The Time Is Now

While pregnant and struggling with her mental health and a creative block, author JoAnna Novak sought solace in the work and life of abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin, who lived with schizophrenia. In Novak’s memoir, Contradiction Days: An Artist on the Verge of Motherhood (Catapult, 2023), she recounts the experience of moving to Taos, New Mexico, where Martin lived for decades, to model her life after the painter’s hermetic existence, shutting herself off from the world for introspection and writing. Whose work do you go to when seeking a way forward? Research the biography of a favorite artist—including their creative habits and routines—and write an essay that meditates on what makes their life and work inspirational. Try to find the personal and aesthetic lineages that connect you together. For more from Novak, read her installment of our Ten Questions series.

As technology continues to play a larger role in society, writers are reflecting on the anxieties and unexpected hopes born out of these changes in their work. Cleo Qian, who is featured in “Literary MagNet” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, explores the fear and loneliness experienced in a technology dependent world in her debut story collection, Let’s Go, Let’s Go, Let’s Go (Tin House, 2023). Her stories center around the inner lives of young Asian and Asian American women using technology to cope: one character escapes into dating simulations after her best friend abandons her while another character looks to a supernatural karaoke machine for redemption. Write a short story in which a technological invention plays a major role. How does this reliance connect to your characters’ vulnerabilities?

“Everybody looks at him playing / the machine hour after hour, / but he hardly raises his gold lashes,” writes Thom Gunn in his poem “Bally Power Play,” which appears in his collection The Passages of Joy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982). In the poem, an unnamed speaker describes the movements of a pinball player in a bar with a sense of close watchfulness and adoration. “He is / the cool source of all that hurry / and desperate activity, in control, / legs apart, braced arms apart, / seeming alive only at the ends,” writes Gunn. This week, write a poem that captures a scene in which your speaker is observing someone closely. Consider, as in Gunn’s poem, how descriptive language can create and match the rhythm of a subject’s movements. For more inspiration, read C. K. Williams’s poem “From My Window.”

In 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed a law declaring the first Monday of September as a workers holiday after labor unions pushed for recognition of both the contributions and mistreatment of American workers. Some of the laws that protect workers today—the forty-hour workweek, minimum wage, and health coverage—began with celebrating Labor Day. Workplace struggles can inspire great writing, whether it be about feeling stuck in a dead-end job, as in Raven Leilani’s novel Luster (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), or real-life experiences, as in Philip Levine’s collection What Work Is (Knopf, 1991), in which the poems offer a portrait of assembly line workers. Write a short story centered around a protagonist’s relationship with a job. Try to tease out the spiritual and physical repercussions of our society’s relationship with work in your fiction.

In her essay “Dear Judy,” published in the New York Review of Books, Melissa Febos writes about her experience watching the film adaptation of Judy Blume’s groundbreaking novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. In the essay, Febos describes the companionship Blume’s novel provided through the difficult years of her adolescence. “There was no book I read more often than Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. It was almost twenty years old when I encountered it, but still more candid about bodily changes and the feelings they prompted than any other children’s book I had read,” writes Febos. Think of a work of art—be it literature, film, or otherwise—that struck a chord with you in your teens. Write an essay that reflects on how this work did or did not prepare you for the years to come.

“While researching the mechanisms of memory, I uncovered a delightful and, yes, terrifying fact from neuroscience: Each time we recall an event, we change it,” writes Rebekah Bergman in a recent installment of our Craft Capsules series about using the slipperiness of memory to craft fiction. “Every memory I hold onto might just be a story I tell myself. And the more I tell it as a story, the more I forget about the original event.” Is there an event from your past that’s been rewritten by the mechanisms of memory? Try writing a short story inspired by the gaps between your core memories. How can you use the slipperiness of memory to craft the perspective of a character?