While the late Keith Waldrop described his 1993 book, Light While There Is Light: An American History, reissued by New York Review Books Classics in May, as a “fictional memoir,” Dalkey Archive Press, which reissued the book in 2013, referred to it as an “autobiographical novel,” and elsewhere it’s been described as a “poetic memoir.” This week, compose three short pieces about one single memory, each one to be described by one of these hybrid labels. How does your fusion of fiction and nonfiction shift when you’re thinking about the genre of your work in a different way? What kind of permission is granted when you add on a more imaginative modifier, such as “fictional” or “poetic”—and how does the “autobiographical” prefix work in tandem or in tension with a fictional element in place?
Writing Prompts & Exercises
The Time Is Now
The Time Is Now offers three new and original writing prompts each week to help you stay committed to your writing practice throughout the year. We also curate a list of essential books on writing—both the newly published and the classics—that we recommend for guidance and inspiration. Whether you’re struggling with writer’s block, looking for a fresh topic, or just starting to write, our archive of writing prompts has what you need. Need a starter pack? Check out our Writing Prompts for Beginners.
Tuesdays: Poetry prompts
Wednesdays: Fiction prompts
Thursdays: Creative nonfiction prompts
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“I learned that Lucky Charms cereal is, like, seventy-five percent sugar, bananas are poisonous to monkeys, and you should rinse Popsicles before eating them to avoid losing taste buds. I learned that you can kind of just say ‘slay’ whenever, as filler, that you can address both your girls and your dad as ‘bro,’” writes Anna Wiener in “The Life and Times of an American Tween,” a recent New Yorker piece about a San Francisco twelve-year-old and her friends that expands into larger ideas around being a twenty-first century tween. Write a short story in which one of your main characters is a teenager. Draw from your own experiences as a teen, as well as your knowledge of Gen Alpha, to round this character out with age-specific habits, emotional turmoil, energy, and outlook. Consider how the character’s use of slang conveys a phase of in-betweenness, intense observation, and playacting in this preadult window of their life.
The machines are watching you . . . and they’re talking to each other. In an interview for Phaidon, Trevor Paglen, artist and author of How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI (Verso, 2026), speaks about how most images made in the world today are not centered around a human observer, but are made by machines for other machines. “A simple example is a self-driving car that is making tons and tons of images every second to navigate,” he says. “They’re not making those images for humans, they’re making them for themselves.” Spend some time imagining how a machine might “see” a photograph differently from how a human would, and write a poem with a particular image in mind. What might a machine notice or not notice? How might processing an image and communicating about it be different when we dispense with our conventional ideas of human emotional responses? Experiment with the way certain details are described and remembered.
In her debut memoir, Everything I Know About Love (Penguin Books, 2018), Dolly Alderton recounts her twenties through the lens of friendship, romantic confusion, and the gradual shedding of illusions. Along the way, she questions the stories she grew up believing about what love should look like, how adulthood should feel, and what it means to be fulfilled. “I blame my high expectations for love on two things: the first is that I am the child of parents who are almost embarrassingly infatuated with each other; the second is the films I watched in my formative years,” writes Alderton. Write about an expectation you inherited about love, success, marriage, adulthood, or happiness. Who set that expectation and how did it take root? Describe a moment when reality didn’t live up to your expectations and how this shifted your understanding of what you truly want.
Choose an ordinary setting for a new story: a laundromat, a corner store, a waiting room, a kitchen table. Treat this place not just as background, but as an active force in the lives of your characters. Think about how your characters encounter and become one with this space. How are the lighting choices, particular sounds, and the rhythm of people and objects a factor in shaping the emotions of those who inhabit them? What hidden meaning emerges when you linger on what first seems mundane?
Write a poem that begins with directions you cannot give, whether it’s returning to a childhood home that no longer exists, finding someone you’ve lost, or reaching a place that has only ever appeared to you in dreams. Let the poem move between the literal and the imagined, charting not only streets and landscapes, but also memories, misdirections, and silences. What landmarks have shifted? What details remain sharp? Allow the act of mapping to reveal both presence and absence, and bring the reader in on what it feels like to be in the place you want to bring them.
