(Namely) Writing With Students
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We wrote about our names. The students had things to say: those who’ve endured mix-ups, mispronunciations, and absent-minded questions surrounding their names (sometimes by well-meaning teachers like me), and those with “ordinary” names. Writing and sharing name-related fiction, poetry, and memoir was a powerful second project of the new school year.
Before writing, we watched a video of Idris Goodwin’s spoken-word-poem “Say My Name,” we read aloud Jacquelyn Woodson’s “a girl named Jack” (from Brown Girl Dreaming), and we reflected on Ralph Ellison’s words: “It is through our names that we first place ourselves in the world. Our names, being the gift of others, must be made our own.”
Constraints: 1) include the word “gift” and 2) the wild-card word “tangerine” (for Gold class) or “bridge” for Green class, and 2) use a poetic tool or literary device in the writing.
My Vegetable Name
by Stephanie Parsley Ledyard
I’m nine. My last name is Parsley. “Is your dad lettuce?” Joe asks, causing my lunch table to erupt in laughter, which I join. It’s 1977, and most of us kids can belt out advertising tunes as though we’re Hollywood-bound. (Truth is, I dream of singing that “stuck on Band-Aid” song in a TV ad.) The jingle for Tuna Twist, a boxed mix to elevate tuna sandwiches, features cartoon veggies: “I’m Miss Parsley, I’m Sir Celery, we are the onion twins,” they squeak. I sing it at recess to get ahead of jokes.
I’m twelve. Watching The Dukes of Hazzard with my mom, stepdad, and little brother, I’m a tangerine in the banana bowl. They share a name, one that’s not a vegetable. I want that last name the same way I want an intact family. But when I imagine the courtroom scene in which my stepdad adopts me, my Parsley grandparents are always there, crying behind me as a faceless judge bangs his gavel.
I’m forty-eight. The internet brings me name twins: a photographer named Stephanie Parsley on Facebook, a crime victim named Stephanie Ledyard in the news. With my first book coming out soon, I need to decide who I am.
“By Stephanie Parsley Ledyard” now graces the front of three picture books. My vegetable name is a gift that makes me different, a bridge to grandparents I could not let down. And even to my dad. Don’t call him lettuce.