A conversation with the creator of three six five, a generative guide to exploring the writerly self

In three six five, writer Lucy Ives presents prompts, acts, and divinations for both aspiring and experienced authors. Her collection of writing exercises opens the door to a new world of possibilities to imagine, think, remember, and write. In this inspiring book talk, Ives traces the lineage of Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit and Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, and invites the reader (and 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, and listening, and by being distracted.

Though there are 365 exercises for writing in this inexhaustible compendium for writing, 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, a tarot deck of acts instead of images, a book of bending hours, a diary of contemplation and imagination, and an antidote to consumption in the shape of care and attention.

Can’t make the event? Pre-order a copy of three six five and we’ll get your book signed for you.

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 an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.