The Time Is Now

In a 2010 panel discussion at the Paley Center, Chinese activist and artist Ai Weiwei spoke about his extensive use of Twitter to share about his art and activism. Pressuring Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey to make Twitter’s web interface available in Chinese, Ai stated how well suited it is to the Chinese language, in which each character constitutes an entire word: “With 140 characters in Chinese you really can write a novel.” Taking inspiration from this discussion, write a series of flash creative nonfiction pieces about art, human rights, or the use of social media, each 140 words long. Later, you may want to decide whether the essays function as standalone pieces or a connected series.

Earth’s “most tenacious creatures,” according to National Geographic’s website, are small aquatic invertebrates called tardigrades—also commonly known as water bears. Among their amazing feats are the fact that they can dry out completely and survive without water, they were launched into outer space and survived, and they roamed the earth and seas long before humans and will likely outlast us. Write a short story that incorporates a water bear, perhaps finding sci-fi, fantasy, or horror inspiration in its physical attributes, or writing a narrative that philosophizes about the range of its adaptations.

“There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter,” wrote Rachel Carson in The Sense of Wonder in 1956. Write a poem centered around one image or sensation you associate with the spring season, using diction and rhythm to evoke the repeated refrains, patterns, and cycles of nature. Explore both the symbolic and physical beauty of your image.

In late February, frogs, salamanders, and other amphibians responding to early warm temperatures began migrating from their winter hideouts to vernal pools to begin the spring mating season. Some of the animals were chaperoned to safety by concerned volunteers across trafficked streets late at night in New York and other Northeastern states. Write an essay about a time in your life when you made a big decision or took a leap. Did someone arrive to accompany you or were you on your own? Was your emotional journey guided by a crossing guard who brought you to safety? 

In “The Emotional Realist Talks to Ghosts” in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, George Saunders discusses the different stages of writing his debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House, 2017). The long process included attempting a third-person version of the story, as well as a play. Though neither form was quite right, Saunders says, “It made me more convinced that there was definitely a story there.” Take a short story in progress and rewrite one particular scene in two new forms—from a different narrative point of view, and in a dramatic script format. What are the main ideas that remain consistent and integral to the story throughout all three versions?

A salt lake in Melbourne, Australia recently turned pink due to the growth of algae “in response to very high salt levels, high temperatures, sunlight, and lack of rainfall.”  The phenomenon transformed the lake from its natural blue tone to an unusually bright flamingo color. Write a poem that begins by evoking the sensations of one color, and then—gradually or abruptly—turns a strikingly different color, perhaps even pink. How will you manipulate the mood, images, sounds, and rhythms of your language to reflect the color change? 

Over the course of the last year, Jorge Otero-Pailos, a Columbia University professor and preservation expert, and a group of his graduate students have been collaborating with the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan on a project studying the smell of old books, furniture, and more. The library was built in 1906 by John Pierpont Morgan to house his rare books and art collection, and is one of the premier repositories in the world. Write an essay about a place that you have spent a considerable amount of time in—perhaps somewhere you lived or worked before—and whose smells are curiously linked with your recollection. Describe the emotions and events from that period that those smells conjure up, and the ways in which your memories may have been colored by your preference or distaste of those smells.

“She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation,” writes Margaret Atwood in her 2000 novel The Blind Assassin. Write a short story in which one segment involves a main character imagining another character imagining him. You may decide to differentiate this segment by setting apart the text in italics, or explicitly stating that it is imagined, or perhaps you may decide to blur the line between real and imagined. In what ways does this line of thought help your character through a conflict or obstacle? What does this insight tell us about how he perceives himself in relation to others?

If you read, in order, the last word of each line in Terrance Hayes’s poem “The Golden Shovel,” you will discover that they are the words of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool,” the inspiration for Hayes’s poem. Select one or more lines from a poem you admire, and write your own “Golden Shovel” poem. Use each word from the source text in its original order for the last word in each line of your new poem. When you are finished, the end-words of your poem should trace out the origin poem. Be sure to add a note crediting the poet whose line(s) you’ve used.

Walden, a Game is a new video game to be released this spring that tasks players with activities inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s time spent in solitude and reflection at Walden Pond in nineteenth-century Massachusetts. In the game, the player’s feelings of inspiration “can be regained by reading, attending to sounds of life in the distance, enjoying solitude and interacting with visitors, animal and human.” Write an essay exploring your personal opinions of solitude as exemplified by a memory from a time when you chose to be alone. How, and why, did it help or hinder your emotional state?