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Final performance by Calderon and Hannah:

Here's how the game goes:
1. Everyone sits in a circle and gets a piece of blank paper. Across the top of the paper, everyone writes a sentence. It should have a subject and an action verb. For example, "A parakeet watches me while I sleep."
2. Hand the piece of paper to your left. Now you have a sentence in front of you. Draw a picture of what the sentence is saying. Don't use any words in your picture!
3. Fold the SENTENCE over, so that you can only see the PICTURE you just drew.
4. Hand the paper to the left. Now you will have a piece of paper with a picture on it. Don't look at the last sentence. Write another sentence below the picture describing what you see.
5. Fold the PICTURE over, so that you can only the see the SENTENCE you just wrote.
6. Hand the paper to your left and repeat the process until someone runs out of room on the paper.
7. Hand the paper to your left one more time. Now everyone has a folded-up piece of paper, which you can unroll.

Here's what emerged for us.

What do you see on the papers? When was there a big change? When was there not much change? What elements of the first sentence, if any, carried through the whole game? What went wrong immediately? Are there any repetitions?

Genres change and emerge in ways similar to how your sentences changed. The poem "The Law of the Law of Genre for Jacques Derrida and Derek Attridge" by M.T.C. Cronan helps us think about this idea.

The first line of the poem is "as soon as I was born I exceeded my mother". Every new person is part of a generation, a genre of people. Every time a new person is born, he or she has some qualities of the generation before, but because the person is new, they are necessarily different. In the same way, the code of genre is constantly being rewritten. Every rewriting is a stretching of the boundaries of the genre; that is, of the genre itself, since a genre is made up of boundaries.

The voice of the poem calls his or her own children "abhorrent possibilities". The new examples of a genre may seem strange at first, but they will eventually become natural because they are replacing the old.

The emergence of a genre is inevitable. Like living species, genres automatically evolve and change. This game depicts a change over time, too. Just by rewriting, change occurred. Every new example of the genre redefines the genre, and every new rewriting of the sentence redefined what the sentence was. The first and last sentences are part of the same genre.