For the first Next Line, Please contest of 2015, David Lehman invites readers to finish a paragraph that he's begun with a provocative sentence fragment. Here's how Lehman introduces the challenge:
I like keeping a notebook in which I scribble down overheard dialogue, a pun or a typo that catches my eye, lists of similes, possible opening lines for poems or stories. Sometimes I find myself lifting just a part of the opening sentence of a book—the first part. I delete the rest and with the passage of time, I can approach it as a literary problem to be creatively solved.
Continue reading and compose your paragraph over at the American Scholar. Deadline: Midnight, January 11.
\The winner will receive a copy of The Best American Poetry 2014.
— sdh