On February 5th, 2025, I attended “Uncanned Words,” a creative writing reading by Davidson College’s English department. A. M. Parker, the moderator, offered wisecracks and personal jibes as he explained that the English department intended the event to celebrate its members’ creative pursuits, and alongside the rest of the audience, I applauded for the first speaker and settled in to listen with excited anticipation.
Over the course of the next hour and a half, I sat riveted as English professors, humanities department leaders, and library staff performed their short stories and poetry. Their formal styles, from Andrew Rippeon’s poetry created “for and against the voice” to Sherrie Flick’s singsonging, suggestive prose, captivated me as both a Humanities student and a lover of language. I was equally enthralled with the content they presented. From Michael Chapin’s poem on love and war to the empathetic power of art in Parker’s “Alex Has a Favorite Mondrian,” their themes struck and moved me.
Given its enthusiastic reception by students, faculty and community members in the audience, I feel confident in recording “Uncanned Words” as a successful celebration of the English faculty’s work. However, the reading also succeeded in what I perceive as two goals of literature writ large: to offer opportunities for self-reflection, and to inspire worldview expansion. While each piece offered me a different version of these insights, I focus here on the performance that resonated with me most: Professor Maddie Norris’ excerpt from her book The Wet Wound.
Norris, the sixth of nine performers, opened her reading with a warm smile and a gently worded welcome to her work. Her father, she told us, had died when she was seventeen. He had been a doctor.
Then Norris’ voice—without losing its conversational resonance—assumed a new level of authority and grace as she began to read. She described the sesamoid bones of the human foot, shaped like “calcified peas” and integral to shock absorption as the body moves (Yeung et al.).1 “Such small things to bear so much weight,” she mused. Then, in the same elevated-yet-conversational tone, she explained the way “[her] body ripped” as she injured her own sesamoids, and the pain she now experiences every time she runs. She concluded her narrative by revealing her introductory description as her father’s examination of her injury, her foot in his gentle, prodding hands as he asked her to say when his investigation hurt. To laughter and applause, Norris concluded, “it hurts, Dad!”
Norris’ diction left me breathless, and I felt the “squish of infection” and the agony of “breaking” and “tearing” right alongside her as she described her injuries. However, above all else, her conclusion left me with tears in my eyes and my hand on my heart. My dad, like Norris’, is a doctor. Like her, I have countless memories of yelping, “it hurts, Dad!” as he cradles a throbbing ankle or wrist. I recognized one of my most cherished relationships in Norris’ descriptions. That connection prompted me to find her afterwards and let her know how much she had touched me, giving rise to a sweet, if small, connection between Norris and I as well as between me and her words.
Yet as I peruse The Wet Wound and remember that Norris’ father died when she was young, I also recognize that part of her story is seismically different from mine: her grief. Much of Norris’ writing, even more so than I realized through her introduction at “Uncanned Words,” reacts to her father’s death. Based on that context, I believe that Norris does not write in order to connect with audience members who have never lost a parent, like me. Instead, she describes her dad’s care to honor her memory of him.
I did not come to comprehend Norris’ grief by listening to her six-minute reading that Wednesday night. However, my personal investment in her story invited me to hear its unfamiliar themes with increased empathy and care. I left knowing that I had experienced, as one of my friends explains it, the “mirror and window” that the best literature offers—a reflection of myself alongside a glimpse into someone else’s world. For me, that combination, expressed so eloquently through Norris’ words, made “Uncanned Words” a genuine success.
- I did not actually remember this term from Norris’ reading. Instead, I called my dad afterwards and gave him a jumbled description of calcified peas and shock absorption. “That’s the sesamoid bone of the first metatarsal joint,” he told me confidently. Thanks, Dad. ↩︎
Works Consulted
Davidson Arts and Creative Engagement. “Upcoming Arts @ Davidson Events.” Arts at Davidson, 3 February 2025, mailchi.mp/8aefc1c42e97/dace-newsletter-23?e=cae7
d2b795.
Norris, Maddie. “Excerpt from Wet Wound.” Uncanned Words, 5 February 2025, Alvarez 900 Room, Alvarez College Union, Davidson College, Davidson, NC. Creative writing presentation.
Norris, Maddie. The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays. Edited by Nicole Walker, University of Georgia Press, 2024, Athens, GA, www.amazon.com/Wet-Wound-Georgia-Literary-Nonfiction/dp/0820366684. Amazon Prime.
Parker, A.M., et al. Uncanned Words, 5 February 2025, Alvarez 900 Room, Alvarez College Union, Davidson College, Davidson, NC. Creative writing presentations.
Yeung, Anthony Y., et al. “Anatomy, Sesamoid Bones.” StatPearls, 4 April 2023, StatPearls Publishing, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK578171/. National Library of Medicine.