How has community served you? Whether literary community or a community found through hobbies and activities, or racial, ethnic, cultural, gender, and sexual identities, there are many ways in which these communities provide the support and resources missing from one’s life. In Parul Sehgal’s recent interview with Sarah Schulman published in the Paris Review’s Art of Nonfiction series, she says: “My whole life has taken place in community, in the gay community. Community saved my life. It’s the official structures, family and all that, that have been my problem.” Write a personal essay that explores various communities you participate in. Compare and contrast what you have found valuable in them versus the social and institutional structures imposed upon you via family, government, economy, education, and religion. With whom has your life taken place?
A study published last year in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presented surprising findings about a population of dark-eyed juncos living in Los Angeles. The normally forest-dwelling sparrows whose physical traits had diverged from their wilder counterparts to suit their urban lifestyle, had beaks that reverted to their wildland shapes during pandemic lockdown restrictions when their immediate environments had fewer humans in them. Think about the environmental shifts that transpired in the early 2020s due to the pandemic and write a short story that revolves around a physical adaptation or transformation that occurred naturally over the course of those years due to changed habits. Experiment with incorporating elements of science fiction, humor, and surrealism into your story. Who takes notice of these changes?
Poet and novelist Stacy Skolnik pieced together a series of Facebook posts from her old high school friend Robert Frost into a collaborative hybrid poetry collection, which is forthcoming from Book Works in June. In one of the collection's poems, the speaker expounds a moment of frustration after reading the signage outside a shopping area: “Can you believe this notice / in the middle of a seating and dining porch / it’s literally made for loitering // We have this seating area but NO ONE CAN USE IT!!!” Taking inspiration from themes that this poem touches upon—class, productivity, propriety—compose a poem of your own that meditates on what it means to loiter, which Merriam-Webster defines as “to remain in an area for no obvious reason.” What judgments do you make when you notice someone who appears to be loitering?
“I told a friend that I had missed a flight to Europe (again) and she assured me that it was just my ‘queer relationship to temporality.’ I did not really know what that meant, but I liked the sound of it,” writes Stephanie Wambugu in her essay “Running Behind,” a meditation on her relationship with lateness and punctuality, recently published by Granta magazine. Consider your own habits of showing up early, on time, or late to meetings, appointments, shared meals, and other assignations. Wambugu writes that on one occasion, her lateness was “an act of passive resistance” and “an expression of my disdain.” How would you characterize your priorities when you arrive late? How might your relationship to temporality be based on how you were raised or your intentions to subvert certain cultural norms?
Jacaranda trees, whose abundant violet-colored flowers dominate the streets of Los Angeles from late spring through early summer, have bloomed about a month earlier this year due to an unexpected heat wave in March. The trees have filled the city with large swaths of purple, both on the tree canopies and sprinkling carpets of blooms when they fall. Think of a sign in your local environment that annually signals a change from spring to summer and write a story that takes place against the backdrop of this seasonal indicator occurring earlier than usual. Experiment with how this subtle or explicit phenomenon in the natural environment can be expressed through various sensory details. How does this occurrence create a sense of tension in relation to the plot arc and character development of your narrative? Do your characters take notice of this anomaly or is it simply playing out in the background?
Fady Joudah, winner of the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize, writes that he thought about how animals process trauma without speaking and how “intifada deserves a good rhyme” when composing his poem “Pink Panther,” recently published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. The poem concludes with the stanza: “See cicada or when home is a howling / intifada. Your heart, utterly flexible, / a wind like water, / the stubborn wind.” This week, begin by creating a short list of words or phrases that you find yourself circling around in your work, perhaps indicative of themes at the forefront of your thoughts. Then, select one term that is particularly difficult to rhyme. Challenge yourself to think of rhyming words and ways to connect the terms, even if far-fetched. Build your poem around this innovative and unexpected rhyme pairing.
“When you mention music, you want that music to do the atmosphere work for you. But it’s really tricky,” says Sophie Strohmeier about linking music, compositions, and instruments to the characters in her novella All Girls Be Mine Alone (Joyland Publishing, 2025), in an interview for the Creative Independent. “It was more like creating a material palette with the evocation of what each instrument might convey.” Focus on infusing a scene in either a new personal essay or a work-in-progress with music. Allow the music to do the work of adding a fresh dimension to the atmosphere and recollection of your memories. You might recall the types of songs that would have been playing in your setting or brainstorm the sounds and instruments that most effectively convey the mindset or emotions of the people present in your retelling.
