In a 2016 interview for the Film Stage, French director Mia Hansen-Løve, known for her philosophical drama films that revolve around familial and romantic relationships and loss, talks about an unexpected connection between her own works and Michael Mann’s 1995 blockbuster crime drama Heat starring Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. She recognizes that the film about a detective and a career thief is actually about “action vs. melancholy and self-destruction—action becoming self-destruction,” themes Hansen-Løve sees in her own films “except in a very different way, in a very different world.” Think of a favorite film of yours with a genre that is, at least on the surface, extremely different from the type of fiction you tend to write. Consider the larger themes that are investigated in that work and write a short story that explores these themes in your own way, and in your own world.

Published in n+1, Jynne Dilling writes a tribute piece to Michael Silverblatt, who died earlier this month and was the host of NPR’s Bookworm radio program for over three decades. Reflecting on his many insights, Dilling writes about an episode of the program in which Silverblatt talks to author David Mitchell about how stammering is a form of learning what to say. “Stammering is the language of the inner self,” says Silverblatt. “Before a writer does a final draft, the first draft is a form of stammering, trying to gum one’s way through the thing one doesn’t yet know how to say.” Compose a poem that begins as a stammer of sorts, in which you are learning how to say something that feels difficult or even impossible to articulate in language. How might holding on to parts of the stammering imbue your poem with valuable insights into your inner self?

“I sit hunched over an open folder, I peer at Lorraine Hansberry’s cursive script, neat and sharp like the thoughts in her eyes,” writes Tisa Bryant in Residual (Nightboat Books, March 2026), an experimental memoir written in the aftermath of her mother’s death in which she includes works by Black women who haunt her meditations and creative work. Bryant writes toward a “shared Black imaginary” as she moves through reflections on art, loss, and literature. Begin composing a hybrid essay that incorporates elements of memoir and criticism by first brainstorming a list of people who haunt your thinking—you might jot down writers and artists you admire, or figures from fiction and nonfiction works. Write a series of vignettes in which you explore these specters while observing how they have infiltrated your personal life. Allow yourself to delve deep into diaristic details, perhaps even adding drawings or photographs.