The Time Is Now

According to a recent study in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, scientists found evidence in a cave in Texas that 1,500 years ago, someone ate a venomous snake whole. The discovery was made through analysis of coprolite, fossilized poop, which revealed a wealth of information about the ancient forager’s life and times. While there is no way to be certain, the archaeologists believe it’s possible that the snake was eaten for ceremonial or ritualistic purposes. Write a short story in which your main character finds a fossil in an unlikely place. How does this discovery steer your character into a mystery?

“‘When you finish the book, you close the pages and let your mind wander to the first thing you remember—the most vivid moment, a feeling, a character, a phrase, or even something in your own life experience that resonated and has been resurfaced by the story,’” says Ben Please in “The Bookshop Band” by Dana Isokawa in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. The duo, comprised of Please and Beth Porter, composes and performs literary-themed music by a wide range of authors, oftentimes inspired by just one book. Try this exercise while composing a new poem: Select a book you read recently and let your mind’s wandering—and lingering on a word, phrase, or feeling—lead you to the starting point of a poem.

“I had surveyed thousands of miles of panoramic splendor, and I couldn’t believe I had come all that way just to get to Los Angeles,” Caity Weaver writes at the end of her New York Times essay “There Is no Reason to Cross the U.S. by Train. But I Did It Anyway.” In other words, sometimes the old adage applies: It’s about the journey, not the destination. Think back to a time in your life when you had to travel for a long period of time to get somewhere—by train, car, plane, bus, or on foot—and the memory of the trek itself now eclipses the destination. Write a personal essay about the experience and what made it so memorable: the people, the landscape, and the unexpected moments along the way.

For decades, phones shaped like Garfield—Jim Davis’s comic strip cat best known for being lazy and loving lasagna—kept washing up on the northwest coast of France seemingly out of the blue. The mystery was finally solved after a French environmental group discovered an abandoned shipping container filled with these feline phones lodged deep inside a nearby cave, according to a recent report in the Washington Post. This week, write a story about an enigmatic object that surfaces near a body of water. Concoct an explanation that is logical, fantastical, or somewhere in between—a statement on wastefulness and global pollution or about the magical interconnectedness of the world. For ideas and photographs of strange artifacts discovered underwater, including an ice cream truck and a giraffe, visit Underwater New York.

In the Paris Review’s advice column Poetry Rx, Sarah Kay recommends the poem “On This the 100th Anniversary of the Sinking of the Titanic, We Reconsider the Buoyancy of the Human Heart” by Laura Lamb Brown-Lavoie to her heartbroken correspondent. “My heart has an iceberg with its name on it, I told / Titanic, so I need your advice. Tell me, did you see the / iceberg coming?” the poem’s narrator asks the sunken ship. Write a poem this week that addresses and personifies a historical object or place, drawing parallels with the speaker’s present-day problems and plea for wisdom. What advice can this relic offer your speaker?

“In the tiny little notebook I took tiny little notes…. I wrote for one minute eight times throughout the first day. Eight times on the second day.” In Camille T. Dungy’s essay “Say Yes to Yourself: A Poet’s Guide to Living and Writing” in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, the author writes about various writing routines, including one which consisted of writing for a small amount of time simply recording things that caught her attention. Try out this routine for several days—you might decide on one or two minutes throughout the day, or twenty—and note down sensory observations, and emotional and physical feelings. At the end of the experiment, write an essay inspired by a couple of your favorite observations.

Earlier this month, a woman in Taiwan who was clearing weeds from a gravestone as part of the Chinese Qingming Festival—a day for sweeping, tidying, and paying respects at ancestral tombs—felt a sudden pain in her left eye. Upon seeking medical attention, the source of the swollenness turned out to be four bees that had flown into her eye and were feeding on her tear ducts. Write a short horror story that starts with a seemingly innocuous irritation that turns out to be something more unsavory. Begin your story with a presumably everyday nuisance—sand in your eye, a pebble in your shoe, a paper cut on your finger—and then let the horror unfold bit by bit.

The first-ever picture of a black hole was revealed last week, an image from the Messier 87 galaxy taken by eight radio observatories on six mountains and four continents in 2017. Spend some time looking at the picture online, including a wider, zoomed-out view. The New York Times calls it a “doughnut of doom,” while Vice Motherboard says it looks like a SpaghettiO. What emotions does the image bring to the surface for you? Write a poem that captures the wondrous significance of the image, perhaps imbuing your verse with humor, terror, and a mixture of scientific vocabulary and figurative language.

What did you eat for breakfast this morning? Do you prefer a pastry and coffee, yogurt and fruit, cereal, or an egg sandwich? Perhaps you like something hearty to start the day like oatmeal porridge, fava bean stew, a rice dish, or noodle soup. Browse through photos of typical breakfast meals from around the world and write a personal essay about a favorite breakfast of your own. Think about specific memories associated with these meals, involving certain people or places. How have your breakfast foods and routines changed over the years?

In a study published last week in Scientific Reports journal, psychologists reported findings that cats are able to recognize and respond to their names. Dogs, however, have a definite advantage, having been domesticated twenty thousand years before cats by humans who intentionally bred them to be obedient. Write a story that has a temperamental cat in it, sometimes responsive and other times quite aloof. What purpose does the cat serve in the story? How can you depict the cat as more than just stereotypically mercurial?