1) Where are you from? Why?
In the beginning, Memphis, where Dad attended seminary; two years later, St. Louis, where Dad founded a church; eleven years later, Arkansas, where Dad joined supportive friends after leaving his church. Ever since, all over, for education, work, hijinks, and educational work hijinks.
2) Generate a relevant formula.
Awe plus intellect plus pity equals art.
3) On your blog it says that you’re “working on materials for…literature and writing classes.” Is it possible to teach someone else to write fiction well? If so, how? If not, why? If both, hurray?
Teaching someone how to write a sentence well suffices because the best fiction is comprised of the best sentences. Bad sentences—clichés, platitudes, unquestioned assumptions, or overgeneralizations, for example—reflect the same in the writer’s mind, and so students can and must learn how to avoid writing bad sentences in order to learn how to write fiction well. One of my favorite methods of teaching includes leading students to masterful authors they’ll love. Hurray!
4) Is anything eternal?
Metaphor.
5) Please write three sentences, each of them syntactically incorrect but semantically meaningful.
Happen can anything. Different looks everything where. Page the of side other the on.
6) What is there, and what should we do about it?
Life, and enjoy it.
7) Try and isolate a specific, distinct emotion that you had today and illustrate it through whatever means you think best.
*Jordy Fu
Over twenty of Lydia’s stories have appeared in print or online literary journals, and last year, one of those stories received a Pushcart Prize nomination. She is currently working on a novel, more stories, reviews and such for The Chattahoochee Review, and materials for her literature and writing classes. Her blog is here.
The point about cliches is excellent. Whenever I see “You’ve heard it a million times,” I want to ask the writer to count to a million.