“Life itself is kinship. We’re all a community of air,” says Mohammad Saud who operates a bird clinic in Delhi with his brother Nadeem Shehzad that predominantly treats the city’s omnipresent black kites and is the center of Shaunak Sen’s 2022 award-winning documentary, All That Breathes. The film is filled with footage not only of the raptors, but also of the many other creatures—including insects, reptiles, rats, and dogs—that have adapted to an urban environment teeming with pollution and sectarian violence, creating a sense of precarious, precious kinship between human civilization and nonhuman life. Write a poem that draws on observation of all the things that breathe around you. What lives in your local “community of air?”

In an essay in the New York Review of Architecture, Elvia Wilk writes about light pollution and the extensive effects and detriments of artificial lighting. “Everyone suffers, from bats—which are essential pollinators, predators, and fertilizers—to birds, to coral reefs, to orchids. The disruption occurs not only on the scale of the day, but on the scale of the season,” writes Wilk. “In cities, trees positioned next to streetlamps wait to shed their fall leaves for three weeks longer than trees unlit by lamps.” Write a personal essay that reflects on your own relationship to the various types of lighting around you, both artificial and natural. Describe the way sunlight affects you throughout the seasons and explore how lamps, overhead lighting, and streetlights shape your days and nights.

A career criminal, a florist owner, an aquarium tour guide, and a prison drama teacher. The characters in the 2022 French comedic heist movie The Innocent hold an array of colorful jobs, which provide intriguing imagery and set pieces, and assist in placing the characters in specific circumstances with rippling effects. This week write a short story that makes use of multiple unconventional jobs, as you define them. Choose a few that seem wildly different from what you know and are evocative to you personally. How do the tasks of these odd jobs circumscribe your characters’ actions and ways of problem-solving? Incorporate elements of comedy and action into your narrative to create a funny, fast-paced story.

In a recent New York Times article, architecture critic Michael Kimmelman visits various DIY concrete ramps in front of New York City bodegas with photographer Tom Wilson, who sees the ramps as “urban geology,” creative workarounds to make the shop doors accessible for hand trucks, strollers, and wheelchairs. Kimmelman describes the bodega ramps as a Rorschach test as they bring to mind glaciers, tongues, clamshells, ziggurats, and even “ladles of pancake batter spreading on a griddle.” Compose a poem dedicated to an overlooked feature of your locale, whether something in an urban environment that parallels natural formations or something in a more rural environment that reminds you of urban structures. You might play with features of concrete poetry, photographs, or illustrations to accompany your piece.