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In this Poets House event, Garrett Hongo reads from his fourth poetry collection, Ocean of Clouds (Knopf, 2025), and Edward Hirsch reads from his new memoir, My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy (Knopf, 2025), followed by a conversation between the authors about their friendship and humor.
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?
“But fear can be galvanizing; perhaps the novel would not have been written without it.” —Xenobe Purvis, author of The Hounding
“She was a short story that kind of got too big and started rolling away from me,” says Katie Yee about her debut novel, Maggie; or a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar (Summit Books, 2025), in this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, in which they discuss writing outside of your own experience and usual style.
“If the dandelion on the sidewalk is / mere detail, the dandelion inked on a friend’s bicep / is an image because it moves when her body does,” writes Rick Barot in his poem “The Wooden Overcoat,” published in Poetry magazine in 2012. The speaker of the poem draws a distinction between a “detail” and an “image” defining the latter as something connected to a larger context and personal history that is “activated in the reader’s senses beyond mere fact.” Compose a poem that experiments with this distinction, perhaps incorporating both a “detail” and an “image” so that each functions in an intentional way. You could consider beginning with an item and slowly shifting the reader’s understanding of its significance as the poem progresses. Look to Barot’s poem for inspiration on form and use of space.
In this Creative Writing Series event at the University of Notre Dame, Kristen Arnett reads from her novel Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One (Riverhead Books, 2025) and talks about how she played with form by using different typefaces for “funny” and “not funny,” and her process to ensure that each joke lands.
The author of Restitution (Regal House Publishing, September 2025) recommends writers refine their research and examine which details actually serve their characters and plots.
Directed by Ebs Burnough, this documentary explores the influence that Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel, On the Road, has had on writers, actors, storytellers and artists, and follows the lives of Americans who set off on their own journeys in the footsteps of the famous author, who died in 1969 at the age of forty-seven.
Marissa Davis reads from her debut poetry collection, End of Empire (Penguin Books, 2025), in this Books Are Magic event with poets Sasha Burshteyn and A. D. Lauren-Abunassar. Davis’s book is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“The Chelsea was like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe. I wandered the halls seeking its spirits, dead or alive,” writes Patti Smith in her award-winning 2010 memoir, Just Kids, recounting her time living in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City during the golden, gritty chaos of her youth. Inspired by this image, write an essay about returning to a place that once held deep meaning for you. It might be a childhood home, a first apartment, a rehearsal space, or a street corner that once felt like the center of your world. Explore what it feels like to stand in a space that is both familiar and changed. How does memory overlay reality? Do ghosts of your former self or others linger in the corners?
