A mysterious lunch meeting at a restaurant in the financial district between a middle-aged actress and a handsome, much younger man opens the story of Katie Kitamura’s novel Audition (Riverhead Books, 2025). The reader is momentarily left in the dark as the unnamed first-person narrator recounts this lunchtime assignation and it’s not until the third chapter of the book that the details and reasons for their initial meeting come to light. Start a new short story in which two characters meet and the nature of their connection is kept ambiguous. Are they friends, lovers, family, colleagues, or something else? How can you use shifting points of view and dialogue to maintain an atmosphere of suspense and inscrutability?

In Sean Baker’s film Anora, which won best picture at this year’s Academy Awards, the title character spends the majority of her time zigzagging around New York City with various characters and in one particularly indelible shot, she strides past the iconic Cyclone roller coaster at a deserted Coney Island boardwalk on a gray winter afternoon. This week write a poem that revolves around an iconic location with a depiction that is unconventional or atypical in juxtaposition. You might consider how this locale is usually thought of in the popular imagination, how it was designed to function, or how it looks in different seasons. Play around with diction and rhythm to amp up a sense of tension and upend conventional expectations of your subject.

Among the thousands of structures that were destroyed in the devastating Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year was one home in Altadena. The house had been slated for renovations to become a foundation and residency honoring the late author and critic Gary Indiana, who died in October 2024. A shipment of hundreds of books constituting the writer’s personal library arrived at the home hours before the Eaton Fire, the entirety of which is now lost. Along with the library was an irreplaceable record of the authors who inspired Indiana’s work. In an act of reparative imagination, write a personal essay about a literary hero of yours and reflect on what might drive their creativity. If there are interviews and other materials available in which your subject reveals their muses, allow yourself the freedom to focus on your own speculations and connections.