Findings from a study in Peru, published earlier this year in the journal Ecosphere, reported that for the first time single individuals of ocelot and opossum were “associating and moving together in the rainforest”—two species generally occupying positions of predator and prey instead choosing to spend time hanging out together. Scientists aren’t quite certain about the reason but have conjectured that there might be something symbiotic about the cooperation that benefits both animals as they hunt for other prey. Write a personal essay that examines the experiences you’ve had with a friend with whom the relationship might seem unexpected or inexplicable. How did you meet and what were the factors that drew you together despite your differences?

A single father living quietly with his daughter in a small mountain village in Japan finds his day-to-day routine and peaceful, self-sufficient existence disrupted by real estate developers in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2023 film Evil Does Not Exist. The collaborative systems of care and mutual exchange that characterize the villagers’ way of life clash with the corporation’s focus on capitalist profit, and the delicate balance of nature and civilization is called into question. This week write a short story that revolves around the disturbance of a balance between nature and culture. You might find it helpful to begin by brainstorming specific areas in your chosen setting where the natural environment and human-made spaces depend on each other or have had to adjust to make way for the other. What are the ramifications of a disruption to this balance?

“Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot?” In Samuel Beckett’s 1952 play Waiting for Godot, which has a new production on Broadway starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, Vladimir and Estragon spend their days waiting for the arrival of someone named Godot, who never shows up. They pass the time with repetitious exchanges of banter, arguments, and musings. The ambiguity of their exact circumstances, as well as who Godot is and what would happen with Godot’s arrival, creates a tragicomic exploration of the nature and purpose of existence, and the significance of friendship and faith. Write a poem that uses the idea of an eternal waiting—for someone, or something—as an entry point to reflect on larger themes of life’s big questions.

The Gilded Age, the HBO television series created by Julian Fellowes, chronicles the lives of a cast of characters living in 1880s New York City, including servants and maids living and working in the garden-level quarters of brownstone mansions, wealthy inhabitants of Manhattan from both old and new money, and Black families living in Brooklyn who reach levels of affluence in the post-Reconstruction period. Together, the characters create a layered portrait of a city where diverse classes come into often conflicted interaction. Write a personal essay that examines your own class status, reflecting on how it manifests in your encounters in society with friends, coworkers, family, and others. How have financial matters evolved through past generations in your family to bring you to where you are today?

Known for his postmodern satirical novels filled with secret conspiracies and government plots, Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Shadow Ticket, out this week from Penguin Press, begins in Depression-era Milwaukee and follows a private detective whose search of a runaway cheese heiress gets him entangled with the Chicago mafia, the Bureau of Investigation, British intelligence, Nazism, and international capitalist conspiracies. This week write a short story that makes use of a current event that might seem absurd or stranger than fiction, spinning off from the actual details of the real event into something weirder. How can you inject humor into a story that gestures to real concerns about paranoia and dysfunctional politics?

For the Poetry Society of America’s “In Their Own Words” series, Suzanne Buffam writes about her poem “Trying,” which circles around the effort to conceive a child. “The poem became, in a sense, a meditation on effort, in which the suspension of effort was the aim of my efforts,” writes Buffam. “I gave myself one constraint. Each paragraph I wrote would have to contain some form of the verb ‘to try.’” Taking inspiration from Buffam’s constraint for her piece, compose a poem that explores your process trying to reach a goal, whether big or small, tangible or more abstract. Play around with different forms of the verb “to try,” or another verb that gestures at effort, paying careful consideration to how the word conveys a sensation of persistence over the course of time and through various obstacles and setbacks.

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley is a documentary directed by Amy J. Berg about the musician who died suddenly at the age of thirty in 1997, having only released one studio album, of which the single “Hallelujah,” a cover of Leonard Cohen’s song, was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry. Buckley’s biological father, a folk musician who rose to fame in the 1960s, died at the age of twenty-eight, and Berg explores the enduring status and mythos created around artists’ lives cut short, the idea of a suspended perfection mixed with the incomplete feeling of never enough. Think of an artist who seems to exist in a mythical state, perhaps because their popularity was short-lived or due to a mysterious or debated circumstance in their life. Write an essay that examines your interest in your chosen subject and reflect on the stories surrounding their life that perpetuates its mystery.

In Vaim (Transit Books, 2025) by Nobel Prize–winning author Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls, one might search for certainty and stability in vain as the fishing village from which the novel gets its title is not a place in the real world, and perhaps not even a real place within the world of the book. Ania Szremski, senior editor of 4Columns, describes the novel as a “a book of amphibolous belief” with a protagonist who “wavers between ‘yes’ and ‘no.’” Write a short story that revolves around a character who inhabits a place that may or may not really exist. In Fosse’s book, the protagonist’s motorboat grounds the reader while the use of shifting points of view and lack of punctuation can be unsettling. How do you inject your own story with both stabilizing and destabilizing elements to create tension and momentum?

“Forget about apples and oranges—nothing rhymes with orange anyway. Never mind those plums that William Carlos Williams sneaked from the icebox. The most poetic fruit of all is the blackberry,” writes A. O. Scott, critic at large for the New York Times Book Review, citing blackberry-inclusive works by poets such as Margaret Atwood, Emily Dickinson, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, Galway Kinnell, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Sylvia Plath. Compose a poem inspired by what you consider the most poetic fruit, describing the textures and tastes of your selection, and its associations in the world and in other works of art. Spend some time thinking about the name of the fruit itself, its sounds and component parts and etymological roots. Does conjuring words and phrases that recall the qualities of the fruit take your poem in a surprising or unexpected direction?

In the new thriller miniseries Black Rabbit, created by Zach Baylin and Kate Susman, Jude Law plays a restaurateur whose life is turned upside down with the sudden return of his brother, played by Jason Bateman. Their historically fraught bond spins into a vortex of the consequences of past betrayals and catastrophes, and the violence of the criminal underworld. Write a personal essay that explores your relationship with a sibling or someone with whom you share a close, long-standing relationship that may have similar elements of inextricable intimacy and rivalry. Incorporate memories of the experiences that have tied you together, as well as circumstances that have been challenging because of your closeness. What are the differences in your personalities that might have, at varied times, created complementary, synergistic energy and also been the root cause of clashes?