three six five: prompts, acts, divinations

by Lucy Ives, Nick Mauss (Illustrator)

For both aspiring and experienced authors, Ives' collection of writing exercises opens the door to a new world of possibilities to imagine, think, remember and write

Though there are 365 exercises for writing in this book, 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. Tracing the lineage of Yoko Ono's Grapefruit and Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, Lucy Ives here offers encouragement, candor and a deep appreciation for the vagaries, wonders and challenges of writing life. These prompts―in alchemical combinations with drawings by Nick Mauss―offer ways to become a (better) writer through observation, reorientation, inquiry, play and engagement with the world and its inhabitants. They invite the 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, listening and by being distracted.

Genres: Writing, Crafts, Nonfiction

416 pages, Hardcover

First published May 5, 2026

About the author

Lucy Ives is the author of several books of poetry and short prose, including The Hermit and the novella nineties. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Lapham’s Quarterly, and at newyorker.com. For five years she was an editor with the online magazine Triple Canopy. A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. She teaches at the Pratt Institute and is currently editing a collection of writings by the artist Madeline Gins.