The Time Is Now

“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?

In the 2024 documentary Mistress Dispeller, director Elizabeth Lo uncovers a family drama involving a woman in China who enlists the help of a professional mistress dispeller to end her husband’s affair. The profession, which has become common in the last decade in urban centers in China, generally entails coaching, infiltration, and persuasion, the emphasis being on winning the trust of all parties. Lo’s film depicts each person in the love triangle—the wronged wife, the cheating husband, the other woman—as multifaceted, vulnerable, and sympathetic, unfurling a specific but also universal story intermixed with scenes relaying the realities of alienation and connection in contemporary society. Write a short story that imagines a scenario in which a mistress dispeller has been hired to disrupt an ongoing affair. What insights and expertise about relationships does the dispeller bring to the interactions with the characters involved?

Día de los Muertos or the Day of the Dead, a traditional holiday in Mexico with roots in Indigenous cultures that celebrates departed friends and family, is typically observed on the first two days of November. People gather around altars with decorative skulls, marigolds, and foods and drinks, sometimes also writing “calavera literaria,” a form of a light-hearted, satirical epitaph addressing someone who is still alive as if they were dead, which can be used as a way of critiquing a cultural or political figure. Write a series of short literary calaveras, just a handful of lines each, incorporating a simple rhyme scheme to imbue a sense of singsongy playfulness. Even if there are elements of mortality or sorrow in the mix, allow yourself to be silly with sound, diction, and imagery to bring in comic relief about the inevitability of death.

“I was born on the banks of the Rukarara, but I have no memory of it. My memories come from my mother and her inconsolable nostalgia.” In the first pages of Scholastique Mukasonga’s Murmurs From the Hills: Rwandan Tales, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti and published by Archipelago Books in November, the author recounts a genre-defying collection of stories reminiscent of an oral history. Blending mythology and memoir, the stories recount the horrors of the Rwandan civil war and genocide along with other memories lived and passed down by family members. In this hybrid form of storytelling, Mukasonga creates a retelling of history—and therefore a retelling of the present and the future—with contributions from a complex range of voices with layered knowledge. Write a lyric essay that braids some of your early memories with stories passed down from your ancestors. Allow yourself the freedom to invent your own mythologies.

A coffee grinder, the soul of a man who drowned to death, a board game, a house, angels, God, mushrooms, and trees are all characters in Olga Tokarczuk’s third novel, Primeval and Other Times, first published in Polish in 1996 and forthcoming in a new edition, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, in December from Riverhead Books. The narrative chronicles the universe of a fictional village called Primeval through short vignettes of different characters, both human and nonhuman, over the course of three generations during the twentieth century. In “The Time of Misia’s Grinder,” Tokarczuk writes: “Perhaps coffee grinders are the axis of reality, around which everything turns and unwinds, perhaps they are more important for the world than people.” Write a collection of vignettes about diverse characters that collaboratively reveal a microcosm of points of view in a specific time and place. What objects will give voice to the philosophical and existential questions you wish to explore?

In Matt Longabucco’s collection The Hummingbird, published by Nightboat Books in October, the poet’s attention flits from subject to subject with sharp observations of mundane goings-on, attending to contemporary life in all its forms. In one section of the title poem, Longabucco moves swiftly from the natural environment to the objects of workday technology: “big ant / scales my power cord / achieves the plug / prepares to mount the keyboard / I give it a decisive flick / we’re both surprised when an instant later / it’s flat against the windowpane / six feet away, intact and unharmed….” Compose a poem that revels in the unbroken interconnectedness of energies and emotions that are revealed when you pay close attention to the vividness of your immediate surroundings. How might the world around you generate a sense of openness and abundance when you find ways to intertwine a multitude of its everyday offerings?

In the anthologies What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About (Simon & Schuster, 2019) and What My Father and I Don’t Talk About (Simon & Schuster, 2025), editor Michele Filgate collected over a dozen essays by authors writing about their struggles in communicating with parental figures. Write your own essay about something you have always felt like you could never talk about with your mother, father, or other guardian. What were the barriers to honesty, and what do you imagine could or would have helped you break your silence? Was it more about what you didn’t want to say or what you perhaps didn’t want to hear back in response? You might bring in your personal reflections about honesty and vulnerability in other relationships to shed insight on your parent-child dynamic.