“Summer grass aches and whispers. // It wants something; it calls and sings; it pours / out wishes to the overhead stars.” In Carl Sandburg’s three-stanza poem “Summer Grass,” originally published in his 1928 collection Good Morning, America, the poet explores sentiments of longing and transition, capturing the spiky heat and dryness of summer through a personification of grass straining for cool, nourishing hydration, and then the deliverance of rain. As summer slowly transitions into autumn, compose a series of short poems that manifest both the physical sensations and the emotional elements you might associate with two consecutive seasons, moving from one to the other. How can you play with rhythm and line breaks, sound and space, to express movement and energy?

In Amy Gallo’s essay, “Forever Faithful to a Single Story: An Ode to Monogamous Writing,” published on Literary Hub, the author writes about her decades-long commitment to a single manuscript and how she adamantly avoided juggling multiple writing projects in the process of publishing her first book. “I couldn’t move on because I was still spoken for, I suppose, my consciousness occupied by the single story closest to my heart,” writes Gallo. Write a personal essay reflecting on your commitment to an essay or manuscript you’ve been working on. Do you tend to focus on one project at a time or do you enjoy taking breaks with something new?

In “What Scientists Learned By Eavesdropping on Thousands of People,” an essay recently published in the New Yorker, Shayla Love reports that people are speaking fewer and fewer words, citing a study published earlier this year that found, on average, people speak about three hundred fewer words a day than in years past. Write a short story set in the near future in which people rarely speak aloud to one another. Consider which thoughts or emotions become difficult or impossible to express when spoken language becomes a rarity. How do those lost conversations affect your characters and reshape societal values? Has verbal communication been supplanted by another kind of discourse?