The Butterfly Hours: Transforming Memories into Memoir

We all have stories to tell, and Patty Dann can help you bring them forth. With prompts and rules for writing, discover the power and pleasure of writing from your life.

For twenty-five years, writer Patty Dann has taught a class on memoir writing at the West Side YMCA. By offering simple prompts, such as food or bicycle, Dann invites her students to pluck memories from their lives that can be turned into larger stories. She’s taught butchers and bakers and bodybuilders who hail from Brooklyn, Bialystok, and Beirut. She taught a student who declared on her first day of class, I am going to write my head off. This book offers up fifty of Dann’s writing prompts, organized into ten rules of writing and adorned with stories from Dann’s own life and from the lives of her students. This book is meant to inspire and excite you so that, day by day, page by page, you too will write your head off.