(could also be read as writing prompts)

~ Memoir beginning with detailed narrative description of subject’s rich and fertile childhood slowly disintegrates into list of difficult books he read as an adult.

~ Academic essay, after Moretti, quantifying the extent to which Jackson Pollock’s paintings influenced late-20th-century hairstyles.

~ Story about a mother who develops an allergic reaction to her kids.

~ Story about a character who goes around knocking on the front doors of strange houses, claiming to have once lived there, receiving gracious tours.

~ Monologue spoken by an aging pianist-composer, based on Prokofiev, beginning with the following sentence: My fingers have grown very tired.

~James Joyce might seem to me less dead than most dead but to him he is just as dead as all the rest.

~ “And what do you do?” “I’m a poet.” “Ah, a poet—I’d love to read some of your poetry.” “Sorry, I only write prose.”

~ Now that I have a husband and children I’ll always have a selection of people to choose from upon whom I can blame my life’s failures.

These lines were extracted from Evan Lavender-Smith’s

From Old Notebooks Old Notebooks