Writing Prompts & Exercises

“Lichens in the armpits of marble statues / differentiated from lichens on the thighs, / eaten by snails on moonless nights.” Talvikki Ansel describes her poem “The Lichens,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, as growing from an imagining of “the stories of far-flung lichen family members” and “inspired by the presence and tenacity of lichens on trees and rocks and the roof-racks and side mirrors of my car.” Taking a cue from Ansel’s muse, spend some time jotting down notes and observations from any type of natural growth in your surroundings and conduct a bit of research about the biological processes involved. Compose a poem that mixes your personal imaginings with scientific findings and striking imagery.

In First Reformed, the 2017 drama film written and directed by Paul Schrader, a tormented minister leading a small congregation in upstate New York finds his mental, physical, and spiritual states unraveling after a situation with a young couple seeking his guidance leads to a shockingly terrible turn of events. Throughout the turmoil, Reverend Ernst Toller continues a project to record onto paper all of his daily activities and unfiltered thoughts for a year with the intention of destroying the journal once he’s done. Write a short story in which your main character is experiencing a particularly tumultuous phase of upheaval and decides to maintain a daily routine of writing in a diary. Incorporate snippets and excerpts from the diary entries to illuminate the character’s biases and singular perspective, lead the reader to conclusions about your character, or shed light on their preoccupations as they navigate a difficult time.

It’s that time of year to send and receive holiday cards, some of which may include a family newsletter with highlights of the past year from friends and family. According to a survey from the Emily Post Institute, a family business promoting etiquette since 1922, 47 percent of respondents don’t like to receive holiday newsletters. The institute’s website suggests this might be because the letters are more of a brag sheet rather than a genuine desire to communicate. Try your hand at composing a holiday newsletter that recounts notable events and milestones from throughout the past year. Take this exercise as an opportunity to reflect on favorite memories and changes, both big and small. Perhaps you’ll decide to subvert conventional expectations and strike a subversively satirical or darkly apocalyptic tone. Have fun with it!

“It was happily free of theoretical ambitions, such as being avant-garde or radical or even funny,” writes Ron Padgett in the foreword to The Complete C Comics (New York Review Books, 2025), which collects the two issues of comic books created by Joe Brainard in collaboration with New York School poets in the 1960s. Brainard created the drawings and poets, such as Padgett, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and Peter Schjeldahl, provided text for speech balloons and captions. This week experiment with the energy and humor of this illustrative format. Take inspiration from classic comic book icons and characters and write a poem that channels the childlike playfulness of comics, giving them your own “adult” spin, perhaps incorporating elements of surrealism or parody, or even accompanying your own doodles and sketches.

How long would it take you to memorize more than a hundred square miles of city streets? London’s black cab drivers are trained to rely on memory and not GPS technology by studying and passing a series of exams, a process called “The Knowledge,” which can take someone three years or more to receive an official license. Potential drivers must memorize over twenty thousand street names, countless landmarks, and various routes. Write a short story that revolves around a character who must take on and pass an extraordinarily difficult exam of some sort. What significance—whether professional, financial, psychological, or spiritual—would passing the test hold? Consider the various tonalities you wish to strike within the story: hopefulness, despair, suspense, ambiguity, or celebratory happiness.

Lulu Wang’s 2019 film, The Farewell, begins with a group of relatives convening in China on the pretext of a wedding but who are actually there to bid farewell to the family matriarch from whom they are hiding her terminal cancer diagnosis. The protagonist of the film, a woman in her thirties who has lived in the United States for most of her life, struggles with this concept and is told by her uncle that it is their duty to carry the emotional burden of her grandmother’s illness for her. “You think one’s life belongs to oneself,” he says. “But that’s the difference between the East and the West. In the East, a person’s life is part of a whole. Family. Society.” Think back to a time when you have carried a burden for someone else and write an essay that examines your personal experience with this concept. Are there situations in which withholding the truth or keeping something secret feels reasonable, ethical, or even honorable to you?

Write a poem that begins with the image of an animal arriving where it should not be, such as a whale in an office space or a Zebra in a suburban backyard. Allow this surreal scene to take you to unexpected places and metaphors. Is the animal an omen or is it concealing a secret? Focus on the literal and symbolic dimensions of the encounter, drawing out the scene to illuminate overlooked truths, inner stirrings, and the quiet absurdities of the world around you.