Recently, the New Yorker published an article by Julian Lucas about the devastation experienced when losing digital data and the experts who are able to repair and recover data for victims. Steve Burgess, a “data-recovery pioneer,” talks about how the value of a person’s data is dependent on whether or not they have it. “Once they have it, it really wasn’t worth anything,” he says. “But, if they don’t have it, it’s worth an arm and a leg and their children.” Write a short story that launches from the starting point of a character experiencing an unfortunate mishap with their phone or computer, resulting in the loss of irreplaceable photos, texts, audio files, writing, and contact information. Were the lost items something that they took for granted before? What is your character willing to do to retrieve the data?
What sort of emotional labor does one experience when caring for a parent or a child, a friend or lover, or someone who’s ill? This week compose a poem that details the gestures and actions, the commitments and complications involved in taking care of someone else. In Angela Jackson’s poem “Caregiving,” published in the April 2023 issue of Poetry magazine, the speaker recalls a time before the responsibility of caretaking when she would “rumble-race” and “haul-dash” to the gym to exercise twice weekly, and contrasts that dynamism with the slowed-down, zoomed-in attention spent on the person she is looking after who is “sitting on the gray stoop / like a lost little girl.” In your own poem, think about the resulting sacrifices and rewards of caretaking, and consider how to express that through sound and rhythm.
Can we learn how to avoid conflict by studying the behavior of other animals? A recent New York Times article reported that in the last decade or so, a group of chimpanzees in the forests of Uganda experienced an unprecedented uptick in large-scale violence, prompting scientists to question the origins of this civil warfare and consider whether these types of violent conflicts are a part of human evolution. Compose a personal essay that reflects on your thoughts about conflict, whether it be a large-scale conflict in the country you live in or more intimate between friends and family. How can sorting through your own beliefs and emotions help you reach new understandings about human social relations and behavior?
Early last year, a group of three thousand people across the United States were surveyed for a study published by Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute which found that nearly one out of five adults had chatted with an AI romantic partner. Considering this growing trend, write a short story that revolves around the unexpected consequences that arise when a character develops a romantic relationship with an AI-generated companion. Is there an inciting incident that prompts your character to turn to technology for comfort? Does anyone else know about this new love interest or is the relationship kept a secret? Aside from possible elements of sci-fi dystopia or tropes from mystery and thriller genres, consider incorporating some unexpected humor and satire into your story.
“I love the hour before takeoff, / that stretch of no time, no home / but the gray vinyl seats linked like / unfolding paper dolls,” begins Rita Dove’s poem “Vacation,” which appears in her 2021 collection, Playlist for the Apocalypse. The poem follows the speaker’s thoughts and observations of others in the airport waiting at the flight gate, from the “ragtag nuclear families” to “the heeled bachelorette” to “the lone executive.” Taking inspiration from Dove’s poem, write a poem that takes place in an airport, infusing the piece with the dynamic energy of different people on the move, traveling and waiting, perhaps impatiently with nervous energy or exhaustion. How might the sounds and textures of the airport play a role in how the poem conveys the atmosphere?
In the author’s note to his debut novel, The Copywriter, published by Scribner in February, poet and copywriter Daniel Poppick lists the types of writing that can be found in the work, a compilation of observations, questions, stories, lyrics, lists, fragments, and other forms that together constitute a portrait of contemporary life, language, and ideas, from the perspective of a poet sharing his notebook. “What follows is a work of fiction. But if it makes nothing happen, call it poetry,” writes Poppick. Spend a week keeping a journal or notebook of your own. Jot down bits and pieces of overheard, seen, or invented language as it occurs, allowing yourself the freedom to simply record without worrying too much about context or explication. Then comb through your notes and group your favorite snippets into a more coherent narrative, using recurrent themes or images to paint a portrait of your own life at this moment.
