In the film Project Hail Mary, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and adapted from Andy Weir’s 2021 novel of the same name, a science teacher is sent aboard an interstellar spacecraft to investigate a star that may hold the key to fight off a celestial parasite damaging the sun and threatening mass extinction on Earth. As the sole survivor of the three-man crew, he must attempt a “Hail Mary,” a last-ditch effort to save humanity. Think about a time in your past when you attempted a Hail Mary, whether in a sporting game, in an interpersonal relationship, or in the context of a relatively mundane task. Write a personal essay that tells the story before, during, and after your efforts. At what point did you decide that there was nothing left to lose, and that the only solution was to throw caution to the wind with a long shot?

Scientific studies on vision have demonstrated that rates of myopia, or shortsightedness, have been rising, to the extent that within the next twenty-five years, half of the population of the world will be myopic. While there are genetic reasons for this, a recent article published in BBC Science Focus magazine reports that environmental factors are playing a part, including people spending less time outdoors in the sun with diverse, visually rich stimulation, and more time indoors staring at screens and digital devices close-up and surrounded by “straight lines and monochrome walls.” Write a short story that takes place somewhere along this spectrum of technology affecting human evolution. Are there characteristics besides eyesight that are worsening?

“The mosquito knows full well, small as he is / he’s a beast of prey,” writes D. H. Lawrence in his 1929 poem “The Mosquito Knows,” recently published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. “But after all / he only takes his bellyful, / he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.” In this five-line verse, Lawrence presents a pithy portrait of an insect and then points the mirror at human behavior, the mosquito becoming a more sympathetic figure when pitted against human greed. Compose a series of miniscule poems that each revolve around an insect. Explore different facets of the bug, including how they might be irritating or harmful to people, and the ways in which their lives contrast surprisingly with human tendencies.

In an interview published in the Paris Review’s summer 2026 issue for their “Art of Fiction” series, Jeremy Tiang speaks to Yan Lianke, noting that throughout the course of their conversations, the author would “slip into the third person, as if describing himself as a character in his fiction, or sometimes into the second person, as if addressing his past self.” This week, write a personal essay about the city, town, or region where you grew up and your experiences there. Experiment with slipping between different points of view while still retaining your personal perspective. You might decide to start in the first person, and then address your past self in the second, before zooming further out into third person, or toggle multiple times between narrative points-of-view as befits the sense of distance you desire.

The comedy horror television series Widow’s Bay begins with the mayor of a small New England island town attempting to boost tourism and presenting the locale in a positive light to a visiting reporter of a major newspaper outlet. Despite the mayor’s efforts to detract attention from the town’s history of unusual occurrences, corroborating local residents’ warnings that the island is cursed and haunted, an arrival of thick fog brings present danger and terror that cannot be ignored. Write a short story that revolves around a group of people whose competing interests are illuminated when an outsider enters the picture. First, spend some time establishing the nuances of your characters’ relationships: Are there rivalries or unresolved conflicts from the past? How does the outsider create a disruption in your characters’ routines and expectations?

“Let America be America again. / Let it be the dream it used to be. / Let it be the pioneer on the plain / Seeking a home where he himself is free. // (America never was America to me.)” Written in 1935, Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again” begins with a stanza of lines that seems to wish for a bygone era of the country, with its ideas of pioneering and freedom, but follows with a line in parentheticals that clarifies and redefines that notion of America from the speaker’s point of view. The poem’s next two stanzas follow this form with lines in parentheticals, the last one stating: “There’s never been equality for me, / Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.” This week, compose a poem that begins with the title of Hughes’s poem as your first line. Throughout your poem, use parentheticals to illuminate how some of your own ideas and experiences stand in tension with the country’s founding ideals.

In “The Tally,” an essay by Anne Enright recently published in the New Yorker, the author thinks back on a childhood memory in which her mother returned to a grocery store to settle the difference because she had been undercharged for a Christmas turkey. Enright explores her feelings of indignation at her family’s morality in the face of “corporate interest” and “predatory capitalism,” but then concludes that “integrity is also a way to hold the self together” and that “honesty may be a one-sided contract with the world, but it is the only side that we can control.” Write a personal essay that reflects on how your own stances around honesty and integrity have been shaped by how you were raised and what your family valued. How has your point of view on honesty evolved over the years, whether maintaining consistency or broadening to a more open-minded flexibility?

As climate collapse transforms our experiences of the natural world, researchers are sounding the alarm that smells and scents will become extinct alongside changes in plant biodioversity, weather-related phenomena, and the evolution of the world’s landscapes of man-made structures. According to a recent article in Smithsonian magazine, scientists warn that not only will the changing climate have a reduced “scentscape,” but that human beings may gradually experience diminished abilities to smell, due to the harmful effects of pollution. Write a short story that takes place in a universe where smells have largely disappeared from everyday life. What sort of adaptations have been created to compensate for this sensory loss? Will memories, which are strongly associated with smell, function in different ways?

In an interview for the Poetry Society of America, Diane Seuss talks to Jennifer Franklin about how she writes with a keen awareness of the body as a site of both immense precarity and radical agency. When considering the role of structure in poetry, Seuss draws a parallel between the literary form and human form, how language can be compressed and lead through the formal constraints of a poetic form in the same way the human body can act as an impediment and a guide. “We write with all of ourselves,” she says, “at our best.” Write a poem that uses the structure of a poetic form to reflect on the nature of the body. Explore how the lyrical imagination pushes against structure, like the body “compresses the soul,” as Seuss describes. How does the inclusion of the body anchor your writing, and how might you play within these confines?

In her translator’s preface to The Narrow Road of Oku, a new edition of Matsuo Bashō’s seminal haibun diary published by New Directions in June, Meredith McKinney notes that though it is possible to read the work “as a straightforward, episodic travel diary of a seventeenth century Japanese poet and his companion,” the haibun form of prose writing followed by poetry “asks the reader to slow down, to pause and focus.” Spend some time jotting down notes and memories of a significant trip you have taken. Try your hand at writing in a similar style, interspersing travel journal vignettes with brief, poetic observations of a singular moment or image in time that distills a particular sensation. “I make the cool / my lodging / lounging at ease,” writes Bashō after one particularly long journey. Consider how the slowed-down pace of short, poetic lines might balance each episode’s narrative.