The Time Is Now

In Sam Needleman’s recent interview with essayist and novelist Darryl Pinckney, published in the Paris Review’s Art of Nonfiction series, he is asked about James Baldwin’s singularity. “Baldwin has this unmistakable voice. The appeal is that it’s at once literary and speakerly,” says Pinckney. “I think the writers, the essayists I’m drawn to have that quality.” This week think of a nonfiction writer whose voice strikes you as sounding distinctively original. Write an essay that attempts to investigate how their individuality is expressed through their use of language and specific observations. Can you pinpoint specific nuances about their writerly style? How does their writing communicate in both literary and “speakerly” ways?

A pivotal scene in the first season of Jacob Tierney’s hit television series Heated Rivalry, an adaptation of Rachel Reid’s Game Changers queer hockey romance novel series, occurs when Russian hockey star Ilya invites his Canadian rival Shane to his house for the first time in their relationship and offers to make him a tuna melt. While the scene lasts less than a minute and the actual assembly of the sandwich is not even depicted, the notably caring gesture struck a chord with fans, inspiring new attention to—and even recipes for—the unassuming sandwich. Write a short story in which an act of care, perhaps revolving around the sharing of food, communicates something significant about your characters’ personalities, states of mind, or relationship. Does this simple act melt hearts?

“You were almost apologetic when you said it today. / We were having coffee, checking e-mail, & the grapefruit / Juice shone with pulp,” begins Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s poem “I Might Not Be Here,” published this month in the New Yorker. The five words in the poem’s title have presumably been spoken by the narrator’s spouse, the “you” addressed throughout the poem, and the tension of those words hover over the scene. Later, the narrator remarks, “Five words / Stalk my future with you.” The poem shifts between details of the room where the words were uttered to thoughts related to senescence and the trajectory of love, life, and art. Write a poem that expounds on a short sentence that carries a lot of weight between two people. Recount details of the place in which the words were said to sit in the moment.

In her essay “Creativity as resistance,” published on the Creative Independent, Kemi Ajisekola makes a case for creative work as a powerful tool to instigate transformation within cultures and point out what’s wrong, noting that “creativity isn’t a retreat from reality. It’s one of the ways reality gets reshaped.” Take some time to think up a short list of specific things around you that need to be changed, whether within the systems and structures in your immediate community or society at large. Write a personal essay that points out what’s broken and envisions where a new direction could take us. Can you imagine innovative ways to demonstrate care? How do your personal values come into play for these hopeful plans?

“Upside Down, Anyways,” “An Economy of a Murder,” “The Beauty and the Shed,” “Bend Over Pac-Man,” and “The Big Girl” are all mistaken movie titles that theatergoers have requested to see according to a box office staff in New York who has kept track of these amusing and sometimes perplexing blunders. The correct titles are, respectively, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Anatomy of a Fall, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Bend It Like Beckham, and The Beguiled. Take inspiration from one of these wrong movie titles, or perhaps a mistake of your own or one that you’ve overheard, and write a short story that follows the direction of the erroneous phrase. What would happen if Pac-Man was a source of inspiration for a soccer film? How would “an economy of a murder” be explained? Allow yourself to be experimental with humor and imagery, perhaps moving toward a fabulist or speculative mode.

In Sanam Sheriff’s poem “The Emperor Pats His Lips with a Napkin,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, each line ends with renditions of the words, “object” and “subject,” a constraint the poet uses as a kind of outline. “Given that you are the object / of the emperor’s touch; given that you object // to his learnt repetition of love; given the abject / shame of a body entered by another body’s object // permanence,” begins Sherrif’s poem. Using a similar type of constraint, compose a poem that plays with different renditions of words that stem from the same or parallel roots. Play with the different verb tenses and homophonic meanings of your chosen words to paint your own portrait.

For the past several decades, artist Gordon Henderson, also known as Nib Geebles, has created yearly calendars featuring pen-and-paint illustrations of unremarkable yet distinctive buildings that he and his partner Abira Ali see on their everyday walks around their local Los Angeles neighborhoods. Hand-painted signage, unpolished and derelict storefronts, strip-mall parking lots, powerlines, and graffiti are all celebrated in this year’s “Unknown Landmarks” calendar. Brainstorm and jot down a list of some of your favorite storefronts and facades that make up the landscape where you live or work. Write a lyric essay that details a handful of these sights, reflecting on how they create a vivid portrait of your local atmosphere. What are the small, distinguishing or idiosyncratic features that give these locales an “unknown landmark” status?

Whether created due to convenience or to traverse through mounds of snow, desire paths are made when people diverge from official walkways to get to their desired destination, and others follow along. It might be a trail of worn grass beside a concrete walkway or a narrow, squiggly line through unplowed snow. “Desire lines are inherently subversive. They remind us that we have a choice, and that we can veer away from what was laid out for us. And the paths are personal, uneven and meandering,” writes Anna Kodé in a recent New York Times article. Write a short series of vignettes that imagines the first person who created a certain desire path, and the subsequent users of that pathway. What are the motivations of the characters who go off the beaten path?

Alison McAlpine’s fifteen-minute-long documentary, perfectly a strangeness, follows a posse of three donkeys as they traverse the barren landscape of the Atacama Desert in Chile and happen upon an astronomical observatory on top of a mountain. While there is no dialogue, the movements of the donkeys, their expressive ears, and the mechanized motions of the observatory satellites, combined with the setting sun giving way to a night sky, offer an expansive range of interpretations and discovery. McAlpine, who was a poet before she was a filmmaker, says in an interview for Deadline, “Seeing these donkeys grazing besides these billion-dollar beasts, these metallic domes, I asked a question, how do they see this world?” Write a narrative poem without human presence that attempts to convey the perspective of an animal, or other living thing, discovering the universe for the first time. What diction seems most effective at producing the wonder you wish to evoke?

Scientists studying chacma baboons in Namibia have recently reported findings that seem to demonstrate young baboons expressing feelings of jealousy, particularly in situations where they encounter their mothers grooming a younger sibling. One researcher observed a jealous baboon’s use of trickery, luring her sister away from her mother by pretending to play with her and then taking her spot in her mother’s arms. Think back to an incident in your own life when you felt jealous because attention was being paid to someone else. Write a personal essay that reflects on your emotions at the time and your relationships with each of the people involved. You might meditate on more general ideas of jealousy as well—are there possible benefits of it from an evolutionary standpoint?