Graywolf Lab

Below is an excerpt of the introduction to three six five: prompts, acts, divinations, a collection of a year’s worth of exercises for writing——three-hundred and sixty-five in total——forthcoming from Siglio Press in early 2026. This excerpt is followed by nine exercises for your use and delectation. You may preorder the book, which includes illustrations by the artist Nick Mauss and an index, here.

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Once upon a time, I thought I was a machine for writing.

Laugh if you want, but it’s true. This wasn’t something you could see with bare eyes, and I would never have shared this predilection with you, even if you’d asked me. What machine-like qualities did I possess? I’m not sure if I came equipped with a QWERTY keyboard or character-space endowed display, but for sure I was an item of technology, my sole setting: Graphomania!! I was an early means of inscription on certain days, if you can believe it——a mere stylus or twig trailing water on hot rock. I was process. I was the dream of an alphabet. I generated difference.

Imagining I was a machine for writing felt good. That’s why I did it. It felt like a relief or good mental game. I engaged in the fantasy nonstop. Being a machine for writing spared me the necessity of being a person, which was an activity that felt not good, nor easy, nor, moreover, possible. “Being a person is a specific kind of art,” I wrote in a poem when I was about twenty-five. This was not an art I liked to practice.

Personness was, in fact, agony. It was a condition I experienced, at a fundamental level, as a form of disenfranchisement. I tried to convince myself that it might nevertheless be a project with a method. As a machine for writing, perhaps I could become acquainted with that method and live life somewhat successfully. Perhaps I’d be able to pass as human by camouflaging my mechanistic activities as art.

Fast forward to the present: I’m not a machine anymore and I wasn’t one then, when I fantasized about it. Today I’m mostly a skeptic with a smartphone. I am interested in philosophy, poetics (which is to say, making, broadly defined), and reduction of harm (a phrase I’m also using in a broad way). Maybe the third item on this list goes without saying or isn’t supposed to be said. Certainly, it’s far from clear that writing itself is fundamentally liberating or kind. The contemporary era is beset with forces who want to convince us that language can be lossless-ly quantified and, meanwhile, that the end user’s desire is a semi-agricultural product to be relentlessly harvested, free to the taker. I have no doubt that some of the most insidious voices among this crowd are folks who once wanted to write a “great novel.” But given novels require vulnerability as well as certain kinds of ethical reckoning, they do this instead. They push us toward their post-literate utopia.

I understand their jealousy, if not their conclusions. As a former machine, I can relate. Not having a point of view is an extremely curious thing, although it’s something we speak about casually all the time. Not having a point of view is a form of forgetting you must learn. Someone must teach it to you, or you must acquire it, from a family, school, nation, boss, and so on. It isn’t a default. Oh, and one of the other things you must learn is to forget that you forgot——and then to forget that you forgot that you forgot. Ad infinitum. The work is never complete. This is why there are so many movies about the failure of implanted memory; one can never fully close that door.

Q. So what kind of memory are you interested in, Lucy? A. The kind of memory in which forgetting is permitted. Forgetting hasn’t been sundered from this memory. They live together, messy and contentious roommates. This is not the instrumentalized memory of data-become-information, nor is it idealized memory like the kind Socrates, Plato, & co. tore their beards out about and insisted everyone sublimate toward. This is something more fallen and frighteningly available. It already belongs to you. You have endless amounts. You can never run out. You’re human.

I really believe that writing is related to survival and, more specifically, to the survival of intuition. This is the survival of that which cannot be fully assimilated——as information or truth. Intuition is, additionally, a human thing that is not scarce and cannot become scarce, even amid the most tyrannical austerities. Intuition is previous to institutional forms. It’s occult, which is to say it is a recessive feature of human agency. Its exercise is not direct. It entails guessing, faith, risk, patience, cunning, awe, doubt, trust, hope, mystification, uncertainty, acceptance, and occasionally doing nothing at all (among other modalities). You have not forgotten intuition, although you may have learned that you did. Please find in these exercises some suggestions for how to unlearn this forgetting, should that be your wish.

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Exercise for Habitation

This is a versatile exercise, one that may be used both for creating new texts and for revising preexisting descriptions and narratives.

If starting from scratch, see how far you can take this act of recollection.

The process:

1. Think of a garment, vehicle, room, or other relatively intimate container for your body that you no longer possess or have access to.

2. Now consider a pocket, compartment, drawer, closet, corner, or small enclosure within your response to 1.

3. Using your memory and/or imagination, make a detailed inventory of the contents of this small enclosure. Do your best to make this inventory as accurate as possible, (re)creating the space, textures, and feelings it evokes.