“The dry, undramatic accent of the Midwest had her longing for the slow, thick drip of Southern speech,” writes Brian Gresko in “Singing the Sublime: A Profile of Donika Kelly,” published in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, about how Kelly “leans into the soundscape of her youth, bringing her family forward as characters and voices within her poems” in her new collection, The Natural Order of Things (Graywolf Press, 2025). Taking inspiration from Kelly’s journey back to her youth, think about the voices and language of a time or place from your past that you long to hear again. Write a short story that incorporates these voices—the diction, syntax, cadence, and grammar—into the world of your narrative. Where does your character encounter this soundscape? Is it spoken by a stranger in passing or by someone who becomes an important part of the plot?

Is hate ever the answer? In her new book, Hate: The Uses of a Powerful Emotion (Verso Books, 2025), translated from the German by Jackie de Pont, journalist and author Seyda Kurt reimagines hatred and proposes the use of something she calls “strategic hate” that can be deployed to fight against systems of oppression for a more just and equitable society. This week consider your own relationship to hatred—whether as a fleeting emotion or a simmering state of mind—and write a two-part personal essay. In the first section, describe a time in your life, or a specific situation, in which you felt hatred or a desire for vengeance. Then, write about your perspective on the possibility of channeling that hatred into a more positive direction. How can this corrosive emotion be pointed toward the purposes of more tenderness and care?

“Avoid movement on roofs, between buildings, and near windows. / Do not stand where you will stand out.” In Carolyn Forché’s poem “On Being Watched From Above,” published in the New Yorker and forthcoming in the anthology I Witness: An Anthology of Documentary Poetry (Wesleyan University Press, 2026) edited by Kwoya Fagin Maples and Erin Murphy, she draws from official Territorial Defense text to write a documentary poem that, void of specific names and places, reflects the horrors of contemporary warfare and surveillance technology. Taking a cue from the imperative and direct language in Forché’s poem, write your own poem that expresses sentiments around society’s increasing use of surveillance and monitoring. In an era in which these modes are oftentimes presented as serving a greater good, what might be overlooked about the costs to our ways of life?

A human skull, eleven boxes full of used corks, a reel of an old cycling race, an eighteenth-century textbook—these are some of the real items discovered in attics from an article published in the Guardian. What’s hidden in your home? Write a short story that revolves around a character who has just moved into a new place, or is exploring a previously unexamined part of their home, and makes a startling discovery in an attic, basement, shed, or crawl space. Does your character attempt to formulate a story around the findings or locate the original owners of the home? Is there a creative, monetary, or emotional value to be found in the object?

Take a pivotal moment from your own life and reimagine it through the lens of a specific genre or style. You might frame it as a ghost story, a myth, a detective case, or even a surreal fairy tale. Pay attention to how the conventions of that genre shape the reader’s perception of your experience and the ways that tension, suspense, and exaggeration can illuminate truth in unexpected ways. Consider what the shift in perspective reveals about how you remember this moment, the trajectory of your emotions, and the narrative you tell yourself about what occurred.

According to a recent article in Psychology Today, while most people’s earliest memories are remembered like silent films—rich with imagery but largely void of sound—for a select few who have an auditory first memory, they may also have a “sound-minded” orientation in life, in which the “sensory modality of hearing is inseparable from their way of being.” This week, taking inspiration from these two possibilities, compose a pair of poems with contrasting takes on sound. Choose one childhood memory and write one sound-filled version and one silent version. Take some time to think about the various ways in which sound can be conveyed through stylistic decisions involving alliteration and consonance, typography and punctuation, and rhythm. How might line breaks and spacing on the page contribute to a sense of silence?

