For as long as writers have put pen to paper, springtime has been a fertile subject—mulled over, praised, longed for, and even forsaken. From Vladimir Nabokov’s 1926 novel, Mary, in which he writes that the feeling of “nostalgia in reverse” grows stronger in spring, to Angela Carter’s 1966 novel, Shadow Dance, in which she writes that “spring hurts depressives,” the season often symbolizes hope and anticipation, a climbing out of darkness. When the lingering coldness of winter remains, however, it is sometimes difficult to transition alongside the blossoms and sprouts. Taking inspiration from this fulcrum between seasons, write an essay about a period when you had trouble accepting the onset of spring. Spend time tracing the connection between the world outside and changing seasons of your emotional life.

Angel Dominguez’s Desgraciado (the collected letters), published in February by Nightboat Books, comprises a series of letters addressed to Diego de Landa, a Spanish friar who attempted to destroy the written Mayan language in Maní Yucatán in the sixteenth century. This hybrid epistolary collection navigates the shared trauma and history of colonization while creating an intimate correspondence that returns agency to the descendant of a people de Landa tried to extinguish. “Dear Diego, I write to you because there’s nothing else to do; nothing to be done, and yet we must go on. Go on living, go on writing,” Dominguez writes. Draft a story in which a character corresponds with a figure from history. Whether through letters, dreams, or ghostly visitations, what would your protagonist ask this historical figure, and what would drive this quest for answers?

“My materialist mind, I can’t / shake it,” writes Solmaz Sharif in her poem “Now What” from her second collection, Customs, forthcoming in March by Graywolf Press. The speaker of the poem sits in a hotel in Ohio eating takeout and meditating on the origins of the meal, tracing connections back into history and the people whose hands made this food possible: “Within a perfect / little tub of garlic / butter // a relief of workers, of sickles / fields of soy.” Write a poem that meditates on the origins of a favorite condiment, seasoning, or meal. Try to establish a time and place in the poem by beginning in the present, then leap into the anecdotal or historical stories that come to you.