Literature has a long history of narratives that are built around fictionalized letters and correspondence—Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther from the eighteenth century, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the nineteenth century, and more contemporary novels such as Stephen King’s Carrie, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. This week compose an epistolary short story incorporating letters, postcards, e-mails, texts, social media posts, news articles, receipts, and other tidbits of written documents. How do these disparate elements work together to create a story that has to be puzzled together?

In their poem “In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down.,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series in 2023, Andrea Gibson, who passed away on July 14, wrote about a newfound gratitude for life while being treated for terminal cancer. “Remind me / all my prayers were answered // the moment I started praying / for what I already have,” wrote Gibson. Write a poem that expresses gratitude through confronting the mortal nature of being human. What do you already have in your life that you might be taking for granted? Perhaps begin by listing some of the beautiful things you saw today.

The rate at which the Earth rotates has been gaining speed, and as a result, days have been slowly getting shorter over the last ten years, according to a recent New York Times article. Yet, for many millennia before, the days were gradually growing longer, with a T. rex living through days that were only about twenty-three and a half hours long. Though these incremental changes in time are too tiny in scale for us to register, time can certainly feel like it moves at different rates. Write a personal essay that recounts a situation from your past that took place either over a seemingly expanded or contracted span of time. Experiment with how you speed up or slow down your retelling, either mimicking or contradicting the essay’s pacing with how the experience felt.

In the 2014 Swedish film Force Majeure directed by Ruben Östlund, a family on a ski vacation in the French Alps has a scare when a controlled avalanche threatens the lodge where they are staying and the father runs away from the oncoming snow, leaving behind his wife and two young children. All remain safe but the event causes tension in their marriage. Over dinner with friends, they discuss how in moments of crisis one would hope to do the heroic thing, but one never really knows until something actually happens. Write a short story that begins with an intense and startling event and build your story around each character’s response. What sorts of personality traits are revealed in the aftermath? You might play around with incorporating different characters’ perspectives or versions of what happened to provide tension.

In a recent interview for the Paris Review’s Art of Poetry series by Chloe Garcia Roberts, the late Fanny Howe, who passed away on July 9, spoke of a revelatory experience writing “with the environment” at Annaghmakerrig, an artists’ retreat where she wrote her 1995 collection, O’Clock. “It was complete solitude, and an actual attempt to write, for the first time, with the environment,” says Howe. “Instead of sitting and looking out of the window, I just sank into the weather and the trees, dancing around in the environment of Ireland, which I know by its smell.” This week, find a spot outside as close to nature as possible, perhaps simply a location with trees, and try to sink into the landscape. Write a poem that captures the feelings of your surroundings, meditating on minute sensory details and the emotions that the environment evokes.

In a recent New Yorker article about the past, present, and future of Brooklyn’s popular Green-Wood Cemetery, Paige Williams writes about a tour guide who “urged her audience not to leave a decision as important as eternity to others” and a cemetery employee who has already decided the guest list, what beverages to serve, and the playlist for his future funeral. Write a personal essay that meditates on your thoughts about your own post-death wishes. Whether it’s something you’ve thought about and planned meticulously already or something you mostly avoid, take the time to consider rituals, traditions, and funerals you’ve attended, as well as the array of options to choose from as technology and trends evolve. How do you envision your eternal send-off and resting place?

Neuroplasticity refers to the ability of the brain to adapt, grow, and evolve throughout our lives by forming new neural connections. But what about actual plastics in the brain? While past studies have presented findings that our bodies are increasingly becoming filled with microplastics, more recent research has shown that a significant amount of these plastics are accumulating in the brain—possibly an average of an entire spoon’s worth. This week write a short story that postulates on the effects of this biological issue. The premise may lend itself naturally to a dystopian, apocalyptic story of sci-fi horror, but are there other elements and genres that you can experiment with, such as satire, romance, or mystery?

In a 4Columns review of After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025 (Granary Books, 2025) edited by Steve Clay and M. C. Kinniburgh, a catalog for the exhibition of the same name at the Grolier Club in New York, Albert Mobilio lists a few of the unconventional poetry forms from the show: “A cardboard box stuffed with crumpled slips of paper; a book in which each line of text appears on its own sliver of a page; a series of poems printed on what look like business cards; knotted lengths of wool stenciled with verse.” This week think beyond words on a page and conceptualize a new poetry project that makes use of different pictorial and material elements. How might you split up words, lines, or stanzas on a variety of surfaces?

“Their romance has started in earnest this summer, but the prologue took up the whole previous year,” writes Susan Choi in the beginning of her 2019 award-winning novel, Trust Exercise, in which two high school freshmen fall in love and experience an intense love affair until they return to their performing arts school the next fall. When other classmates and teachers get involved, the outlines of their burgeoning relationship begin to seem less clear as the realities and complexities of group social dynamics come into play. Write a personal essay that chronicles the subtle or dramatic shifts of a relationship you’ve had in which your dynamic with the other person encountered some sort of transformation when the setting or surroundings of your relationship changed. Did issues of power, control, or social expectations have an effect? What questions arise when considering performance of the self in private versus in public?

Written and directed by Celine Song, Materialists is a film about a matchmaker at a high-end agency in New York City and her own trials of love. She interviews and maneuvers her clients who have very specific demands for their potential dating partners, testing the mechanics of worth and value, and seeing people through the lens of market capitalism. Characters are bluntly forthcoming about age preferences and job salaries, an honesty that may seem surprising when considered against old-fashioned social norms which deem it vulgar to talk about money. Write a story in which one of your characters is uncommonly direct about financial matters—whether about having a lot or a little, or how much they spend, earn, and save. How does bringing money into the picture illuminate issues of class between your characters?