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“I was writing this book that was kind of longing for the city that I actually lived in.” In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, Natalie Adler talks about the loneliness she felt in New York City during the pandemic and how it inspired her to write her debut novel, Waiting on a Friend (Hogarth, 2026), which takes place at the height of the AIDS crisis in 1984.
“I learned that Lucky Charms cereal is, like, seventy-five percent sugar, bananas are poisonous to monkeys, and you should rinse Popsicles before eating them to avoid losing taste buds. I learned that you can kind of just say ‘slay’ whenever, as filler, that you can address both your girls and your dad as ‘bro,’” writes Anna Wiener in “The Life and Times of an American Tween,” a recent New Yorker piece about a San Francisco twelve-year-old and her friends that expands into larger ideas around being a twenty-first century tween. Write a short story in which one of your main characters is a teenager. Draw from your own experiences as a teen, as well as your knowledge of Gen Alpha, to round this character out with age-specific habits, emotional turmoil, energy, and outlook. Consider how the character’s use of slang conveys a phase of in-betweenness, intense observation, and playacting in this preadult window of their life.
The machines are watching you . . . and they’re talking to each other. In an interview for Phaidon, Trevor Paglen, artist and author of How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI (Verso, 2026), speaks about how most images made in the world today are not centered around a human observer, but are made by machines for other machines. “A simple example is a self-driving car that is making tons and tons of images every second to navigate,” he says. “They’re not making those images for humans, they’re making them for themselves.” Spend some time imagining how a machine might “see” a photograph differently from how a human would, and write a poem with a particular image in mind. What might a machine notice or not notice? How might processing an image and communicating about it be different when we dispense with our conventional ideas of human emotional responses? Experiment with the way certain details are described and remembered.
In this video, Lillian Li talks about her desire to write about friendships and friendship breakups, and the experience of growing up in a hypercompetitive Chinese American community in her second novel, Bad Asians (Henry Holt, 2026), for this Politics and Prose event with Angie Kim.
“I think philosophy was my first reading love. It was through philosophy that I entered literature.” In this Mahindra Humanities Center event at Harvard University, Tamil novelist and translator Anuk Arudpragasam speaks with Tara K. Menon about writing while working on his doctorate in philosophy and shares insights about his novels The Story of a Brief Marriage (Flatiron Books, 2016) and A Passage North (Hogarth Press, 2021).
In her debut memoir, Everything I Know About Love (Penguin Books, 2018), Dolly Alderton recounts her twenties through the lens of friendship, romantic confusion, and the gradual shedding of illusions. Along the way, she questions the stories she grew up believing about what love should look like, how adulthood should feel, and what it means to be fulfilled. “I blame my high expectations for love on two things: the first is that I am the child of parents who are almost embarrassingly infatuated with each other; the second is the films I watched in my formative years,” writes Alderton. Write about an expectation you inherited about love, success, marriage, adulthood, or happiness. Who set that expectation and how did it take root? Describe a moment when reality didn’t live up to your expectations and how this shifted your understanding of what you truly want.
“It’s the women in my life who have held a steady glow for me.” In this video, Minda Honey reads from her memoir, The Heartbreak Years (Little A, 2023), and speaks about cultural expectations of women and long-term relationships with co-hosts Christina Fisanick and Damian Dressick for this event from the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia. For more from Honey, read “The Joy of the Tortured Artist: Why We Write, Even When We Hate to Write” featured in the May/June 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Choose an ordinary setting for a new story: a laundromat, a corner store, a waiting room, a kitchen table. Treat this place not just as background, but as an active force in the lives of your characters. Think about how your characters encounter and become one with this space. How are the lighting choices, particular sounds, and the rhythm of people and objects a factor in shaping the emotions of those who inhabit them? What hidden meaning emerges when you linger on what first seems mundane?
