The Time Is Now

Among the thousands of structures that were destroyed in the devastating Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year was one home in Altadena. The house had been slated for renovations to become a foundation and residency honoring the late author and critic Gary Indiana, who died in October 2024. A shipment of hundreds of books constituting the writer’s personal library arrived at the home hours before the Eaton Fire, the entirety of which is now lost. Along with the library was an irreplaceable record of the authors who inspired Indiana’s work. In an act of reparative imagination, write a personal essay about a literary hero of yours and reflect on what might drive their creativity. If there are interviews and other materials available in which your subject reveals their muses, allow yourself the freedom to focus on your own speculations and connections.

“The difficulty of living through long minutes is a central concern of Cléo From 5 to 7, a film set in real time and real space, which follows an aspiring young pop star as she endures time—the real running time of the film—waiting for the results of a biopsy,” writes Laura McLean-Ferris about Agnès Varda’s 1962 film in an essay published in frieze magazine. “Subjective time periodically bloating and stretching in confusion and loneliness, while objective time ticks on.” Unlike with a film or play, the reader of a story sets the timing of their engagement with the work by their reading pace, on their starts and stops. But the writer, too, has many tools to bloat and stretch time within the confines of a story. Write a short story that moves slowly and in “long minutes” to allow certain moments to stretch or contract according to your main character’s state of mind.

April is National Humor Month, which means it’s the perfect time to be reminded that everyone has a funny bone. The annual observance was conceived to heighten public awareness of the therapeutic value of humor, laughter, and joy. This week, consider what others have said about your sense of humor over the years. Does it lean toward puns or dad jokes? Is it witty or dark, laconic or bizarre, goofy or lighthearted? Write a short series of poems that showcases your specific sensibility around amusement and how you value humor and joy in your life. You might find it helpful to recount recent experiences and images that made you chuckle or guffaw and try to manifest in your poem what specifically made you laugh out loud.

Directed Boris Lojkine, the award-winning French drama film Souleymane’s Story follows a young immigrant from Guinea who prepares for his interview to seek asylum refugee status in Paris. In the harrowing forty-eight hours prior to his interview, Souleymane careens through the streets as a bike courier for a food delivery app account he rents for a hefty fee from a fellow immigrant, tries to memorize falsified stories about political imprisonment another immigrant coaches him on for a fee, and rushes to find a bed each night in a homeless shelter. Write a personal essay that recounts a momentous event from your life and begins forty-eight hours before the climactic scene. Try playing with focused descriptions of your surroundings and the style of your prose to reflect the pacing and dramatic moments of your story.

What kind of effect can a casual, offhand compliment have on a stranger? According to social psychology research, compliments benefit both the giver and receiver, spread positive emotions, and are usually more welcome than expected. This week write a short story in which the bestowing of a compliment has a ripple effect and transforms, in slight or significant ways, the lives of both the giver and the receiver. Spend some time considering how you wish to set up the trajectory of each character before the compliment is given and what compels this exchange to occur. Is the admirer moved to say something in the moment or is this something they’ve been wanting to say for a long time?

In a 2023 BOMB Magazine interview by Wendy Xu, she asks Emily Lee Luan about the cinematic, image-specific aesthetic of the poems in her collection 回 / Return (Nightboat Books, 2023). “I think my poems try to understand internal emotional change through the external world—that might be why image and scene are so central,” says Luan. “If you look at something for long enough, then you might be able to understand what’s happening within you.” Take inspiration from this juxtaposition between interiority and externality, and the notion of finding understanding and connection through prolonged observation, and write a poem that uses extensive imagery to reflect the speaker’s internal emotional state. In lieu of expository description, how does imagistic expression lend a different kind of dynamism to your work?

How much creative work do you do in a day? When Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei was asked this question for the New York Times Style Magazine’s Artist’s Questionnaire series, he said, “My work is trying to break the boundary of what is normally called ‘creative.’ I avoid trying to be creative. I try to push myself into normal life and bring the integrity of a normal life into the so-called art world.” Take inspiration from the idea of breaking down these boundaries and consider all the different ways your creative identity potentially bleeds over into your daily tasks and vice versa. Write a personal essay that begins with an exploration of how your relationship to language, craft, or aesthetics has affected your general outlook. Then expand on how this artistic perspective manifests in your day-to-day habits, actions, and interactions.

In Matt Spicer’s 2017 dark comedy film Ingrid Goes West, Aubrey Plaza stars as a woman obsessed with social media who moves to Los Angeles after a brief stint in a psychiatric ward and attempts to befriend her influencer idol which eventually leads to chaos. The satire makes clear the extent to which the use of social media can be a type of performance and the potential destruction that may result from mistaking artifice for truth. Write a short story in which one of your main characters interacts with social media in a way that has dramatic repercussions due to their excessive trust in digital personas and confusion between reality and life online. You might play around with describing and presenting social media posts, language, and imagery in an innovative way.

Over the course of Rita Dove’s three-stanza prose poem “Prose in a Small Space,” the speaker meanders through a sequence of questions, observations, and digressions, periodically returning to the functionality of the prose poem form itself. “Prose likes to hear itself talk; prose is development and denouement, anticipation hovering near the canapés, lust rampant in the antipasta,” writes Dove. This week, forgo the options of line breaks and nonstandard grammar of more conventional poetry, and compose a series of short prose poems that take greater advantage of other poetry elements—rhythm, prosody, diction, pacing, and sensory details. Allow your prose to “hear itself talk,” develop, and conclude.

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Five years later, it may all feel like a distant dream (or nightmare) or completely forgotten, but there’s no denying that the pandemic created irrevocable changes in our world, both big and small. Write a personal essay that reflects on how your life has transformed in the last five years. You might trace certain hopes, fears, or expectations as they evolved over the course of each year and consider where you are today. What have been the biggest shifts in your mindset regarding relationships with family and friends, socializing, health, finances, and travel?