“I arrived in the middle of the night to save you from the terrible smoke, I had a dream about you and so I decided to come and see you, I arrived just in time,” writes Ariana Harwicz in Unfit (New Directions, 2025), translated from the Spanish by Jessie Mendez Sayer. In the novel an Argentine migrant worker laboring as a grape picker in southern France is thrown into a tailspin after losing custody of her two young sons; she sets fire to her in-laws’ farmhouse, kidnaps her children, and embarks on a manic road trip. The terrifying and darkly humorous first-person narration is filled with contradictions and falsehoods and comma-filled run-on sentences, structured in frenzied, rambling paragraphs that mirror the protagonist’s delusionary state of mind. Write a story that plays with narrative voice in a similar way, aligning the mindset of your protagonist with a frenetic style of storytelling. Are there moments of levity that can provide a reprieve from the pacing?

Findings from a study in Peru, published earlier this year in the journal Ecosphere, reported that for the first time single individuals of ocelot and opossum were “associating and moving together in the rainforest”—two species generally occupying positions of predator and prey instead choosing to spend time hanging out together. Scientists aren’t quite certain about the reason but have conjectured that there might be something symbiotic about the cooperation that benefits both animals as they hunt for other prey. Write a personal essay that examines the experiences you’ve had with a friend with whom the relationship might seem unexpected or inexplicable. How did you meet and what were the factors that drew you together despite your differences?

“Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot?” In Samuel Beckett’s 1952 play Waiting for Godot, which has a new production on Broadway starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, Vladimir and Estragon spend their days waiting for the arrival of someone named Godot, who never shows up. They pass the time with repetitious exchanges of banter, arguments, and musings. The ambiguity of their exact circumstances, as well as who Godot is and what would happen with Godot’s arrival, creates a tragicomic exploration of the nature and purpose of existence, and the significance of friendship and faith. Write a poem that uses the idea of an eternal waiting—for someone, or something—as an entry point to reflect on larger themes of life’s big questions.

Known for his postmodern satirical novels filled with secret conspiracies and government plots, Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Shadow Ticket, out this week from Penguin Press, begins in Depression-era Milwaukee and follows a private detective whose search of a runaway cheese heiress gets him entangled with the Chicago mafia, the Bureau of Investigation, British intelligence, Nazism, and international capitalist conspiracies. This week write a short story that makes use of a current event that might seem absurd or stranger than fiction, spinning off from the actual details of the real event into something weirder. How can you inject humor into a story that gestures to real concerns about paranoia and dysfunctional politics?

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley is a documentary directed by Amy J. Berg about the musician who died suddenly at the age of thirty in 1997, having only released one studio album, of which the single “Hallelujah,” a cover of Leonard Cohen’s song, was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry. Buckley’s biological father, a folk musician who rose to fame in the 1960s, died at the age of twenty-eight, and Berg explores the enduring status and mythos created around artists’ lives cut short, the idea of a suspended perfection mixed with the incomplete feeling of never enough. Think of an artist who seems to exist in a mythical state, perhaps because their popularity was short-lived or due to a mysterious or debated circumstance in their life. Write an essay that examines your interest in your chosen subject and reflect on the stories surrounding their life that perpetuates its mystery.

“Forget about apples and oranges—nothing rhymes with orange anyway. Never mind those plums that William Carlos Williams sneaked from the icebox. The most poetic fruit of all is the blackberry,” writes A. O. Scott, critic at large for the New York Times Book Review, citing blackberry-inclusive works by poets such as Margaret Atwood, Emily Dickinson, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, Galway Kinnell, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Sylvia Plath. Compose a poem inspired by what you consider the most poetic fruit, describing the textures and tastes of your selection, and its associations in the world and in other works of art. Spend some time thinking about the name of the fruit itself, its sounds and component parts and etymological roots. Does conjuring words and phrases that recall the qualities of the fruit take your poem in a surprising or unexpected direction?

As reported in a recent piece in Smithsonian magazine written by Erin Donaghue, there is a small residential neighborhood in northwestern New York State with a population of about 300 inhabitants of which about forty are psychic mediums. Every summer, thousands flock to the hamlet of Lily Dale to engage in the practices of spiritualism, a philosophy and religion that believes that the living can communicate with the dead. This week write a short story in which one of your characters encounters a medium and attempts to establish a connection with someone in their life who has died. You might choose to include multiple voices or perspectives, or imbue your narrative with a tone of mystery, horror, tragedy, or comedy. Are the medium’s capabilities genuine or fraudulent, or perhaps somewhere in-between? What is revealed about your protagonist’s relationship with the person they’re trying to contact?

