Through some happenstance web link, I found TLA, and have become quite the fan girl of their online courses. I’ve taken classes at many places over the years, but only TLA has resonated on such an elemental level. Many of my classmates are like me, female, of periretirement age and still seeking that counter-narrative.

Last fall I took the irresistably titled “Liminal Spaces: The Poetry of Transitions and Change” with Angie Ebba. (Who among us doesn’t wish to be changed by a poem? Who among us doesn’t wish to change their world through their poem?)

The two weeks between when I signed up for the class and when it started turned out to be quite a liminal space for me: a sprained ankle on top of a chronic mobility disorder, the death of my mother and the first time I got Covid. So my attention to the thematic possibilities, new (to me) forms like the haibon and oulipo, and techniques was mutable.

But the Week 4 assignment was on using personification, the literary device that gives human characteristics to nonhuman things or inanimate objects. To my delight, a number of us confessed to be confirmed personifiers, even and especially outside of our writing lives.

The online class thread for this assignment read like a meeting of Empathizers Anonymous. The initials of my classmates and the actual objects personified below have been changed to protect their privacy:

T posted about their mother’s lamp that did not want to be discarded.
M couldn’t stand to see the last apple alone on the store shelf.
K whose spouse who talked to their favorite stapler.

I commented how, in the early 1970s, my father made me return a midi dress to the store “because it made me look like too much of a hippie.” Never mind that, born in 1961, I had been too young for Woodstock and missed out on the Summer of Love. Even in the dress, no one would have mistaken me for Janis Joplin. Putting it in the bag to be returned, I cried for the dress and the multicolored stripes around its skirt, its hurt feelings.

Five decades later
I still glimpse the purple dress,
Now, I too am seen.