Hands On with Metaphor: Barrelhousing with Conference Workshop Leader Holly M. Wendt
At our Washington, DC conference this past Spring, we loved Holly M. Wendt’s craft workshop session Getting Hands on with Metaphor so much that we asked them to run it back at our Philly conference on September 23, 2023. We sat down with Holly around the virtual campfire — is that a metaphor? — to talk a bit about this very cool and effective workshop, what writers can get out of it, and of course Patrick Swayze movies.
Barrelhouse: To start off, can you tell us a little about the workshop and how it will go?
Holly M. Wendt: Getting Hands-On with Metaphor combines informative and experiential learning to hopefully make the idea of metaphor more accessible & less mysterious and then demonstrate that anything can be a vehicle for metaphor. The workshop begins a little bit of information about metaphors--the names for the parts and how they work--and then we'll walk through a few examples from recently published fiction to see how a metaphor can infuse a moment or sentence with meaning, reveal character, or point to possible elements of tension within a work. We'll spend a good chunk of our time together actually interacting with some objects that could fuel metaphor and doing some generative exercises, and then we'll close with a bit of discussion/Q&A.
Barrelhouse: What gave you the idea to do a workshop like this, with participants actually handling some irl objects?
Holly M. Wendt: I'm a fiber artist and textile nerd, as well as a fiction writer, so I've been thinking about spinning, stories, and spinning stories for most of my life. Recently though, a new project made me think really deeply about how the specific language of weaving or spinning or knitting, when applied to narrative, changes what that narrative feels like and what some of its possibilities might be. Woven fabric, for example, is made of threads that intersect--over and under, like a lattice pie crust. In basic woven fabric, it's possible to remove threads from the middle or edges without destroying the whole fabric, but most weaves don't stretch. Knitted fabric, on the other hand, is made up of a single strand of thread or yarn that is then manipulated by the needles to be interlocking. Knitted fabric stretches! However, if you find a loose end and pull, the whole thing can unravel. The implied metaphor, then, of something like "a close-knit group" offers some really interesting narrative possibilities: what happens when you take one of those characters, as an author, and pull? What happens to the group dynamic? Even though that particular metaphor is well-worn, if we can think about what the actual language means, there's all kinds of exciting tension in it.
I'm hoping this workshop will help us connect to the physical, sensory world of metaphor and see the possibilities that open up if we hold the objects we're using as comparisons in our hands. If we can understand how they're made and fully understand the properties they have, we can invite the whole fullness of the thing onto the page. And that might take us somewhere interesting.
Barrelhouse: What do you hope writers will take away from this session?
Holly M. Wendt: Mostly, I hope writers will leave with two things in mind: one, metaphor can be (and is!) accessible and applicable to all kinds of writing, and two, everything--every pleasingly shaped rock, every good-bad hard candy in Nana's purse, every fraying handkerchief--can become a metaphor that will freshen our understanding of a character, a scene, or even a whole work, if we're willing to engage with it fully.
Barrelhouse: What's your favorite Patrick Swayze movie?
Holly M. Wendt: Dirty Dancing, full stop. The soundtrack was the second cassette I owned (the first was Vanilla Ice's To the Extreme), and when I was a kid, I rented Dirty Dancing from the local video store once a week. As an eight-year-old, I didn't understand the Penny plot (and no one would explain it to me), but the dancing was everything. (And like most 80s kids, maybe I was a little unsupervised in my video store picks, but my other go-to was Sleeping Beauty, so no one seemed particularly concerned.) My dad would oblige my enthusiasm by hoisting me into The Lift from time to time. Once, though, I was already at full sprint when the phone rang and he turned away for a second, which was just long enough for me to crash face-first into his hip and give myself a bloody nose. Still, no regrets. Johnny and Baby suffered for their art, too.
Holly M. Wendt (they/them) is the author of Heading North (Braddock Avenue Books, November 2023). They are a recipient of the Robert and Charlotte Baron Fellowship for Creative and Performing Artists from the American Antiquarian Society and fellowships from the Jentel Foundation and Hambidge Center. Their work has appeared in Passages North, Shenandoah, Barrelhouse, Memorious, and elsewhere. Holly is a former Baseball Prospectus contributor and contributing editor for The Classical. Their nonfiction has appeared in Bodies Built for Game: The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Sports Writing, The Rumpus, and Sport Literate. Holly is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lebanon Valley College.