The Time Is Now

In much of her work, scholar and author of the award-winning book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (Norton, 2019), Saidiya Hartman writes about the silences, gaps, and omissions present in conventional institutional archives that leave out the voices and lives of marginalized people. In her 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts,” published in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, she coined the term “critical fabulation” to describe a research method that combines archival research, critical theory, and storytelling to redresses and reimagine these historical biases. Write a short story that echoes this idea, beginning the process by considering what old textbooks have gotten wrong. What history would you like to retell? How can your story reimagine not only what happened long ago but also imagine a different present?

Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness,” which appears in her 1995 book, Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, begins: “Before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things….” The next two stanzas start similarly with: “Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness / you must travel…” and “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, / you must know sorrow….” Compose a three-stanza poem that takes a cue from this parallel structure, starting the first line of each stanza with: “Before you know _____, you must _____.” Think about a quality, such as kindness, that you highly value and how your understanding of it has changed over time. What are the lessons you have learned and what do you hope to pass on to others?

Have you fallen for fall and left spring on the backburner? According to a recent New York Times article, spring used to be “a special favorite of poets and musicians, who were moved by the lush reawakening of the natural world to express their feelings of love and wonderment in verse and song,” but recent surveys have shown a preference for autumn. With its cozy colors and social media-worthy sweaters, ciders, leaves, and pumpkin spice lattes, the crisp season has moved up in the ranks of popularity. This week write a personal essay about how you have experienced seasons differently at various times in your life. You might consider the value in having fluctuating phases of energy or enthusiasm throughout the year, or in being able to count on cycles of the natural world.

Amnesia, evil twins, baby swaps, love triangles, and fake deaths are common tropes that have been used in American soap operas for decades. According to Jo Walker’s Guardian review of the 2019 South Korean television series Crash Landing on You, which received critical acclaim and gained worldwide popularity after streaming on Netflix, Korean melodrama plot conventions include “forgotten chance meetings, dramatic piggyback rides, and at least one scene per show where the heroine gets totally juiced on beer.” Write a short story that borrows one of these K-drama tropes or a newly discovered one. Give yourself permission to meld “soapy” characteristics with perhaps more nuanced or subtle literary elements. How can the integration of melodrama imbue your story with humor or emotional dynamism?

In a recent piece published on Literary Hub, Maggie Smith describes her writing space—the objects she considers talismans, the furnishings, and accessories that surround her as she works. Some notable items include: her clear desk from CB2, black Uni-Ball Vision Elite pens, an Audre Lorde postcard from a friend, a fortune cookie message, and a card from her high school English teacher. Compose a series of short poems that zero in on a few favorite tools or accoutrements that you like to use or have with you when you write. Include details of the brands, types, and personal touches of each item. What memories are associated with them? How can you combine functional physical descriptions in your verse with thoughtful reflections of what these objects bring to mind?

Frederick Wiseman, the late director renowned for his lengthy documentaries about various American institutions and infrastructures—including Hospital; City Hall; Welfare; Titicut Follies; Near Death; and Belfast, Maine—spoke in a 2015 BOMB magazine interview about how humor is interspersed throughout his films, which are oftentimes incisive exposés of injustice, neglect, and grief. “I think all my films are funny,” said Wiseman. “You find yourself in a lot of situations that are funny. Or sometimes they are both funny and sad. I mean, the best comedy is sad comedy.” Think back to some past experiences that you would characterize as sad or sorrowful and write an essay in which you try to find a thread of humor to draw out. How can sad comedy demonstrate the ways in which human emotions are more complex than at first glance?

Can crystals offer luck, calmness, good vibrations, courage, or protection? Human beings have a long history of believing that certain crystals, such as quartz, tiger’s eye, pyrite, citrine, and tourmaline, contain special energies to benefit one’s life. A recent scientific study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology looks at chimpanzees behaving in ways that seem to demonstrate a particular interest in crystals: selecting them out of a variety of rocks, carrying them back to their sleeping quarters, and only giving them up after hours of negotiation with favored foods. Write a short story that revolves around the discovery of a mysterious crystal. What kind of powers does the crystal hold, if any? Do your characters have differing opinions or beliefs about the general existence of mystical powers, energies, and vibrations?

“Sometimes colors become points of departure to go into stories or anecdotes from things that I believe correspond to those colors,” says writer and comedian Julio Torres explaining the origins of his solo theater project, Color Theories, in an interview with Douglas Corzine published in the Brooklyn Rail last fall. In the show, Torres performs a memoiristic blend of stand-up and art lecture that “engages with the idea that colors are a form of classification, like saying something is a mineral, animal, or vegetable, something is either red or blue or yellow or green, et cetera.” Launching off from this idea, compose a series of short poems, each focusing on a different color. Incorporate ideas, moods, people, and abstract things in the world—such as systems or cultural concepts—that you associate with that color. How might vastly different objects and memories be categorized as the same color?

In Sam Needleman’s recent interview with essayist and novelist Darryl Pinckney, published in the Paris Review’s Art of Nonfiction series, he is asked about James Baldwin’s singularity. “Baldwin has this unmistakable voice. The appeal is that it’s at once literary and speakerly,” says Pinckney. “I think the writers, the essayists I’m drawn to have that quality.” This week think of a nonfiction writer whose voice strikes you as sounding distinctively original. Write an essay that attempts to investigate how their individuality is expressed through their use of language and specific observations. Can you pinpoint specific nuances about their writerly style? How does their writing communicate in both literary and “speakerly” ways?

A pivotal scene in the first season of Jacob Tierney’s hit television series Heated Rivalry, an adaptation of Rachel Reid’s Game Changers queer hockey romance novel series, occurs when Russian hockey star Ilya invites his Canadian rival Shane to his house for the first time in their relationship and offers to make him a tuna melt. While the scene lasts less than a minute and the actual assembly of the sandwich is not even depicted, the notably caring gesture struck a chord with fans, inspiring new attention to—and even recipes for—the unassuming sandwich. Write a short story in which an act of care, perhaps revolving around the sharing of food, communicates something significant about your characters’ personalities, states of mind, or relationship. Does this simple act melt hearts?