As climate collapse transforms our experiences of the natural world, researchers are sounding the alarm that smells and scents will become extinct alongside changes in plant biodioversity, weather-related phenomena, and the evolution of the world’s landscapes of man-made structures. According to a recent article in Smithsonian magazine, scientists warn that not only will the changing climate have a reduced “scentscape,” but that human beings may gradually experience diminished abilities to smell, due to the harmful effects of pollution. Write a short story that takes place in a universe where smells have largely disappeared from everyday life. What sort of adaptations have been created to compensate for this sensory loss? Will memories, which are strongly associated with smell, function in different ways?

In an interview for the Poetry Society of America, Diane Seuss talks to Jennifer Franklin about how she writes with a keen awareness of the body as a site of both immense precarity and radical agency. When considering the role of structure in poetry, Seuss draws a parallel between the literary form and human form, how language can be compressed and lead through the formal constraints of a poetic form in the same way the human body can act as an impediment and a guide. “We write with all of ourselves,” she says, “at our best.” Write a poem that uses the structure of a poetic form to reflect on the nature of the body. Explore how the lyrical imagination pushes against structure, like the body “compresses the soul,” as Seuss describes. How does the inclusion of the body anchor your writing, and how might you play within these confines?

In her translator’s preface to The Narrow Road of Oku, a new edition of Matsuo Bashō’s seminal haibun diary published by New Directions in June, Meredith McKinney notes that though it is possible to read the work “as a straightforward, episodic travel diary of a seventeenth century Japanese poet and his companion,” the haibun form of prose writing followed by poetry “asks the reader to slow down, to pause and focus.” Spend some time jotting down notes and memories of a significant trip you have taken. Try your hand at writing in a similar style, interspersing travel journal vignettes with brief, poetic observations of a singular moment or image in time that distills a particular sensation. “I make the cool / my lodging / lounging at ease,” writes Bashō after one particularly long journey. Consider how the slowed-down pace of short, poetic lines might balance each episode’s narrative.

At the start of Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein, a hybrid-genre book merging biography with fiction, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June, the first-person narrator finds a silver lining to her friend’s cat going missing, noting that the drama “was a relief from writing my essay on Gertrude Stein, about whom I knew too much and nothing at all.” The narrator goes on to express her frustration while studying who Stein was as a writer and a person. “Sometimes, when I read her baffling and beguiling writing I wanted to smack it in the chops,” writes Levy. Select a writer or artist whose personality, mythology, and life story pique your interest, and write a short story that revolves around a character who is working on a project about your chosen person. Consider how the subject’s real biography might play with parallels in your fictionalized character’s life and world.