4. From your inventory, select one item that seems in some way charged, full, or otherwise significant.

5. Write the “life story” of this item——where it came from, how it came to you and why, what purpose it served, where it went, its future.

Perforations

This is a thought for notetaking. It is additionally a way to check in regarding the multiplicity of times we inhabit, even without our full recognition of these times/habitations.

Carry an index card or small notebook with you one day wherever you go. Whenever you find yourself thinking of the past, write down the year/date/time of day (or anything you can piece together to approximately index this), along with the time when you had this thought.

e.g., “July 20-something, 2023, afternoon, X poses near statue——11:12am”

Keep the practice going for at least twelve hours.

See what emerges.

Short-Term Memory

Walk to a place where you can sit for a while undisturbed.

Now, write a detailed account of how you got there.

The shorter the trip, the longer the account should be.

As Many Lists

Sit in a circle at a table with a group. Each person should have a blank piece of paper and a writing implement. At the top of their paper, each person writes a title for a list. Common list titles include:

TO DO:

Groceries

Top 10 Albums of All Time

States I Have Visited

ADORABLE ANIMALS

Most Embarrassing Moments

Lost Loves

For Immediate Shredding

And so on. It is of course fine to choose a more unusual title for your list.

It may be helpful to have a timekeeper who will abstain from creating a list.

Now everyone passes their list to their left. You have ten seconds to add an item to the list before you must pass it to your left again. This process continues for however long and at however fast or slow a rate as the timekeeper and/or participants see fit. It is not necessary to supply items for the list that make perfect sense. Sometimes you may not have enough time to think carefully about what you are writing, and this can be interesting. When the lists have become sufficiently long, they should be read aloud. All entries to the lists are considered anonymous.

Exercise for Recovery of Joy

Draw up a list of mistakes, large and small, that you have made across the duration of your life. Try to write about each mistake in a careful and exhaustive way. Give them names, if you like. This may take a while. It’s also OK if the mistakes start to resemble one another and you must start over, describing a single mistake, or if each mistake fragments into multiples. Gather them as best you can.

When you are done with your list, you won’t be able to go back in time. Sorry about that. However, you can save your list as a resource, write about one or more of the mistakes, give them to a character to hold for you while you do something else, or bury or drown or set the list on fire, share it with a trusted friend.

Under Erasure

Formulate a question. Ask about the future or something you are having difficulty understanding.

Now, find a text someone has discarded. You could look in the recycling bin or find a book abandoned on a stoop, etc.

You might xerox this item, tear out a page, etc.

Use a pen or something else to cross letters and words out, until new sense emerges, perhaps in response to your original question or bearing this question in mind.

On the Museum’s Ruins

When I was a teenager, I went to museums and galleries after school on Fridays and made pencil sketches of works of art (I had seen people do this in movies about the nineteenth century). After a while, I stopped making these reproductions and started using words to reproduce paintings and other things. (Strangers comment on sketches and not always kindly. Words are easier to hide.)

It interested me that during these exercises inevitably I would stop writing about the work of art and start writing about something else. I became obsessed with this moment of transition.

Here are two prompts for repurposing the space of the museum.

1. Museum-as-clock: Someone recently told me a story about someone they know who goes to visit the same work of art at the same museum at the same time on the same day every week. This person has done this every week at the same time for more than a decade. Straightforward and yet somehow terrifying! I imagine this practice holds a few possibilities for writing, including writing a single episodic, diaristic, or epistolary book that will only be completed at the end of one’s life. Or maybe a year of visits would be enough. A month.

2. Add an object to the museum.

Lore

In a class or on your own (working with people you know), gather local legends and myths, beliefs about charms and coincidence and the uncanny, authorless songs, rhymes recited for fun or for ritual purposes, rituals, spells, notions about supernatural possibilities, hauntings, and games you learned and participated in as a child. Make an encyclopedia of these practices and orientations. Write something based on what you learn——and what this research allows you to imagine.

Exercise for Escapists

Choose a topic.

Now write a very short essay or poem about a very short essay or poem you will write on this topic.

Explain what the very short essay or poem on the topic will be about, what it will consist of——name chapters, styles you will employ, words and metaphors, subject matter, arguments, interpretations the reader will certainly arrive at, and so on. Use the space of the very short essay or poem to exhaustively detail the very short essay or poem you will write on the topic. Whatever you do, do not actually write the very short essay or poem on the topic. Write only the very short essay or poem on the very short essay or poem on the topic.