In “Is Mary Oliver Embarrassing?,” an essay by Maggie Millner, senior editor at Yale Review, she writes about omitting the poet from her list of early influences when asked in professional settings, despite the fact that “Oliver’s poems marked [her] permanently.” Millner writes: “It seemed clear that my disavowal of Oliver was more about my own shame and snobbery than about the merit of the work itself.” Think about an artist whose work you find value in but feel conflicted or embarrassed about, perhaps because you associate their work with your childhood when you had less discerning tastes or because of the opinions of peers in your field. Write a personal essay that explores the roots of your affinity and your feelings of conflict. Then revisit the artist in question and explore how you feel when you encounter their work without embarrassment.

“We live in such a fast-paced world: Poetry helps us slow down, deepen our attention, connect and live more fully,” says Arthur Sze in our online exclusive announcing his appointment as the twenty-fifth poet laureate of the United States. Taking inspiration from Sze’s insights on poetry’s ability to help us appreciate each moment, compile a cluster of words and phrases that come to mind when you recall the soundscape of a recent observation. As you jot down the grouping of words, allow the sounds of what’s already on the page to contribute to associative rhythms and any consonance or assonance in your brainstorm. Then, compose your poem using the full range of the page’s space, deprioritizing any urgency for ease of meaning-making for a piece that is first and foremost inextricable from its sound.

In her 1955 book The Edge of the Sea, marine biologist Rachel Carson explores the ecology of the Atlantic seashore. “When we go down to the low-tide line, we enter a world that is as old as the earth itself,” she writes, “the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflict and eternal change.” Write a short story that uses a shoreline as its setting. Consider the ways in which this meeting place of earth and water is a place where one might encounter change, conflict, and compromise. What sorts of sights specific to this merging of earth and water are observed, and how can you connect them to the major and minor conflicts in your narrative? Does your story conclude with the implication of further “eternal change,” or do you lead your characters to a seeming point of resolution?

In an essay in the New York Review of Architecture, Elvia Wilk writes about light pollution and the extensive effects and detriments of artificial lighting. “Everyone suffers, from bats—which are essential pollinators, predators, and fertilizers—to birds, to coral reefs, to orchids. The disruption occurs not only on the scale of the day, but on the scale of the season,” writes Wilk. “In cities, trees positioned next to streetlamps wait to shed their fall leaves for three weeks longer than trees unlit by lamps.” Write a personal essay that reflects on your own relationship to the various types of lighting around you, both artificial and natural. Describe the way sunlight affects you throughout the seasons and explore how lamps, overhead lighting, and streetlights shape your days and nights.

In a recent New York Times article, architecture critic Michael Kimmelman visits various DIY concrete ramps in front of New York City bodegas with photographer Tom Wilson, who sees the ramps as “urban geology,” creative workarounds to make the shop doors accessible for hand trucks, strollers, and wheelchairs. Kimmelman describes the bodega ramps as a Rorschach test as they bring to mind glaciers, tongues, clamshells, ziggurats, and even “ladles of pancake batter spreading on a griddle.” Compose a poem dedicated to an overlooked feature of your locale, whether something in an urban environment that parallels natural formations or something in a more rural environment that reminds you of urban structures. You might play with features of concrete poetry, photographs, or illustrations to accompany your piece.

“Sometimes she sat at the foot of the illness and asked it questions. Had it stolen her old mind and given her a new one? Had she been able to start over from scratch, a chance afforded to very few people?” Patricia Lockwood’s second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, forthcoming in September from Riverhead Books, chronicles a young woman’s hallucinatory descent as she navigates a loss of self during a global pandemic. Think back to the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic and consider the ways in which the rapidly changing world reconfigured your idea of self and your mindset as you dealt with social distancing and lockdown, sickness and death. Write a short story encapsulating a character’s loss of self during a period of social upheaval that catalyzes a gradual distancing from known reality. Whether your character sees this as a chance to start over or a moment to stand their ground, what do these actions reveal about their personality?

