Eighteen students sit around a polished wooden table. I take in the varsity jackets hanging on the backs of chairs, the excellent orthodonture, and the cleverly modified uniforms (collars on the collared shirts so slim that they look like ribbons). Outside the window lies manicured shrubbery and well-tended stone walls. Beyond these, are the impressive estates with service entrances that I drove past on the way in.

I ask students to share from their image journals. Hands shoot up.

Prior to my arrival for my two-day writer’s residency at this tony Connecticut prep school, I had given the image journal assignment to the classroom teacher to share with the students.

My mandate is to help 8^th-graders deepen their short stories. I wanted to hit the ground running—with material from our lives that we could use to deepen our fiction.

These students’ lives seem buttressed by privilege, but sharing our images quickly bring us past external social markers.

One dark-haired boy begins reading from his image journal: “gold sneakers whose tongue glints in the sun.” An amber-haired girl reads from hers: “memories of scented candles.”

The images keep coming: “rough wooden bars,” “sticky red seat of train, “forsaken hat,” “hardens into a frown.” And coming:

“fresh grass”

“sun beating”

“empty court”

Then, suddenly, we are awash in images, the stuff of our lives.

Behind each of them I can sense a pulsing inner life.

“staring scoreboard”

“smell of imported Italian shoes”

I learn more about my students in these first few minutes of sharing from our image journals than I would, probably, in hours of conversation. (The classroom teacher suggests that these images could be used as the basis for personal essays.) The images are springboards to further revelations. The boy who shared the image of the gold sneakers volunteers that he avidly collects rare sneaker models. He recently took the train into the city to go to Sneakercon, an event held in a church basement of an outer borough of NYC. The girl who shared the memories of scented candles is an aspiring actress who chooses (against her parent’s wishes) to attend auditions after school, while her friends are playing soccer.

As I work with them, I discover that these digital natives have been raised on narratives of all kinds. They have no trouble generating plots. Their short stories jump and hurl through plot hoop after plot hoop. But what often feels missing in the narrative pyrotechnics are moments of stillness, of humanity. When I get home from teaching, I reread Charles Baxter’s great essay on the value of stillness in Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Baxter reminds us, “What’s remarkable is the degree to which Americans have distrusted silence and its parent condition, stillness.” He goes on to argue for the importance—even necessity—of stillness in making sense of narratives. [click here for an interview with Charles Baxter on "stillness."]

The resonant image—the wind in the trees, the clatter of dishes, the whirr of the refrigerator motor, the tattered lipstick case you can’t remember where you got—can oblige us to stop and listen for moment or two to others’ lives. And to our own lives.

Before we start running again.

-Sari Wilson

Sari Wilson is a T&W teaching artist and a creative writer who works in fiction, nonfiction, and comics.  You can read more about Sari here.