It was the last brisk morning of June, and Maryam ElZayat (MA ’24), a graduate student of literature, and I gathered on the lawn of Engineering Hall with a group of about fifteen students in 6th, 7th, and 8th grades who were part of the 2023 GROW Program at K-State.
After a short reading of Sabrina Imbler’s “I Had Come to Petco to Stage a Protest,” a flash essay about a middle schooler who protests to free the goldfish at Petco, we discussed what it might be like to experience life from the perspective of the students’ favorite animals and plants.
We pondered the everyday lives of the sea turtle, the gerbil, the showy milkweed, the elephant, the giraffe, and the big bluestem. We imagined the showy milkweed’s daily encounters with the American bumblebee and considered what a gerbil might dream about.
To begin their own essays, students pulled a starter sentence out of an envelope and sat down to begin writing about an animal or plant of their choice. For the next twenty minutes, students wrote about how a worm might start their day, or what a butterfly might be searching for, or what the squirrel might dream about, or the mission that a little black ant is on, or the persistence of a blue jay.
While she was writing, one student mentioned how terrifying it would be for an ant to experience the underground sprinklers suddenly going off; five minutes later, the sprinklers started spraying, sending the writers clutching their notebooks and running out of the sprinkler’s reach. I guess we aren’t so different from the ants, after all, said one writer.
After the students finished writing, several offered to share their brief essays with the rest of the group.
Maryam and I were blown away by the writers’ creativity – they placed ants in heroic treks to a dropped muffin crumb, described a blue jay’s determination to deliver his family a morning worm, and considered the experience of a squirrel caught in a thunderstorm.
At the end of the hour, when the sun’s rays began to intensify, we went back inside to the air conditioned Engineering Hall, wondering about the microscopic creatures who might be sharing our desks and hallways.
— Ania Payne, Assistant Professor
K-State English 