In her book Walk Two Moons, Sharon Creech repeatedly uses the phrase “trying to catch fish in the air” to mean trying to achieve the impossible, when disillusionment is a much more likely situation. And as a writer with an idea, she doesn't just leave us there, no. Sharon Creech takes this concept of "trying to catch fish in the air" and gives it the form of a picture book (her first) in collaboration with the wonderful art of Chris Raschka. Inside the pages of Fishing in the Air, the world of imagination becomes a place where the similes and metaphors of memory are the storytellers of the mind's eye.
Now let's write.
Visit our Pinterest Write it board and scroll through until you find a boy flying through the air on a shimmering orange fish. Start imaging. Where is the boy on the fish headed? What might his "fish in the air be"? What impossibility is he trying to make possible? Now, choose one of your personal "fish in the air" and describe it in a poem or vignette. What would happen if you actually caught one of those "fish in the air and rode" it where you pleased? Write about what would happen if you caught your singular fish in the air? What would happen if you caught five of your fish in the air? What kind of day would that be like?
Example:
Daydreaming
I usually think of it when I’m in line
usually somewhere in the steaming depths
of an amusement park in the summer,
somewhere in the crush of bodies slippery
with sweat and sunscreen. Or I think
of it somewhere in the musty belly
of the library basement, when I look up
from radio static of black words
on pallid page, into the one dim bulb
flickering like a sleepy eyelid.
When it’s been ten hours driving down
a straight road, and the car’s air
is a soup brought to a slow boil,
I shift in my place between the luggage
and the door, stare out the window
at particularly inviting cloud,
climb its towering pillar as my feet
make deep imprints in its soft stairs,
and perch on the very tip, where birds
pass each other with a faint rustle of wings.
-Constance