The Time Is Now

“Sometimes my mouth opens up and my mother’s laugh jumps out, a parlor trick.” Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter (Semiotext(e), 2017) is a meditation on memory and grief that takes the form of fragments, lyric essay, poetry, memoir, reflections, and criticism. At the book’s core is the death of Zambreno’s mother and the author’s piecing together of their relationship and its bearing on her childhood and identity. In the Creative Independent, Zambreno writes about working on the book over the course of thirteen years: “As for what sustained me to keep going with it, I think it was just that itch—to not only figure out why I wanted to write about my mother, but also why I couldn’t.” Think of an inherited trait or a specific aspect of a relationship you have with a parent or guardian figure that seems difficult or impossible to explain. Write a personal essay that attempts to explore this subject by drawing in references to art and literature, old photographs, memories, and other fragmentary materials.

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s classic 1953 dystopian novel about a future in which books are outlawed and burned by firemen, has recently been adapted into a feature film. The book, which was written during the McCarthy era, has often been interpreted as a warning against state-based censorship and the dangers of illiteracy and conformity in a society where people are obsessed with technology and mass media. Write a short story in which a totalitarian government has enforced a ban on some aspect or invention of society that has long been considered integral for human expression. How does the government justify its stance and exercise control? Are the people both victims of suppression and somehow complicit in its enforcement? What type of characters might reside in the liminal gray area between hero and villain?

In her fourth poetry collection, Oceanic, published by Copper Canyon Press in April, Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores themes of love, discovery, family, motherhood, and home, often through a lens of connectedness with the natural world, focusing on the wonders of the ocean and the shapes, movements, and behaviors of flora and fauna. In “Penguin Valentine,” a penguin waits for his partner, and the speaker asks, “During those days of no sun, does he / remember the particular bend / of his mate’s neck, that hint of yellow / near her ears?” As spring transitions into summer, look to the flora and fauna in your local neighborhood, at the park or the beach, or on a vacation or a trip, for inspiration. Write a love poem that uses animal or plant behavior as a lesson about how we interact as humans. How might tendencies or characteristics of nature resonate with your own relationships?

Temperatures in the thirties, driving rain, and headwinds gusting at thirty miles per hour are not ideal weather conditions for a marathon. And yet, approximately thirty thousand people participated in this year’s Boston Marathon slogging through these treacherous conditions. In Matthew Futterman’s essay “What It Was Like to Run the Boston Marathon in a Freezing Deluge” in the New York Times, he writes about the glory of getting to tell the story of this miserable yet epic experience. Write a personal essay about an event from your past in which circumstances beyond your control transformed what would have been a more standard situation into something decidedly more dramatic.

Lightning never strikes the same place twice, is how the saying goes, but for some it strikes more than twice. Over the course of three years, twenty-year-old outdoorsman Dylan McWilliams beat 893 quadrillion-to-one odds to experience being bitten by a shark, being attacked by a bear, and then being bitten by a rattlesnake. Write a story in which a character endures a slew of bad luck in the form of several unfortunate incidents within a short span of time. Though the events may seem unrelated, are there larger forces at work? How does your character’s response to this streak of bad luck reveal her personality or foreshadow future consequences within the narrative?

In “The Love of Labor, the Labor of Love,” Rigoberto González’s interview with Carmen Giménez Smith in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, she talks about the experimentation in her new book, Cruel Futures (City Lights Books, 2018). Smith discusses releasing her writing from her usual “taut lyric voice” and allowing herself to “fly without punctuation...employing more cloudiness, maybe more impressionism.” This week, make an effort to let go of your own poetic safety blanket, and do away with the most clearly defined aspects of your lyric voice. Dispel with punctuation, wreak havoc with line breaks and syntax, and write a hazy series of impressionistic, cloudy poems.

Hobbies and activities often inspire and become an important part of a writer’s life. In his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Knopf, 2008), Haruki Murakami recounts his personal history with running, and draws parallels between his passions for marathons and novels. More recently, in her essay collection, The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater (Flatiron Books, 2018), Alanna Okun explores her practices of knitting and crafting, and how they interact with her writing life and overall well-being. This week, try writing an essay about an interest of your own that runs parallel to, or perhaps even informs, your identity as a writer.

In Denis Johnson’s classic short story collection Jesus’ Son (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992), the protagonist is morally compromised: he does bad things, ranging from little lies to large acts of theft and violence. Part of what makes the book compelling is the way Johnson handles the protagonist’s inner life and his reactions to his own misdeeds. This week, try writing a short story from the perspective of a character who does something bad and gets away with it. How is this character affected? Is there rationalization, shame, fear? The plot could be as innocuous as a child stealing a candy bar, or something more sinister.

Zachary Schomburg’s poetry collection Fjords Vol. 1 (Black Ocean, 2012) was inspired by his desire to write poems based on the dreams his friends had shared with him. In an interview for the Pleistocene, he explained that part of his process was “e-mailing my friends or having a beer and talking to them about their most interesting dreams or their most recent dreams, and trying to make poems out of them.” The resulting poems have the odd clarity of dream logic. This week, reach out to some friends and ask them to share their most vivid dreams with you. Then try turning that material into a poem: include both the surreal and the concrete.

“Is it possible to tell a story about getting better that is as compelling as a story of falling apart?” asks Leslie Jamison, speaking about her new memoir, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (Little, Brown, 2018), in “The Infinite World” by Michele Filgate in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. Write a personal essay on a topic or event in your life related to dysfunction or a low point in which you experienced a recovery. Use inspiration from Jamison’s own challenge of narrative structure and focus on a way to use “rigorous, specific, fresh language” to write about recovery.