If your students struggle to finish a novel, this unit is perfect for you. The stories are from Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms. The stories range anywhere from one paragraph to a few pages in length so it makes it easy to assign a few stories to a small group of students. They can quickly read the story and be ready to present their interpretation to the class in around ten minutes. These stories are also easy to read out loud to the class and because the stories are so short, it breaks up the discussion into smaller parts and keeps the class moving quickly.
The anthology contains many short pieces that feel like prose poems. An oxymoron, prose poems contain all the complexity of poetry without the line break. The line break makes rhyme and rhythm possible, and all poetic forms like the sonnet, villanelle, and sestina. But the line break, especially in free verse and plays, also confuses students because of the visual pause that often doesn’t end the sentence or even contain punctuation that would indicate a grammatical pause. Prose poems, without the line break, at least appear more like narratives than poetry, if only because they visually appear more cohesive. Prose poems and very short stories often rely heavily on the backstory, the story that the reader must often imagine.
It's also fun to guess if the story is fiction or nonfiction, because it's not always clear. The stories help students explore the line between fiction and nonfiction. I assign the first chapter of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka before starting the unit because it shows how an imaginary story can depict reality better than some nonfiction.
One of my favorite stories, Meena Alexander’s “Crossing the Indian Ocean”, is about how it feels to migrate at the age of five:
"A child can fall into the sea, never to reappear … Sometimes the syllables of poetry well up, waves on the surface of the sea, and they burst as flying fish might, struck by light … The page on which I write is a live restless thing, soul-sister to the unselving sea."
These sentences rise and fall like the waves that simultaneously become the speaker, the act of moving to another country, and the act of creating art out of a memory from childhood. Alexander’s explosive use of metaphor, rhyme, alliteration, consonance, personification, commas, and simile helps makes sense of the past and helps the reader understand the essence of a transformative experience.
The backstory in this case, as in any very short story, relies heavily upon the imagination of the reader, and allows the reader to draw on their own experiences to fill in the gaps caused by the limited amount of words. Sometimes five-hundred-page novels contain as much truth and power as five-hundred-word stories. No story, no matter how many words are in the story, tells the full story. Even the person who tries to tell their own story falls short of capturing the full reality of every single moment. Even a third person narrator doesn’t have full access to the thoughts and feelings of every single person in the story. This is why we talk with our students and ask questions. We hope to get to the bottom of things, to tell our own stories, and those words we speak out loud will endlessly expand the words and the story of the writer.
Teacher's Workshop, professional development for secondary ELA teachers
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