“I often think of poetry as something that is beyond the true and the false,” says poet and critic Michael Leong on what he feels is true about the art of poetry in a Literary Hub interview with Peter Mishler. “Poetry’s strangeness is so tied up with how it productively messes with what we previously thought were stable truths and stable falsehoods.” Taking inspiration from this notion that poetry exists in a space that is “beyond the true and the false,” write a poem that explores a seemingly stable truth or falsehood, one that you may be interested in interrogating and undermining. Experiment with using surrealist imagery, playing with expanding far out into the white space of the page to stretch further into the incongruity of your subject.

In a recently published article in T Magazine, artists, including John Waters, Andres Serrano, Karen Finley, Khaled Hosseini, Geraldine Brooks, Art Spiegelman, Kate Bornstein, and Dread Scott, were interviewed about how censorship changed their work and lives. “The censorship does the opposite of what it wants to do,” said playwright and director Moisés Kaufman. “It makes people really think: ‘What are the issues in the play? Whose stories get to be told?’” This week write a personal essay that focuses on either a work of art, literature, or performance that has endured censorship at some point. Describe the work and the themes within the work that provoked censorship. How did this banning affect your ideas of the role of an artist?

The Last Showgirl is a 2024 drama film directed by Gia Coppola starring Pamela Anderson as a veteran Vegas dancer in her fifties who finds herself becoming obsolete as the revue she has headlined for three decades prepares to close. As Shelly considers other job prospects and a lifetime invested in and shaped by outmoded notions of femininity, eroticism, and glamour, she is faced with confronting the people in her life: the stage manager who remains at the venue producing a new show, her estranged daughter, and an old friend who works as a cocktail waitress and has alcohol and gambling addictions. Write a short story in which your main character is confronted with the harsh realities of social expectations as they age, particularly those around gender, beauty, and worth. What are their personal values around these concepts and how do they navigate the resulting tensions?