In Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” the short story starts with the protagonist Anders, an ill-tempered and cynical book critic, caught in the middle of a bank heist interacting with fellow customers and the robbers. In the second half of the story, Anders is shot by one of the bank robbers and the story suddenly swerves into a retelling of his memories and private desires, leaving the linear plot of the story and allowing readers in on some of his backstory. Write a short story that is affected by a major event and causes a shift in the direction of the narrative. How can you dig further into a character’s inner life after a momentous event?

In Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Anodyne,” he writes an ode to his body and its survival, and catalogues the parts of his body that make it his own with lines such as: “I love my crooked feet / shaped by vanity & work” and “The white moons / on my fingernails.” As the poem progresses, the images transform and expand to mythological proportions: “this spleen floating / like a compass needle inside / nighttime, always divining / West Africa’s dusty horizon.” Write an ode to your body that starts with the crooked parts and continues by going past the physical into the mythological.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (Norton, 1934), is a collection of letters written when he was twenty-seven and living and working with the artist Auguste Rodin in Paris. Rilke’s correspondence was with Franz Xavier Kappus, an aspiring nineteen-year-old poet seeking advice. Many scholars say that much of Rilke’s advice to the younger poet is advice he himself received from a more experienced Rodin when they worked together at different points of their career. Write a short series of letters addressed to your younger self. What experiences can you use to encourage your less experienced self?

On August 26, I curated a virtual reading highlighting New Orleans writers to remember, as I said at the event, all the people, all the cultural places, all the businesses, all the family artifacts, all the schools, all the neighborhoods, and the ways of being that were lost physically and dismantled systematically by Hurricane Katrina. It is hard to believe, but August 29 marked the day the levees broke in New Orleans fifteen years ago.

To commemorate the occasion, Dr. Mona Lisa Saloy, Tom Piazza, Alison Pelegrin, José Torres Tama, Lolis Elie, and Asia Rainey read from their work and shared their experiences. Fourteen-year-old New Orleans saxophonist Akeel Salah Muhammad Haroon treated us with a performance to close the evening.

Readings & Workshops program coordinator Ricardo Hernandez, who helped with tech support, said of the event: “The featured readers were all incredible. I was especially moved to hear Lolis Elie read from “The Whys” and I looked up the piece so I could quote it accurately: ‘Some of us came back because we didn’t believe that the insurance company that we’d dutifully paid for decades would cheat us in our hour of gravest need. (If Dante Alighieri had endured the inferno of our flood, he would have kindled a special fire for insurance companies!)’”

Curating this event was fun but challenging, especially with the added pressure of doing this virtually and praying for no tech hiccups. Luckily it all worked out and our virtual audience was pleased. My goal was to highlight all the ways Hurricane Katrina impacted the city’s writers. It was hard to curate because so much is at stake with a reading that represents the loss and trauma of an entire city. I was happy that each writer brought a different voice and perspective to the reading.

Thank you to all of those who joined us on Facebook for the live event. If you missed the reading, you can watch it here. There is also a wonderful piece written by Joshua Barajas for PBS NewsHour about our event.

Writing about Katrina can be painful, but mostly it is a celebration of what makes New Orleans so special. As Saloy says in the PBS NewsHour piece, “We’re not just authors. We are the carriers of our culture.”

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In a 2003 Paris Review article recounting the research for her book Solitude & Company: The Life of Gabriel García Márquez Told With Help From His Friends, Family, Fans, Arguers, Fellow Pranksters, Drunks, and a Few Respectable Souls (Seven Stories Press, 2020), Silvana Paternostro writes about how often the Nobel laureate used facts from his life for classic works such as One Hundred Years of Solitude. The article lists various acquaintances and distant relatives who knew Márquez and offered intimate anecdotes that helped shape an organic portrait. Write a story that acts as a portrait of a single person told through the anecdotes of various characters, distant or familial. What does this narrative mode reveal about the protagonist?

In “Killing My Sister’s Fish” by Sharon Olds, which appears in her 1996 poetry collection, The Wellspring, she writes of a child pouring ammonia into the bowl of her sister’s pet goldfish and ruminates on the action “as if something set in motion / long before I had been conceived / had been accomplished.” Reflect on a time when you did something wrong, or even sinister, as a child and list the physical details of the event. Write a poem that narrates this memory as truthfully as possible and consider why the event remains so vivid in your mind.

In California’s chaparral plant ecosystem, there are dozens of species known as “fire followers”—including tree and fire poppies, whispering bells, phacelia, lupine, poodle-dog bush, and snapdragons—whose growth is triggered after regional fires by changed chemical conditions of charred soil, and fire- or smoke-activated seeds or buds. Write a series of flash nonfiction pieces, each pointing to a small beginning of sorts after a specific event of chaos or destruction in your life. Does each short narrative pick up a thread from an originating incident and carry it toward something new?

In “Yoshitomo Nara Paints What He Hears” by Nick Marino published in New York Times Magazine, Mika Yoshitake, curator of an upcoming retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, says of Nara’s signature paintings blending the cute, innocent, or childish with an ambiguous anger or menace: “People refer to them as portraits of girls or children. But they’re really all, I think, self-portraits.” Write a short story based on a new character, someone who is seemingly very different from yourself but whom you can use as a vehicle for a self-portrait. What are the superficial ways in which this character is disguised, and what are the characteristics or traits that mark the character as undeniably you?