Return to your subordinate clause and add a second verb that picks up the metaphor introduced in the parenthetical.
Try it!
How did it go?
About King of Shadows: Based on the author’s life as a gay man and a poet, King of Shadows is a collection of twenty-one autobiographical essays that circle in and around San Francisco since the 1960s. The three longest pieces deal with Aaron Shurin’s coming into poetry and gay identity via a high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his deep relationships with poets Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan, and his personal history of venturing into San Francisco gay bars, starting in 1965 and ending just before Stonewall.
About Me:
I’ve taught “Style in Fiction,” “Word for Word” and “Cultivating Your Prose” at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies since 2007.
Please visit my website to find all my books: ninaschuyler.com, including my novel Afterword, How to Write Stunning Sentences, and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal.
Afterword!
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Love this! Such a stunning sentence! Thank you.
I've decided to try to craft a response that actually fits into my Wip instead of creating a stand alone sentence. It feels more difficult, but here goes:
Thing is, my feeling of preciousness each time I showed up when she needed me, even though I complained and compared the depths of our friendship—the unevenness so apparent I answered every call while hearing most of mine shunted to voice mail—in some way gratified, though I still harbored a petty subtext of displeasure which crept into our dialogue.
Oh, if I could name each bit of fur I picked off my favorite jacket and my favorite chair, and even though I never walked alone—I sometimes wondered if it was worth the work—and always felt it was.