Think of an ordinary object you see almost every day: a chipped coffee mug, a frayed doormat, or the traffic light you always catch red. Write an essay that treats this object as if it were a silent witness to one chapter of your life. Give this object a voice and allow it to narrate this portion of your history in fragments, in terms of what it has seen you gain, what it has seen you lose, and the small, private moments it holds for you. Allow the object’s “voice” to reveal something about you that you rarely admit to others.

In her elegiac poem “the rites for Cousin Vit,” Gwendolyn Brooks captures the aliveness of a loved one as she lays in her casket. Brooks writes: “Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss, / Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks / Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks.” Write a poem that captures the vibrant, unmistakable presence of someone you remember vividly, whether they are near or far, alive or gone. Focus on the small, lively details that make them unique: their gestures, their voice, the habits that linger in your memory. Consider how these fragments—imperfect, intimate, and raw—keep that person alive in your mind.

Last month, new research published in the Review of English Studies presented findings from a pair of scholars that solved a centuries-old mystery in Geoffrey Chaucer’s writings. A typo was discovered in a transcription of a twelfth-century sermon referencing a long-lost, and once popular, poem “The Tale of Wade” in which the word “wolves” was mistakenly written as “elves” and “sea snakes” written as “sprites.” In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales, he referenced the poem and this same bumbled transcription appeared through the centuries, perplexing scholars as to why Chaucer would include mythical creatures in his stories of courtship with knights and ladies. Write a short story in which a typographical mistake results in a cascade of consequences for those who interpret the language in unexpected ways. Is the mistake eventually rectified or does the story conclude without anyone knowing?

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?

“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.

Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel, A Little Life, centers on the complex relationships between four college friends: Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm. JB, a painter, begins a new series of portraits based on his friends, working from memory. When he paints Jude, his enigmatic friend with whom he’s grown distant, he claims it’s a tribute. However, the portrait depicts Jude mid-stumble, highlighting the distinctive walk caused by his lifelong injuries and trauma, and the image is widely seen as exploitative by their friends. This moment marks a betrayal and demonstrates how attempting to capture another person’s essence, even someone you love, can sometimes be dangerous. Write a story about a narrator trying to understand someone they were once close with, perhaps a sibling, friend, or lover. What image do they want to believe? What truths remain unseen?

What might someone whom you’ve just encountered for the first time never guess about you? What do you think your loved ones associate most with you? Consider these questions and write a lyric essay that consists of two parts: a speculative section with your own musings about how your outward appearance or demeanor might drive people to assume certain characteristics about you, and how those expectations might be subverted. And a second part in which you either choose one person who knows you well and consider the ways they would describe your most distinctive propensities, or meditate on a number of people who are close to you and create a chorus of their lasting impressions of you. Do these two parts make a whole?

In their poem “In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down.,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series in 2023, Andrea Gibson, who passed away on July 14, wrote about a newfound gratitude for life while being treated for terminal cancer. “Remind me / all my prayers were answered // the moment I started praying / for what I already have,” wrote Gibson. Write a poem that expresses gratitude through confronting the mortal nature of being human. What do you already have in your life that you might be taking for granted? Perhaps begin by listing some of the beautiful things you saw today.

In the 2014 Swedish film Force Majeure directed by Ruben Östlund, a family on a ski vacation in the French Alps has a scare when a controlled avalanche threatens the lodge where they are staying and the father runs away from the oncoming snow, leaving behind his wife and two young children. All remain safe but the event causes tension in their marriage. Over dinner with friends, they discuss how in moments of crisis one would hope to do the heroic thing, but one never really knows until something actually happens. Write a short story that begins with an intense and startling event and build your story around each character’s response. What sorts of personality traits are revealed in the aftermath? You might play around with incorporating different characters’ perspectives or versions of what happened to provide tension.

In a recent New Yorker article about the past, present, and future of Brooklyn’s popular Green-Wood Cemetery, Paige Williams writes about a tour guide who “urged her audience not to leave a decision as important as eternity to others” and a cemetery employee who has already decided the guest list, what beverages to serve, and the playlist for his future funeral. Write a personal essay that meditates on your thoughts about your own post-death wishes. Whether it’s something you’ve thought about and planned meticulously already or something you mostly avoid, take the time to consider rituals, traditions, and funerals you’ve attended, as well as the array of options to choose from as technology and trends evolve. How do you envision your eternal send-off and resting place?

