Peggy told us it was time we started making up our own prompts. Our homework assignment for tomorrow is to write down an assignment on a slip of paper. (I think I can see where this is going.) In class, she had us write something repeating one of two phrases: I can’t understand or I never understood.

David had us read our direct and indirect conversations from last week. Our homework is to write a third version with no more than 2 lines of dialog.

Jeanne read us a poem in the persona of John Muir, all one sentence. (Peggy suggested we write a one-sentence poem of about the same length–considerable. For homework, we have to find a character from myth or a fairy tale. Our class exercise was to write on “What formed you.” It could be an incident, a landscape, peaple, creatures, experience, trauma, food, institutions, work, play…

Afternoon we spent with those people only taking the single class. Peggy, I don’t have notes on what you did–please comment. David quoted from Flannery O’Conner about mystery and manners being the essential points of a story. He had us invert characters (age, gender, jog, favorite item of clothing, favorite food, contents of refrigerator, the worst thing they’ve ever said, and a secret. Then we had to copy it and excnage extra copies with others in the class, so each had two characters. Finally, write a conversation between the two, starting with “I have to get this off my chest.” Only he kept changing where the conversation was to take place–speeding car, Alaskan woods, inn a very slow drivethrough lane at McDonald’s, in a library with homeless min sitting near the water fountain. The idea was that the setting would change the nature of the conversation.

Finally, Jeanne gave us the poem, “Bike Ride with Older Boys” by Laura Kasischke. She then had us write down several things we hadn’t done, pick one at random, and write about it.