A pivotal scene in the first season of Jacob Tierney’s hit television series Heated Rivalry, an adaptation of Rachel Reid’s Game Changers queer hockey romance novel series, occurs when Russian hockey star Ilya invites his Canadian rival Shane to his house for the first time in their relationship and offers to make him a tuna melt. While the scene lasts less than a minute and the actual assembly of the sandwich is not even depicted, the notably caring gesture struck a chord with fans, inspiring new attention to—and even recipes for—the unassuming sandwich. Write a short story in which an act of care, perhaps revolving around the sharing of food, communicates something significant about your characters’ personalities, states of mind, or relationship. Does this simple act melt hearts?

“You were almost apologetic when you said it today. / We were having coffee, checking e-mail, & the grapefruit / Juice shone with pulp,” begins Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s poem “I Might Not Be Here,” published this month in the New Yorker. The five words in the poem’s title have presumably been spoken by the narrator’s spouse, the “you” addressed throughout the poem, and the tension of those words hover over the scene. Later, the narrator remarks, “Five words / Stalk my future with you.” The poem shifts between details of the room where the words were uttered to thoughts related to senescence and the trajectory of love, life, and art. Write a poem that expounds on a short sentence that carries a lot of weight between two people. Recount details of the place in which the words were said to sit in the moment.

In her essay “Creativity as resistance,” published on the Creative Independent, Kemi Ajisekola makes a case for creative work as a powerful tool to instigate transformation within cultures and point out what’s wrong, noting that “creativity isn’t a retreat from reality. It’s one of the ways reality gets reshaped.” Take some time to think up a short list of specific things around you that need to be changed, whether within the systems and structures in your immediate community or society at large. Write a personal essay that points out what’s broken and envisions where a new direction could take us. Can you imagine innovative ways to demonstrate care? How do your personal values come into play for these hopeful plans?

“Upside Down, Anyways,” “An Economy of a Murder,” “The Beauty and the Shed,” “Bend Over Pac-Man,” and “The Big Girl” are all mistaken movie titles that theatergoers have requested to see according to a box office staff in New York who has kept track of these amusing and sometimes perplexing blunders. The correct titles are, respectively, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Anatomy of a Fall, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Bend It Like Beckham, and The Beguiled. Take inspiration from one of these wrong movie titles, or perhaps a mistake of your own or one that you’ve overheard, and write a short story that follows the direction of the erroneous phrase. What would happen if Pac-Man was a source of inspiration for a soccer film? How would “an economy of a murder” be explained? Allow yourself to be experimental with humor and imagery, perhaps moving toward a fabulist or speculative mode.

In Sanam Sheriff’s poem “The Emperor Pats His Lips with a Napkin,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, each line ends with renditions of the words, “object” and “subject,” a constraint the poet uses as a kind of outline. “Given that you are the object / of the emperor’s touch; given that you object // to his learnt repetition of love; given the abject / shame of a body entered by another body’s object // permanence,” begins Sherrif’s poem. Using a similar type of constraint, compose a poem that plays with different renditions of words that stem from the same or parallel roots. Play with the different verb tenses and homophonic meanings of your chosen words to paint your own portrait.