What might someone whom you’ve just encountered for the first time never guess about you? What do you think your loved ones associate most with you? Consider these questions and write a lyric essay that consists of two parts: a speculative section with your own musings about how your outward appearance or demeanor might drive people to assume certain characteristics about you, and how those expectations might be subverted. And a second part in which you either choose one person who knows you well and consider the ways they would describe your most distinctive propensities, or meditate on a number of people who are close to you and create a chorus of their lasting impressions of you. Do these two parts make a whole?

Literature has a long history of narratives that are built around fictionalized letters and correspondence—Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther from the eighteenth century, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the nineteenth century, and more contemporary novels such as Stephen King’s Carrie, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. This week compose an epistolary short story incorporating letters, postcards, e-mails, texts, social media posts, news articles, receipts, and other tidbits of written documents. How do these disparate elements work together to create a story that has to be puzzled together?

In their poem “In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down.,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series in 2023, Andrea Gibson, who passed away on July 14, wrote about a newfound gratitude for life while being treated for terminal cancer. “Remind me / all my prayers were answered // the moment I started praying / for what I already have,” wrote Gibson. Write a poem that expresses gratitude through confronting the mortal nature of being human. What do you already have in your life that you might be taking for granted? Perhaps begin by listing some of the beautiful things you saw today.