three six five: prompts, acts, divinations (an inexhaustible compendium for writing)

For both aspiring and experienced authors, Ives' collection of writing exercises opens the door to a new world of possibilities to imagine, think, remember and write Though there are 365 exercises for writing in this book, three six five is not simply a book of writing exercises. It is a "how-to" book of questions rather than answers, a diary of contemplation and imagination, an ars poetica of expanding possibility. Tracing the lineage of Yoko Ono's Grapefruit and Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, Lucy Ives here offers encouragement, candor and a deep appreciation for the vagaries, wonders and challenges of writing life. These prompts—in alchemical combinations with drawings by Nick Mauss—offer ways to become a (better) writer through observation, reorientation, inquiry, play and engagement with the world and its inhabitants. They invite the writer to learn and unlearn, to mine memory and forgetting, to enter impossible spaces and create new ways of telling time, to inhabit multiple, other and conflicting perspectives, to discover the elasticity of language and its constraints, to write by drawing, walking, listening and by being distracted. Lucy Ives is a novelist, poet and critic. Her essay collection, An Image of My Name Enters America, won the 2024 Vermont Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. She has taught at Brown, Cornell and New York Universities and received a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.