Group 1

There were times, in my childhood, when I was sure I had forgotten how to
breathe, and concentrating on the sheer mechanics of it – a set of matching
velvety billows inside my chest, draw in, release – always carried me further
away from the automatic function. But I highlighted the same paragraph I
would always have highlighted, my heart leaped in the same place it always
would have. And now, writing this, the tesserae are moving into place the
way they always do, as if they are aware of the pattern they ought to be
making – little red cells arranging themselves into an organism, the stars and
spots and animalcules that swarm together to make up vision. I used to be
able to do this, I know I used to be able to do this, I will be able to do it
again.

Group 2
The Cabaret’s plywood-panelled walls are hung with deer antlers, Old
Milwaukee beer promos, and mawkish paintings of game birds taking flight.
Tendrils of cigarette smoke rise from clumps of farmers in overalls and dusty
feed caps, their tired faces as grimy as coal miners’. Speaking in short,
matter-of-fact phrases, they worry aloud over the fickle weather and fields of
sunflowers still too wet to cut, while above their heads Ross Perot’s*
sneering visage flickers across a silent television screen. In eight days the
nation will elect Bill Clinton president. It’s been nearly two months now
since the body of Chris McCandless turned up in Alaska.
 Group 3
"It was mid-October, the harvest well stored. The sun was as hot as if it shone
in the first week of September, but a tumbling sky threw great clouds before
the wind, and when the sun was obscured then all the promise of winter was
in the air. But it was magic weather, a gift to sweeten the sadness of the
ending year. There were still blackberries, thick and dripping with juice, but
these would remain on the bushes, for by now, as it was said, the Devil had
spat on them and they should not be eaten. So birds gorged themselves, and
the ground and the leaves of the brambles were strewn with purple droppings.
The water, half shadow and half glitter, threw back the colours of beech and
bracken tossing them over the boulders like gold and copper coins."

Group 4
Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky
after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester
Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas,
thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana. My mother
named me William Jefferson Blythe III after my father, William
Jefferson Blythe Jr., one of nine children of a poor farmer in Sherman,
Texas, who died when my father was seventeen. According to his
sisters, my father always tried to take care of them, and he grew up to
be a handsome, hardworking, fun-loving man.