If you haven’t read the first part of my post on A Promise of Salt, you might want to start here.
3. Use of whitespace
A hermit-crab story is one that appropriates an existing form such as a how-to article or a math exam. Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola write this:
[The hermit-crab essay] deals with material that seems born without its own carapace — material that is soft, exposed, and tender, and must look elsewhere to find the form that will best contain it.
A Promise of Salt isn’t a hermit crab story, but Miseck uses form (and in this case liberal whitespace) for this same purpose. Throughout the book (in most cases), a few self-contained lines sit at the top of each page. The whitespace that follows gives the reader time to reflect on (and recover from) what they’ve just read. Hermit crab shells provide boundaries. Miseck’s use of whitespace provides boundaries and space at the same time.
I won’t give it away, but on one memorable page, a single word tells us the name of Sheila’s killer. When I read this the first time, I went back and reread the previous page several times, turning the page to read the name each time, the experience so memorable I’ve never forgotten the name.
“A Promise of Salt is like listening to a lone violin, each note illuminating anguish, each line laid down with overtones of grace. She has made song of sorrow. She has done what should be impossible to do.”
— Eunice Scarfe
4. Use of micro-scenes
If you’ve never heard the term micro-scene, that’s because it’s my creation. I needed a term to communicate the concept to my students. That term is “micro-scene.” A micro-scene is a scene fragment that tells a complete story.
In A Promise of Salt, there is one micro-scene that can stand in for all of them:
The girls stood at the foot of my bed, said, “Mom, please come back.”
A single snippet of dialogue, a single image, but in this case, anything more would be too much.
Maybe this scene connected with me so strongly because I have two daughters myself, but I think it’s more than that. The scene is poignant, yes. But it’s so tightly compressed that it hits you like a clenched fist to the face. It’s the compression and concision that make this passage so moving.
I won’t over-explain it. Just read the book. You’ll see what I mean.
Roberta Laurie 