In a 4Columns review of After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025 (Granary Books, 2025) edited by Steve Clay and M. C. Kinniburgh, a catalog for the exhibition of the same name at the Grolier Club in New York, Albert Mobilio lists a few of the unconventional poetry forms from the show: “A cardboard box stuffed with crumpled slips of paper; a book in which each line of text appears on its own sliver of a page; a series of poems printed on what look like business cards; knotted lengths of wool stenciled with verse.” This week think beyond words on a page and conceptualize a new poetry project that makes use of different pictorial and material elements. How might you split up words, lines, or stanzas on a variety of surfaces?

Written and directed by Celine Song, Materialists is a film about a matchmaker at a high-end agency in New York City and her own trials of love. She interviews and maneuvers her clients who have very specific demands for their potential dating partners, testing the mechanics of worth and value, and seeing people through the lens of market capitalism. Characters are bluntly forthcoming about age preferences and job salaries, an honesty that may seem surprising when considered against old-fashioned social norms which deem it vulgar to talk about money. Write a story in which one of your characters is uncommonly direct about financial matters—whether about having a lot or a little, or how much they spend, earn, and save. How does bringing money into the picture illuminate issues of class between your characters?


In Zhang Yueran’s novel Women, Seated, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang and forthcoming in August from Riverhead Books, the protagonist Yu Ling works as a nanny for a wealthy couple and their young son in China, after initially taking on duties assisting in the art studio of her employer, Qin Wen. In a flashback, Yu Ling recalls a remark by Qin Wen about an artist she admires: “Do you know why Alice Neel liked drawing mothers and children so much? It’s because she abandoned her own child.” Compose a pair of short lyrical essays, one that originates from loss and one that begins with a thing achieved or acquired. You might start with your instinctive responses to personal losses and gains, whether physical or more abstract. Do your attendant essays mirror each other or diverge?

In the essay collection Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and published by New Directions in June, Yoko Tawada explores various aspects of life, communication, and art through a lens of linguistic and cultural hybridity. In “Paris: This Language Which Is Not One,” Tawada writes about a poem by Paul Celan in which the German words for dwindling (Neige) and snow (Schnee) appear in adjacent lines, pointing out that Neige means snow in French. “To me, Celan’s poems have a multilingual structure akin to a magic net that even captures Japanese, a language he never knew,” Tawada notes. Write a poem in which you deploy a “magic net” that allows you the freedom to play with associative, expansive thinking, capturing any basic knowledge of words in other languages or dialects or registers. What unexpected connections can be made?

Double-booking can be a hilarious premise for comedy, as in the wedding rom-com films Bride Wars and You’re Cordially Invited in which two weddings are booked for the same venue on the same day, or a terrifying setup for horror, as in the 2022 film Barbarian in which a woman arrives at a rental home already occupied by a mysterious guest. This week write a short story that revolves around a reservation error that results in characters being unexpectedly forced into sharing a space. Do the opposing parties know each other or are they complete strangers? You might consider playing with narrative perspective and incorporating portions from opposing characters’ points of view or experimenting with a fragmentary structure to evoke suspense and disorientation. Is your story a comedy or horror of errors?

In the comedic documentary series The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder helps ordinary people rehearse difficult conversations they may be dreading by creating precisely replicated environments and hiring actors to prepare for each scenario. The elaborate sets include a fully functioning bar with patrons, a household with a child actor, and an exact reproduction of a Houston airport terminal. Compose a personal essay about a necessary conversation that has been weighing on you and write out several vignettes exploring potential ways the exchange might play out given your knowledge of your own mindset as well as the person you’re confronting. Consider incorporating thoughts about how some reactions or behaviors may be impossible to predict. How might this rehearsal of sorts help calm your nerves or provide an understanding of your own social tendencies?

The poems in Charity E. Yoro’s debut collection, Ten-cent Flower & Other Territories (First Matter Press, 2023), largely circle around the political history and her personal experience of the Hawaiʻian islands. Her poem “postcard from rome” takes on the feeling of a postcard that arrives unexpectedly in the mail—a surprising and sudden intrusion of an exotic locale. This week, write a poem titled “Postcard From…” and think back to your memories of visiting a new place. Try to reach far from what’s currently at the forefront of your mind, as well as the themes and topics you typically explore in your poetry. Allow this poem to drop in to your current body of writing like a short, evocative glimpse of another time and place—a gentle disruption to your usual flow.

