Poetry: Summer Senses
Jane Kenyon’s poem “Three Songs at the End of Summer” features three portraits of late summer, each evoking its own distinct sounds, moods, and atmosphere. The first section of the poem begins with “a second crop of hay” and “five gleaming crows,” continues through the sights and sounds of summer camp, and ends with a couplet that gestures to autumn: “Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts; / water, silver-still, and a vee of geese.” The second section consists of two three-line stanzas infused with the sound of cicadas, and in the final section, Kenyon explicitly reaches back in time to the speaker’s childhood and the scent of a damp dirt road on a foggy morning. Taking inspiration from this structure, write a three-part poem that explores a few resonant memories of the end of summer—fleeting images and sounds and smells of various activities. Experiment with sections of varying lengths to create dramatic effect.
Fiction: Beguiled
At the start of Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein, a hybrid-genre book merging biography with fiction, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June, the first-person narrator finds a silver lining to her friend’s cat going missing, noting that the drama “was a relief from writing my essay on Gertrude Stein, about whom I knew too much and nothing at all.” The narrator goes on to express her frustration while studying who Stein was as a writer and a person. “Sometimes, when I read her baffling and beguiling writing I wanted to smack it in the chops,” writes Levy. Select a writer or artist whose personality, mythology, and life story pique your interest, and write a short story that revolves around a character who is working on a project about your chosen person. Consider how the subject’s real biography might play with parallels in your fictionalized character’s life and world.
Nonfiction: Travel Episodes
In her translator’s preface to The Narrow Road of Oku, a new edition of Matsuo Bashō’s seminal haibun diary published by New Directions in June, Meredith McKinney notes that though it is possible to read the work “as a straightforward, episodic travel diary of a seventeenth century Japanese poet and his companion,” the haibun form of prose writing followed by poetry “asks the reader to slow down, to pause and focus.” Spend some time jotting down notes and memories of a significant trip you have taken. Try your hand at writing in a similar style, interspersing travel journal vignettes with brief, poetic observations of a singular moment or image in time that distills a particular sensation. “I make the cool / my lodging / lounging at ease,” writes Bashō after one particularly long journey. Consider how the slowed-down pace of short, poetic lines might balance each episode’s narrative.
Suggested Reading
On Witness and Respair (Scribner, May 2026) by Jesmyn Ward
One needn’t be a writer to appreciate the essays in Jesmyn Ward’s collected nonfiction, filled as they are with insights and observations about the two-time National Book Award–winning author’s childhood and upbringing in rural Mississippi, her experience raising a Black son in the United States, and the personal tragedies that have impacted her life. But the book holds special treasures for writers looking for examples of how art, and writing in particular, helps us survive. The collection features Ward’s “Why Fiction Matters” address at the Library of Congress in 2023, the speech she delivered at Toni Morrison’s memorial in 2019, her Eudora Welty lecture “You Tell Your Story: You Survive,” and essays about authors such as Octavia Butler and Ta-Nehisi Coates. “Writers were magic-workers,” she writes in the introduction about a realization she had in the library of her elementary school. Readers of On Witness and Respair will know the feeling.
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