The Time Is Now

In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, A Life in Men, published in the New Yorker, Merritt Tierce self-deprecatingly hypothesizes about the reasons a man she is on a first date with at a restaurant might want to sleep with her even though she had sensed that he “wasn’t blown away by my beauty” when she first walked up. “His kids were with their mother, in Brooklyn, and I was good enough for a Tuesday night,” she writes. Write a personal essay that explores a moment from your past when you felt you weren’t good enough in some way, incorporating a layer of humor to balance the emotional pangs. Include small, specific details to evoke the atmosphere and your mindset from that time. Then consider the insights that you’ve gained now that years have gone by. What have you learned from how you see yourself?

“A saw squeals in the half-built house across the street; a man shouts: Hey hey hey!; a car speeds by on the road out front; the neighbor thuds across the floor on the other side of the wall; a hammer strikes; men speak; a car door slams,” begins Kathryn Scanlan’s story “Study for American Interior (Monday),” published in the Summer 2026 issue of Granta. The story consists of a single dense paragraph, which itself is one long sentence punctuated by a litany of semicolons, creating a portrait of a neighborhood through its sounds. The mentions of “my chair creaks” and “the windows in my room” hint at the narrator perhaps being a writer at their desk. Write a short story composed entirely of a sequence of sounds from someone inside a building listening to the outside world. Even if nothing particularly extraordinary occurs, how can you curate the repetition of sounds to create a feeling?

Once a promising poet, Óscar Restrepo, the protagonist of Colombian filmmaker Simón Mesa Soto’s 2025 film, A Poet, is now middle-aged and unemployed, spending his days wallowing in failure. Óscar is seen crying, drinking, squabbling with family members and other writers, and muddling through attempts at forging a relationship with his teenage daughter. When he starts a new teaching job, he meets and begins mentoring a student who shows prodigious poetic talent and this inspires him to write his first poem in years: “But don’t lose faith yet / In this sad poet / For he is trying to write / A happy poem.” Try composing a poem from the persona of a sad poet attempting to write a happy poem. From where does the sadness spring, and what does happiness look or sound like?

As we approach the season for gratitude, consider the ways in which it’s equally important to express and feel gratitude. “Not only does gratitude improve the well-being of the giver and the recipient, but it may also be good for those who witness it,” writes Christina Caron in the New York Times. “Watching an act of gratitude between two people can cause an observer to feel more warmth and affinity toward them both.” Spend some time reflecting on a time when you have witnessed an act of gratitude; maybe it was someone sincerely thanking another person for providing help in a store or on the street, or an exchange between loved ones in which a specific instance of generosity or assistance was acknowledged. Then, write a personal essay about the memories and thoughts that arise when you explore how this type of grateful interaction makes you feel.

In an interview by Joel Pinckney published on the Creative Independent, Hernan Diaz talks about how the “joy of a beautiful sentence” keeps him writing. “How wonderful that this sentence that never existed, that I don’t dislike, now is here,” says Diaz. “And look at what it’s doing! It’s not only conveying meaning, but maybe it’s mimicking what it’s saying in its own structure, or contradicting what it’s saying. Listen to its music.” Taking inspiration from the multitudinous ways in which a sentence can function, write two vignettes: one that features sentences whose structure mimics its meaning; and one that features sentences that contradict what they’re saying. You might decide to first imagine a character and perspective for each piece, one whose personality or motivations align with the way you’re using the sentences.

“Read a book from the library / Donate to a food pantry ... / Casually research becoming a citizen of a country with free health care / Play a few pickleball matches.” In “Things to Do While Waiting for Midterm Election Results,” published on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Wendi Aarons presents a to-do list of items that are humorous, desperate, mundane, unhinged, and relatable, that together create a sense of the anxiety of waiting tinged with satirical humor. This week compose a poem that takes the form of a list of things to do while waiting for something nerve-wracking—whether personal or on a larger scale. Allow yourself to be playful with imagery and sound, and experimental with spacing, punctuation, and strike-through text.

“A packer faces three obstacles. There’s contingency: a variety of possible futures must somehow be tamed. There’s consumerism: the junk you own needs to be winnowed into a useful curation. And there’s comfort: we want to be cushioned against transit’s sharp points,” writes Joshua Rothman in his essay “Why Can’t You Pack a Bag?” which was published in the New Yorker in 2024. Consider how packing a bag for travel can reveal various aspects of your personality and mindset. Do you tend to be a maximalist or minimalist packer? How do you navigate the constraints of available space against being prepared with clothing and accoutrements necessary for the weather and terrain you will be traversing, and the occasions and activities you expect to experience? In an essay, reflect on times in the past when you were met with packing failures, as well as packing successes.

Rosemary’s Baby, the renowned 1967 horror novel by Ira Levin which was adapted into a film directed by Roman Polanski, takes place in New York City as a young married couple, Rosemary and Guy, move into an apartment building and their relationship to an elderly couple living in the building evolves in horrific ways in parallel to Rosemary’s pregnancy. All the action and suspense takes place in Manhattan, a departure from the settings of rural and small-town environments often used in horror stories, taking advantage of people’s fears of silence, darkness, and potentially foreboding nature. Write a horror story that takes place in a big city. How might the stresses of a busy, densely populated locale, with streets overly crowded with unknown faces and irritatingly intrusive neighbors, create a sense of alienation?

Reflecting on her poem “Bluebeard,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Safiya Sinclair writes, “I was always fascinated with the myth of Bluebeard; the way a man can construct a false image while keeping a hideous secret from the one he claims to love. And how a woman might be so diminished by his falsehood that she begs for her own destruction.” Select a myth, fable, or fairy tale, and focus on its darker aspects, seeking out any evocative themes of duplicity, betrayal, vengeance, or destruction. Reflect on the layers of complexity that the darkness brings to the narrative and see if you can connect it to your own life experiences. Compose a poem that brings the mythological story into a more contemporaneous reality, incorporating especially resonant archetypal characters and dynamics, and allowing yourself to delve into a variety of sounds, textures, and imagery.

When Anne Carson, who was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize for Literature, was asked in a Penn Review interview about her 2015 poem “Each Day Unexpected Salvation (John Cage),” in which the word shade is used forty-four times, she responded that the repetitive gesture was not so much an intentional act of decreation as it was “probably more mechanical, a matter of turning the head and seeing different things with the same head.” Compose a short lyric essay that encapsulates a resonant feeling of this past year and takes a cue from Carson with the repetition of a single word throughout the piece to see different things in, or ways into, your main themes. How can you open interpretation to have meanings ranging from the literal, to the metaphorical, to the oblique or nonsensical? How does the repetition accumulate to present a kaleidoscopic portrait of your state of mind?