In the dystopian world of Hon Lai Chu’s novel Mending Bodies (Two Lines Press, 2025), translated from the Chinese by Jacqueline Leung, a Conjoinment Act has been passed by the government wherein people are encouraged to have their bodies surgically joined to another person, creating couples who purportedly become more fulfilled beings while providing improvements for economic and environmental states. The novel’s structure alternates between sections detailing the narrator’s struggles with her own thinking and decision-making around “conjoining” and sections of her dissertation on the program’s history, including case studies and the origins of bodily “conjoinment.” Taking inspiration from this format, create a dystopian premise in which a society’s government has instituted an optional, controversial policy. Write a short story which intersperses bits of fictionalized research within the in-scene action for a touch of surrealism.

In the 1997 film Face/Off, an FBI agent survives an assassination attempt that kills his young son and is out for vengeance and justice. To foil this criminal’s next plot to bomb the city, the agent undergoes a secret surgery to replace his face with that of the criminal, only to have him surgically don the agent’s face, effectively creating a mirrored switch in physical identities and an epic showdown. Notable for its flabbergasting premise, another aspect of the film’s cult popularity is director John Woo’s signature style and trademark motifs: balletic action sequences, doves and churches, deadlocked gunfights, and coats blowing in slow motion in the wind. Write an essay about a dramatic situation from your past in which you insert small details and observations of physical description that complement the tone of your piece. How might you translate a slow-motion effect in cinema to a slow-motion moment in your storytelling?

In storytelling, the narrative strategy of beginning in medias res is to launch into the middle of a plot. Frequently applied to the composition of contemporary novels and films, such as Fight Club, Forrest Gump, and Raging Bull, the storytelling device can be traced back to Homer’s Greek epic poem The Iliad, which opens at the tail end of the Trojan War. This week write a poem that begins in medias res. Think of a story you’d like to recount in narrative verse and then select a starting point that may be much later than the logical or conventional beginning of the action. Sprinkle in flashbacks and recollections of memory to fill in any necessary pieces of context that allude to earlier events.

“Nothing happens without a reason. Everything was determined by something prior.” In Devs, a 2020 science fiction television miniseries written and directed by Alex Garland, the viewer is presented with heady questions around determinism and free will as more and more is revealed about a quantum simulation project at a cutting-edge tech company that appears to have the ability to simulate the world at any and all places and times, past and future. Write a short story in which you examine these ideas through characters with opposing opinions about the freedom to change the course of one’s life. You might choose to delve into science fiction or fantasy, or develop your story around a romance or a comedy of errors. What events in the past lead each character to their respective ways of thinking?

Four Seasons is a new comedy drama miniseries based on the 1981 film of the same name with an ensemble cast of middle-aged characters who are lifelong friends. Over the course of one year, the three couples take four group vacations together and reflect on the dynamics of their relationships, and in particular, the evolving circumstances after one couple’s divorce. Choose a significant relationship in your life and compose a four-part personal essay that relays an anecdote for each season of one year. You might turn back to old journals, photographs, e-mail messages, or planners for ideas and choose incidents not necessarily filled with drama, but that might reveal illuminating details about your bond with this person. Consider incorporating seasonal details to supplement the atmosphere of each section and add a sense of the passing of time through those twelve months.

Diane Seuss’s poem “Romantic Poet,” which appears in her collection Modern Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2024), is a reference to John Keats and his famous poem “Ode to a Nightingale.” Seuss writes: “You would not have loved him, / my friend the scholar / decried. He brushed his teeth, / if at all, with salt. He lied, / and rarely washed / his hair.” This week write a poem about someone or something you love that takes inspiration from Seuss’s poem and the ways in which her verse spans the universe of mundane actions and the sublime. Consider how to apportion the profane and the profound with alternations. How can the rhythm, pacing, and sound of your lines introduce a tension between what you love and the reality of what you love?