Date: Thu, 31 Dec 1998 10:36:00 -0500 From: "a bibliobibuli! beware, beware!" Subject: [WRITERS] EXERCISE: Pilgrimage (Gilead - 3) Gilead I don't know when it was that I found out that our family was different from other families. There was nothing to point it out. We lived in a house very like the other houses in Socorro. Our pasture lot sloped down just like the rest through arrowweed and mesquite trees to the sometime Rio Gordo that looped around town. And on occasion our cow bawled just as loudly across the river at the Jacobses' bull as all the other cows in all the other pasture lots. And I spent as many lazy days as any other boy in Socorro lying on my back in the thin shade of the mesquites, chewing on the beans when work was waiting somewhere. It never occurred to me to wonder if we were different. That's the third paragraph from Pilgrimage by Zenna Henderson. Copyright 1961, printed by Avon books, New York NY. Here's my challenge. I am posting six other opening paragraphs from the book so there will be seven opening paragraphs that you can use. (Why does this book have seven starting paragraphs? One is from the framing story, the other six are basically stand-alone short stories.) Your job is to write stories starting from Zenna Henderson's paragraphs. Write them, polish them, and send me your best. No more than two stories per author per paragraph (14 stories per author? That's not a limitation, that's an invitation to over extend yourself). Length? Short stories, remember? So, how about 3,000 words max. Remember, send your stories to mbarker@mit.edu so that I can repost them anonymously. I will also put copies on a Web page. Closing date for the last submissions: January 20, 1999 Reading and Voting: January 21 to January 27 Two winners, each to receive a copy of Pilgrimage by Zenna Henderson. and they're sharpening their pencils, flattening out the curled sheets, almost ready to... WRITE! "Take me up into your mind once or twice before I die (you know why: just because the eyes of you and me will be full of dirt some day). Quickly take me up into the bright child of your mind." Edward Estlin Cummings tink