Let's Get Cracking with Metaphor

Irene Cooper | November 4, 2025

But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.

                                                                   Aristotle, "Poetics," 1459a 3-8, via etymonline.com  

No shade to Aristotle, but I have to question the master’s definitiveness. (Also, his attachment to so-called ‘genius,’ which many a working writer understands to be less useful to her writing than plain persistence—but that’s another blog for another time.)

I have no quibble with describing metaphor as an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars. That’s money. It is, too, the focus of week three at The Forge creative writing program—how a curious and masterful use of metaphor can make one’s writing sing, and why this kind of resonance isn’t just for the poets.

Common Ground, Creative Tension

Years ago, in a workshop focused on imagery, the instructor asked us students to go deep with our observations of the world, to find meaning—or more precisely, feeling—in material and movement. A writer in our cohort wound up comparing a heartbreak to the cracking of an egg three rooms away—nearly unhearable, profoundly irreversible. A heart is not an egg. (Heck, the valved and bloody heart is not even the heart of heartbreak.) In comparing what is dissimilar, however, the writer brought to our attention what is—or could be, if we let it—common to a heart and an egg, and oh, so poignantly. (I’m still a little mad about how good that metaphor was.)

In literary and working writer discussions of metaphor, the energy that comes from this combination of similar and dissimilar is called ground and tension. Like the notion of superposition in quantum physics, it’s easier to let it wash over your brain than to try to pin it down. Here’s the thing: the body gets it. The comparison doesn’t require perfect symmetry to thrum. When we students collectively gasped at the notion of the distant cracking of an egg, it was our bodies that responded—to the sound, faint as faint can be, and to the mind’s eye image of the broken perfection of the shell, never to be the same. The ground: the egg and the (already metaphorical) heart as vulnerable vessels; the tension: the heart, unlike the egg, will, in all likelihood, recover.

Breaking Down the Big Ideas into Piquant Canapés of Feeling

Why compare at all? Well, as we (me, sometimes) say at The Forge, we turn to metaphor because Abstractions Are Often a Big Unmarked Rubbermaid Bin Taking Up Space in Your Text, Holding the Things You Really Want to Say. Metaphor in creative writing helps the mind make sense of the body by speaking directly through the senses. Sure, we can write, “The old man was lonely after his wife died,” and we will have said it in way that can be understood. Or, we can say “The man let out a little moan each time he opened the closet door and heard the hollow clacking of the empty hangers on his wife’s side,” and readers will have felt lonely in their bones (specifically those tiny bones in their mind’s ear, where those clacking hangers will continue to echo).

I’ll be eager in the coming week to talk about how the homework went, as it includes a close read of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Left Omelas,” and an assignment to write an original allegory—an extended metaphor, or as I like to think of it, a metaphor with a mandate. Nobody knew better than Le Guin: you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an Omelas.  

And We're Off!

Ellen Santasiero | October 2025

Photo by Oliver Sjöström: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-holding-black-backpack-1223649/

"The thrill of our first class was revealing myself and beginning to see myself as a writer before such supportive, talented people.” –2025 Forge student

In my twenties, I sailed off the coast of Maine as a student on an intensive Outward Bound course. On the first day, I felt so nervous as we hauled life jackets and oars and kitted out the boats because I didn’t know what to expect of the program. Could I do everything required of me? Would I make it? Or would I have to bail?

During the Forge’s first class last Saturday, I was reminded of that day in Maine because I imagined our new cohort of creative writing students may have been feeling nervous, too. After all, every intensive course is designed to coax people out of their comfort zone so they can achieve a higher level of mastery.

We started with an easy ice breaker for introductions, just like we did at Outward Bound, except in the Forge class we learned about grammar pet peeves, GI Joes, swimming with jellyfish, and that some people, apparently, hold strong positions on the matter of top sheets.

Because we believe that the best writers possess skills in critical analysis, we asked students to start building these skills by reacting to short readings we’d sent them in advance. To calm any existing jitters, we invited them to sit in small Zoom breakout rooms so they could test out their responses with one or two others before sharing in the larger group.

