In “Catfishing in Academe,” part of Lucy Ives’s Negative Utopia series published in the Believer, the author writes about her experience with a student’s AI-fabricated writing assignment in an introductory creative writing course. Ives considers the ways language models “threaten worlds” in the ways they “shave language of its messy connections to community, culture, history, poetry, and living bodies.” Spend some time jotting down notes about your favorite words, phrases, slang, or types of language you use with different people in your life. Then write a personal essay that explores how your own, idiosyncratic use of language has “messy connections” to community, culture, and history. How has your use of language evolved to reflect its particular associations with your own living body and those of others around you?

Stories that revolve around a love triangle often presume the presence of would-be binaries: a hero and a villain, the righteous and the evil, the good and the bad. But what happens when the roles are blurred and no one is out to hurt the other? In Ida Lupino’s 1953 drama The Bigamist and the recent dark comedy television series DTF St. Louis, the focus is on the humanity of all three characters within their marriages and the ambiguity of their actions. Taking a cue from the sympathetic nature of these characters, write a short story that involves a love triangle that is similarly even-keeled. How can you experiment with point of view, humor, or dramatic circumstances to create a narrative in which all members of the triangle are imbued with equally powerful traits of complexity and pathos?

In an essay recently published in the Evergreen Review, Eric Dean Wilson writes about discovering the playful use of metaphors in Robert Glück’s 1985 debut novel, Jack the Modernist. While considering what makes one work, Wilson recalls another writer teaching him about metaphor with a metaphor. “A metaphor, the writer said, is like a spark plug,” he says. “At just the right distance, the electrodes cause a spark to arc across the open air, igniting an explosion. The distance between the electrodes matters.” This week compose a poem that cycles through the process of creating an effective metaphor. You might start with the words, “A metaphor is like….” Allow yourself the freedom to play with language that might feel too convoluted as you gradually move toward the right combination to ignite a spark.

“I’ve always thought that art should ultimately be personal,” said artist Melvin Edwards in a 2017 interview published in Frieze magazine. “It may be validating for other people to find that your work reminds them of something else, but it’s much more important for me to keep myself alive creatively, to have the point of departure for whatever I develop be personal.” The first Black sculptor to have a solo art exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York with his provocative, abstract steel forms, Edwards died at the age of eighty-eight on March 30, 2026. This week, think about how you can create an abstract piece of writing. How can writing about something personal develop into expressing a theme, or multiple themes, about the world, whether societal or political? In what ways do inspiration and creative vigor begin with a personal point of departure?

In much of her work, scholar and author of the award-winning book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (Norton, 2019), Saidiya Hartman writes about the silences, gaps, and omissions present in conventional institutional archives that leave out the voices and lives of marginalized people. In her 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts,” published in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, she coined the term “critical fabulation” to describe a research method that combines archival research, critical theory, and storytelling to redresses and reimagine these historical biases. Write a short story that echoes this idea, beginning the process by considering what old textbooks have gotten wrong. What history would you like to retell? How can your story reimagine not only what happened long ago but also imagine a different present?

Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness,” which appears in her 1995 book, Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, begins: “Before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things….” The next two stanzas start similarly with: “Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness / you must travel…” and “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, / you must know sorrow….” Compose a three-stanza poem that takes a cue from this parallel structure, starting the first line of each stanza with: “Before you know _____, you must _____.” Think about a quality, such as kindness, that you highly value and how your understanding of it has changed over time. What are the lessons you have learned and what do you hope to pass on to others?

Have you fallen for fall and left spring on the backburner? According to a recent New York Times article, spring used to be “a special favorite of poets and musicians, who were moved by the lush reawakening of the natural world to express their feelings of love and wonderment in verse and song,” but recent surveys have shown a preference for autumn. With its cozy colors and social media-worthy sweaters, ciders, leaves, and pumpkin spice lattes, the crisp season has moved up in the ranks of popularity. This week write a personal essay about how you have experienced seasons differently at various times in your life. You might consider the value in having fluctuating phases of energy or enthusiasm throughout the year, or in being able to count on cycles of the natural world.

Amnesia, evil twins, baby swaps, love triangles, and fake deaths are common tropes that have been used in American soap operas for decades. According to Jo Walker’s Guardian review of the 2019 South Korean television series Crash Landing on You, which received critical acclaim and gained worldwide popularity after streaming on Netflix, Korean melodrama plot conventions include “forgotten chance meetings, dramatic piggyback rides, and at least one scene per show where the heroine gets totally juiced on beer.” Write a short story that borrows one of these K-drama tropes or a newly discovered one. Give yourself permission to meld “soapy” characteristics with perhaps more nuanced or subtle literary elements. How can the integration of melodrama imbue your story with humor or emotional dynamism?

In a recent piece published on Literary Hub, Maggie Smith describes her writing space—the objects she considers talismans, the furnishings, and accessories that surround her as she works. Some notable items include: her clear desk from CB2, black Uni-Ball Vision Elite pens, an Audre Lorde postcard from a friend, a fortune cookie message, and a card from her high school English teacher. Compose a series of short poems that zero in on a few favorite tools or accoutrements that you like to use or have with you when you write. Include details of the brands, types, and personal touches of each item. What memories are associated with them? How can you combine functional physical descriptions in your verse with thoughtful reflections of what these objects bring to mind?

Frederick Wiseman, the late director renowned for his lengthy documentaries about various American institutions and infrastructures—including Hospital; City Hall; Welfare; Titicut Follies; Near Death; and Belfast, Maine—spoke in a 2015 BOMB magazine interview about how humor is interspersed throughout his films, which are oftentimes incisive exposés of injustice, neglect, and grief. “I think all my films are funny,” said Wiseman. “You find yourself in a lot of situations that are funny. Or sometimes they are both funny and sad. I mean, the best comedy is sad comedy.” Think back to some past experiences that you would characterize as sad or sorrowful and write an essay in which you try to find a thread of humor to draw out. How can sad comedy demonstrate the ways in which human emotions are more complex than at first glance?