A week after his wife died, my father wrote the first piece of writing he'd written in thirty-five years. As in, he hadn't written letters, e-mails, journals, anything but grocery lists and reminders. Knowing this, his wife wrote her own eulogy, and a Death Letter (she'd been terminally ill for a while, so she'd prepared goodbyes for many of the people in her life), and left it for him to find. One of the things she mentioned was that she wished my father had written to people as easily as he'd talked to people. So my father took out an ad in the local paper and wrote a goodbye to his wife.

 The prompt for The Cantab was to write something your father might write to you, had he not communicated with you for thirty-five years.

 Write a poem from the following quote from Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. "It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep"

write a love letter to a fictional person. Not one you made up. Someone from a story, novel, TV show, movie, play or song that meant something to you. Or, barring that, from the perspective of such a character.

The first ever Cantab Tip From The Bar comes from Slammaster, Simone Beaubien, who invites you to turn down an invitation to do something you never planned on doing anyway.