Back in the main Zoom room, we were pleased to hear their comments on point of view and word pairings, and questions about titling and structure. We heard several students point out how a poet played with language and syntax, another student admire the conciseness of a two-sentence short story, and another say how listening in the breakout room helped them understand the readings in new ways.

The best part, always, of any Forge class, is when students read their writing out loud. For this first meeting, we asked them to read a 500-word piece they are especially proud of. For some, this is a big, scary step, but we can flex to meet students where they are (much like my Outward Bound instructor, who, when I announced that I would only be doing the lower portion of the ropes course, just looked at me said, “OK”). Our rationale them to read on day one? They begin to build confidence in performing their own work, and we all get to hear each writer’s voice.

Throughout, there were appearances, planned and unplanned, by pets, including one student’s magical, disappearing dog. I held my terrier up to the camera and presented all sides of him for no apparent reason, not even to me.

As for that ropes course, once I got done with the lower portion and it was time to climb to the higher level, I saw that it would be awkward for me to come down, and that the next platform up didn’t look so high anymore. I was still nervous, but I climbed up. I climbed up and up until I finished the ropes course. I felt pretty good about myself then.

I could say more about the Outward Bound analogy, but I won’t, except for the fact that by the end of that program, I had got over my nerves, and achieved way more than I thought I could.

I’m confident that our Forge students will, too.

"Dirt Being Dirt": Creative Writing from the Breaks

by Irene Cooper

photo by Hannah O'Leary

The poet Carl Phillips won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection, Then the War. Phillips is a favorite poet—sensual, surprising, and cerebral. He’s a Black man, and gay, and has embodied and explored those identities throughout his body of writings, starting with his first collection, In the Blood, published in 1992. In 1992, AIDS is rampant, and riots break out in Los Angeles after four police officers are acquitted of the beating of Rodney King.

Bouncing around Google just after Phillips won the Big P, I came across a video of the poet reading his poem, “Dirt Being Dirt.” Obvious to say, but it bears repeating: A poem is one thing on the page, and another on the tongue. The last line hits hard, and differently, across experience: “You broke it. Now wear it broken.”

Some weeks ago, Sherrilyn Ifill, who for ten years served as the head of the Legal Defense Fund— the non-profit civil rights organization and law firm founded by Thurgood Marshall—gave the annual Robert B. Silvers lecture at the New York Public Library, entitled, “How America Ends and Begins Again.” Friends, it is an example of rhetoric such as we have not seen in some time—honest (brutal, even), informative, and, impossibly, hopeful.

I’ve seen a lot of references, lately, in creative nonfiction and elsewhere, to kintsugi, the Japanese art of finishing the mended seams of broken pottery with gold: Cracks not only visible, but celebrated. It’s often difficult, however, to celebrate our fractures and fissures, our breaks. But there are other, perhaps more practical responses.

Ifill talks about listening to the people in the margins, the falling off places, if you want to hear the truth. She offers, too, a number of actionable suggestions on what to do with that truth. Phillips writes:

The orchard was on fire, but that didn’t stop him from slowly walking straight into it, shirtless, you can see where the flames have foliaged—here, especially—his chest. Splashed by the moon, it almost looks like the latest proof that, while decoration is hardly ever necessary, it’s rarely meaningless:

Writers sometimes worry they have nothing to write about, that their writing is merely decorative, or otherwise unworthy of attention. I would argue that the pull to write indicates the need to write, and a need for that writing. Creative writing takes courage, as well as time and energy and fortitude. That is, if the writing is trying to get at something. Which is not to say that truth is always the catastrophic fracture: One may crack a joke, or break into a grin, or bust out laughing.

The bold, golden seams of a vase or bowl that has undergone kintsugi suggest to me that the piece is stronger, now, at the site of the break—and that the piece was worth the attention to repair it. Ultimately, we may not want our revisions to be exhibited quite so nakedly in our work. But as I read through my first draft and start to be aware of the various fault lines and fires, I understand that this is where the beauty begins, in the attention to the unfinished, needful edge.

This is where I’ll learn how to wear it broken.

Learn more about how to invest in and develop your creative writing at The Forge. Already a Smithy? Go write.

Image by SEBASTIEN MARTY