In her memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May, Yiyun Li writes about the loss of her two teenage sons. After her son Vincent’s death, Li wrote a book for him “in which a mother and a dead child continue their conversation across the border of life and death.” However, she finds that her son James’s character and their relationship evade her desire to write a book for him and in composing this memoir, Li embarks on a project to find a new alphabet, a new language, and a new way of storytelling. Taking inspiration from Li, write a lyrical essay about someone you have lost in a style that reflects their personality and your relationship, in all its complexities. Allow yourself to be experimental with structure and chronology.

A mysterious lunch meeting at a restaurant in the financial district between a middle-aged actress and a handsome, much younger man opens the story of Katie Kitamura’s novel Audition (Riverhead Books, 2025). The reader is momentarily left in the dark as the unnamed first-person narrator recounts this lunchtime assignation and it’s not until the third chapter of the book that the details and reasons for their initial meeting come to light. Start a new short story in which two characters meet and the nature of their connection is kept ambiguous. Are they friends, lovers, family, colleagues, or something else? How can you use shifting points of view and dialogue to maintain an atmosphere of suspense and inscrutability?

In Sean Baker’s film Anora, which won best picture at this year’s Academy Awards, the title character spends the majority of her time zigzagging around New York City with various characters and in one particularly indelible shot, she strides past the iconic Cyclone roller coaster at a deserted Coney Island boardwalk on a gray winter afternoon. This week write a poem that revolves around an iconic location with a depiction that is unconventional or atypical in juxtaposition. You might consider how this locale is usually thought of in the popular imagination, how it was designed to function, or how it looks in different seasons. Play around with diction and rhythm to amp up a sense of tension and upend conventional expectations of your subject.