The Time Is Now

In Amy Gallo’s essay, “Forever Faithful to a Single Story: An Ode to Monogamous Writing,” published on Literary Hub, the author writes about her decades-long commitment to a single manuscript and how she adamantly avoided juggling multiple writing projects in the process of publishing her first book. “I couldn’t move on because I was still spoken for, I suppose, my consciousness occupied by the single story closest to my heart,” writes Gallo. Write a personal essay reflecting on your commitment to an essay or manuscript you’ve been working on. Do you tend to focus on one project at a time or do you enjoy taking breaks with something new?

In “What Scientists Learned By Eavesdropping on Thousands of People,” an essay recently published in the New Yorker, Shayla Love reports that people are speaking fewer and fewer words, citing a study published earlier this year that found, on average, people speak about three hundred fewer words a day than in years past. Write a short story set in the near future in which people rarely speak aloud to one another. Consider which thoughts or emotions become difficult or impossible to express when spoken language becomes a rarity. How do those lost conversations affect your characters and reshape societal values? Has verbal communication been supplanted by another kind of discourse?

“There’s always a chainsaw somewhere, / the high whine of a drill, somebody building something or / tearing it down, fastening metal to metal,” begins Marie Howe’s poem “Chainsaw,” published in the May 2023 issue of Poetry magazine. Taking inspiration from Howe’s opening stanza, write a poem that begins with: “There’s always a ___ somewhere.” You might similarly start with a sensory observation and draw a connection to it with larger, ever-present forces, the way that Howe explores the relentless drive of industry and human violence in her poem. Consider how the ubiquity of your object serves as a stand-in for other inescapable forces.

Jérôme Lindon by Jean Echenoz, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti and forthcoming from Archipelago Books in September, is the story of the author’s decades-long friendship with his publisher, Jérôme Lindon, who directed the renowned French publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit for over a half century. “It begins on a snowy day, on Rue de Fleurus in Paris, January 9, 1979,” writes Echenoz. “I’ve written a novel, my first. I don’t know if it’s only my first; I don’t know if I’ll write another. All I know is that I’ve written one, and if I could find a publisher for it, that would be good.” The book’s final page concludes twenty-two years later, after Echenoz receives news that Lindon has died. Write a memoiristic account that chronicles an important friendship with someone you have worked with professionally, beginning with your first meeting. Reflect on their admirable qualities along with their less-than-perfect traits to provide a tribute that encompasses their humanness.

Haunted houses are often depicted as decrepit manses with crumbling Victorian architecture, sitting on top of hills, surrounded by creepy dark woods, isolated from civilization. The house in Brenda Iijima’s second novel, Shelter Is Necessary for Existence (Two Dollar Radio, 2026), is set instead in a densely populated, affluent brownstone neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, and is haunted by the ghosts of previous tenants and psychogeographical history, as well as its new owners’ preoccupations and paranoias. Write a story set in a haunted home located in a neighborhood that doesn’t lend itself to conventional spooky tropes. Start with a scene of exploration or discovery of something that formerly went unnoticed, in or around the home. How might gentrification, exploitation, or constant construction contribute to a sense of dread as elements of psychological horror seep into your story?

Stine An’s debut collection, B-Dragon Suite, forthcoming from Nightboat Books in September, is a multidisciplinary, hybrid work that revolves around Korean pop music’s sounds and culture. The verses spring from an invented universe inhabited by a fictional boy band and girl group while also meditating on themes of colonial history and diaspora. Pieces range from prose poems and concrete poetry to song lyrics and dramatic scripts. The poem “B-Dragon Solo” begins: “B is for benighted. / Use banger in a sentence. The Korean War was is such a club banger. / B is for bang. / B is for banger.” The lines continue, incorporating emojis and Korean characters and romanizations. Create a poem that grows out of an imagined universe of your own, perhaps one that exists at the confluence of pop-music aesthetics and digital forms of communication, such as emojis and graphics. Try your own experiments with language and translations.

In a recent interview published on the Creative Independent, author and editor Naomi Falk talks about the importance of ritual and her daily morning habits of cooking, meditation, walking, and dream journaling. “I adore the morning time,” she says. “Between the hours of six and nine, everything that I do is just for myself.” Write a personal essay that takes a look at how you like to start and end your day, including the type of atmosphere and activities that help you ease into the morning and how you like your night to wrap up. Where might spirituality or dreams come into play? Does exercise or body movement contribute to a sense of warming up or cooling down before and after the day’s events? Consider how your relationship to patterns and repetitive habits say something about where you are in your life.

In The Invite, a recent film directed by Olivia Wilde with a screenplay by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, an unhappily married couple invite their upstairs neighbors over to their apartment for dinner and the evening leads to unexpected revelations after a risqué proposition. Taking inspiration from the contained setting of an apartment and the ripe ingredients for drama and comedy of mysterious neighbors and an awkward proposal, write a short story in which members of a household—a couple, multi-generational family members, or housemates—invite neighbors they don’t really know over for a gathering and a surprising idea or proposition is brought up. How does this closed space open up a multitude of possibilities in terms of what might go wrong or right, and how the characters end up learning from one another?

What do you think of when you hear the word clown? In a 2022 Los Angeles Times article by Jake Kroeger about the contemporary state of clowning in the arts and its growing popularity, clown teacher and performer Jet Eveleth defines the word as “a celebration of the physical and vulnerable side of the human experience.” Eveleth points out how the actions of a clown, whether it be falling down or falling in love, are “poking fun at the human condition.” This week write a “clown” poem, allowing yourself to explore whatever the word brings up for you. Perhaps it is children’s birthday parties, horror movie villains, campy decor, circus hijinks, or something that lives in the contradiction of simultaneous joy and sorrow. How do the paradoxes of a clown—both happy and sad, silly and sinister—reveal truths about the human condition?

Ships and boats, clocks, bird cages, Black dolls, antlers, and masks. Artist Betye Saar, who passed away last month at the age of ninety-nine, was renowned for her assemblage works created with found objects that she gathered in her studio over the course of decades, objects she used to explore social issues of racism, stereotypes, femininity, and spirituality. “I’ve always felt that old objects hold a power,” Saar stated in a 2024 New York Times interview. “They’ve survived, and they have a sense of the previous owner. They have a spirit.” What objects have you collected over the years? Jot down a list of old objects, perhaps the types of everyday items you might find at a garage sale or antique collectibles shop. Then, write a lyric essay with short reflections, experimenting with how to put the objects in play with one another thematically when you consider their spirit and who owned them previously.