In her 2024 memoir, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris, published by Penguin Life, Glynnis MacNicol lists the items in her suitcase when packing to live in Paris for a year and reveals that Joan Didion was a source of inspiration. “In The White Album, Joan Didion famously wrote down her packing list, radical at the time—Tampax!— and revealing in its intimacy and simplicity,” writes MacNicol. “As a storytelling device, it was admirable in what it told the reader about the writer, about her life, and about what it meant to be a woman in the world, without seeming to say much.” Write a personal essay anchored by a list of your belongings—whether it be from a suitcase, grocery tote, or any other bag. Consider using certain items as entry points into memories and experiences, using them like pieces of a portrait, each adding another layer to you in that moment.

In the film Obsession, directed by Curry Barker, protagonist and hopeless romantic Bear finds a supernatural toy that grants his wish for his friend Nikki to fall madly in love with him. The consequences of his wish are soon revealed when Nikki becomes terrifyingly attached and devoted to him, and it becomes harder to decipher her true self. Write a short story from the point of view of someone under a love spell. Show the process of your character transforming as they grow deeper in their fixation. You might explore the darker facets of this obsession and loss of autonomy through an internal monologue. How can you incorporate glimpses of reality within a story told behind rose-tinted glasses?

In a recent installment of our Ten Questions series, Maya C. Popa talks about how her palindrome poem “One Way or Another” became the opening poem of her collection If You Love That Lady (Norton, 2026) and the first one she remembers writing for it. “Its back-and-forth, snake-swallowing-its-own-tail quality would end up being emblematic of both those years and my experience assembling the manuscript,” she says. This week, write a palindrome poem in which the last half mirrors the first half. You may choose to adhere strictly to a set of lines, reversing the order halfway through the piece with no alterations, or choose to divert from this structure while keeping the halves of the poem a reflection, be it structural or figurative. How might symmetry serve as an embodiment of your poem’s themes?

“My essay on tigers started with the question of whether Blake, when he wrote ‘The Tyger,’ had ever seen a real tiger,” says Eliot Weinberger in an interview by Srikanth Reddy for the Paris Review’s “Art of the Essay” series. “That got me looking into the mythology and image of the tiger in the West.” Stemming from a deceptively simple question, Weinberger’s celebrated essay “Paper Tigers” investigates the complex history of tiger iconography and fascination with the wild animal. Write an essay that begins with a simple question and draws from a piece of mythos, whether cultural or private, that is present in your life. What associations and symbolisms does your subject conjure for you?

Sophie Kemp’s absurdist novel Paradise Logic (Simon & Schuster, 2025) follows a young woman who seeks everlasting devotion from her boyfriend and embarks on a mission to become the best girlfriend of all time. In an interview published in Columbia University’s the Blue and White, Kemp talks about drawing inspiration from one of Nobel Prize–winning author Kazuo Ishiguro’s books. “The Remains of the Day is about a guy who wants to be the greatest butler of all time,” she says. “And I was like, oh, it’s going to be like that.” Write a short story in which your main character is trying to become the absolute best in their field or pursuit. What insights can this monomania give to your character’s psychology? Is the grandiose fixation noble, deluded, ill-fated, successful, or perhaps somewhere in-between?