“It’s always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.”

“A week after his wife died, my father wrote the first piece of writing he’d written in thirty-five years. As in, he hadn’t written letters, e-mails, journals, anything but grocery lists and reminders. Knowing this, his wife wrote her own eulogy, and a Death Letter (she’d been terminally ill for a while, so she’d prepared goodbyes for many of the people in her life), and left it for him to find. One of the things she mentioned was that she wished my father had written to people as easily as he’d talked to people. So my father took out an ad in the local paper and wrote a goodbye to his wife.”

Write something your father might write to you, had he not communicated with you for thirty-five years.

Write a poem based around a completely fictional fact or set of facts about an animal.

Write a poem about the death of a dog.

Write about a creepy or disturbing video or book about animals; pick something true (i.e. the Thirty Hornets vs. Thirty Thousand Bees video on Youtube).

Write about a time you were picked last.