In Sarah Wang’s debut novel, New Skin (Little, Brown, 2026), a young woman named Linli Feng is drawn back to her hometown to tend to her mother in the aftermath of her latest string of disastrous plastic surgeries. Through the eyes of Linli, the environment around her reflects components of her own reality, full of signs of destruction and disrepair, including grass that is “as brown and dry as any in Los Angeles,” a fruitless fig tree that has been damaged after her mother backs her car into it, and a thicket of bougainvillea with “deep magenta bracts” dying and falling to her feet. Write a short story in which the setting displays characteristics that reveal both the mindset of your main character and themes you wish to interrogate in your narrative. How might elements that may conventionally be seen as positive or beautiful take on hints of menace or darkness through the story’s landscape?
“Zipping your skirt, you rustle past, / sand hissing through a glass, / with the bedouin snap and flash / of static-electric / sparks disturbing fabric.” In “Static,” which appears in Bright Thorn: Poems 2000–2026 by Devin Johnston, forthcoming in May from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, sound is a significant component of how meaning is expressed. The poet carefully observes a subject’s actions, capturing the ways in which a single movement or gesture can communicate a vast complexity of sentiment. From the tactility of fabric and the sibilant sounds and motions of “zipping” a skirt to the “sparks” of consonance, an intimate tone is set. Write a poem that employs a variety of sounds to convey the complex feelings within a resonant image or moment. How does the variance in sound and actions create a sense of productive tension?
In “Catfishing in Academe,” part of Lucy Ives’s Negative Utopia series published in the Believer, the author writes about her experience with a student’s AI-fabricated writing assignment in an introductory creative writing course. Ives considers the ways language models “threaten worlds” in the ways they “shave language of its messy connections to community, culture, history, poetry, and living bodies.” Spend some time jotting down notes about your favorite words, phrases, slang, or types of language you use with different people in your life. Then write a personal essay that explores how your own, idiosyncratic use of language has “messy connections” to community, culture, and history. How has your use of language evolved to reflect its particular associations with your own living body and those of others around you?
Stories that revolve around a love triangle often presume the presence of would-be binaries: a hero and a villain, the righteous and the evil, the good and the bad. But what happens when the roles are blurred and no one is out to hurt the other? In Ida Lupino’s 1953 drama The Bigamist and the recent dark comedy television series DTF St. Louis, the focus is on the humanity of all three characters within their marriages and the ambiguity of their actions. Taking a cue from the sympathetic nature of these characters, write a short story that involves a love triangle that is similarly even-keeled. How can you experiment with point of view, humor, or dramatic circumstances to create a narrative in which all members of the triangle are imbued with equally powerful traits of complexity and pathos?
In an essay recently published in the Evergreen Review, Eric Dean Wilson writes about discovering the playful use of metaphors in Robert Glück’s 1985 debut novel, Jack the Modernist. While considering what makes one work, Wilson recalls another writer teaching him about metaphor with a metaphor. “A metaphor, the writer said, is like a spark plug,” he says. “At just the right distance, the electrodes cause a spark to arc across the open air, igniting an explosion. The distance between the electrodes matters.” This week compose a poem that cycles through the process of creating an effective metaphor. You might start with the words, “A metaphor is like….” Allow yourself the freedom to play with language that might feel too convoluted as you gradually move toward the right combination to ignite a spark.
“I’ve always thought that art should ultimately be personal,” said artist Melvin Edwards in a 2017 interview published in Frieze magazine. “It may be validating for other people to find that your work reminds them of something else, but it’s much more important for me to keep myself alive creatively, to have the point of departure for whatever I develop be personal.” The first Black sculptor to have a solo art exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York with his provocative, abstract steel forms, Edwards died at the age of eighty-eight on March 30, 2026. This week, think about how you can create an abstract piece of writing. How can writing about something personal develop into expressing a theme, or multiple themes, about the world, whether societal or political? In what ways do inspiration and creative vigor begin with a personal point of departure?
In much of her work, scholar and author of the award-winning book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (Norton, 2019), Saidiya Hartman writes about the silences, gaps, and omissions present in conventional institutional archives that leave out the voices and lives of marginalized people. In her 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts,” published in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, she coined the term “critical fabulation” to describe a research method that combines archival research, critical theory, and storytelling to redresses and reimagine these historical biases. Write a short story that echoes this idea, beginning the process by considering what old textbooks have gotten wrong. What history would you like to retell? How can your story reimagine not only what happened long ago but also imagine a different present?
Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness,” which appears in her 1995 book, Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, begins: “Before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things….” The next two stanzas start similarly with: “Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness / you must travel…” and “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, / you must know sorrow….” Compose a three-stanza poem that takes a cue from this parallel structure, starting the first line of each stanza with: “Before you know _____, you must _____.” Think about a quality, such as kindness, that you highly value and how your understanding of it has changed over time. What are the lessons you have learned and what do you hope to pass on to others?
Have you fallen for fall and left spring on the backburner? According to a recent New York Times article, spring used to be “a special favorite of poets and musicians, who were moved by the lush reawakening of the natural world to express their feelings of love and wonderment in verse and song,” but recent surveys have shown a preference for autumn. With its cozy colors and social media-worthy sweaters, ciders, leaves, and pumpkin spice lattes, the crisp season has moved up in the ranks of popularity. This week write a personal essay about how you have experienced seasons differently at various times in your life. You might consider the value in having fluctuating phases of energy or enthusiasm throughout the year, or in being able to count on cycles of the natural world.
Amnesia, evil twins, baby swaps, love triangles, and fake deaths are common tropes that have been used in American soap operas for decades. According to Jo Walker’s Guardian review of the 2019 South Korean television series Crash Landing on You, which received critical acclaim and gained worldwide popularity after streaming on Netflix, Korean melodrama plot conventions include “forgotten chance meetings, dramatic piggyback rides, and at least one scene per show where the heroine gets totally juiced on beer.” Write a short story that borrows one of these K-drama tropes or a newly discovered one. Give yourself permission to meld “soapy” characteristics with perhaps more nuanced or subtle literary elements. How can the integration of melodrama imbue your story with humor or emotional dynamism?
In a recent piece published on Literary Hub, Maggie Smith describes her writing space—the objects she considers talismans, the furnishings, and accessories that surround her as she works. Some notable items include: her clear desk from CB2, black Uni-Ball Vision Elite pens, an Audre Lorde postcard from a friend, a fortune cookie message, and a card from her high school English teacher. Compose a series of short poems that zero in on a few favorite tools or accoutrements that you like to use or have with you when you write. Include details of the brands, types, and personal touches of each item. What memories are associated with them? How can you combine functional physical descriptions in your verse with thoughtful reflections of what these objects bring to mind?
Frederick Wiseman, the late director renowned for his lengthy documentaries about various American institutions and infrastructures—including Hospital; City Hall; Welfare; Titicut Follies; Near Death; and Belfast, Maine—spoke in a 2015 BOMB magazine interview about how humor is interspersed throughout his films, which are oftentimes incisive exposés of injustice, neglect, and grief. “I think all my films are funny,” said Wiseman. “You find yourself in a lot of situations that are funny. Or sometimes they are both funny and sad. I mean, the best comedy is sad comedy.” Think back to some past experiences that you would characterize as sad or sorrowful and write an essay in which you try to find a thread of humor to draw out. How can sad comedy demonstrate the ways in which human emotions are more complex than at first glance?
Can crystals offer luck, calmness, good vibrations, courage, or protection? Human beings have a long history of believing that certain crystals, such as quartz, tiger’s eye, pyrite, citrine, and tourmaline, contain special energies to benefit one’s life. A recent scientific study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology looks at chimpanzees behaving in ways that seem to demonstrate a particular interest in crystals: selecting them out of a variety of rocks, carrying them back to their sleeping quarters, and only giving them up after hours of negotiation with favored foods. Write a short story that revolves around the discovery of a mysterious crystal. What kind of powers does the crystal hold, if any? Do your characters have differing opinions or beliefs about the general existence of mystical powers, energies, and vibrations?
“Sometimes colors become points of departure to go into stories or anecdotes from things that I believe correspond to those colors,” says writer and comedian Julio Torres explaining the origins of his solo theater project, Color Theories, in an interview with Douglas Corzine published in the Brooklyn Rail last fall. In the show, Torres performs a memoiristic blend of stand-up and art lecture that “engages with the idea that colors are a form of classification, like saying something is a mineral, animal, or vegetable, something is either red or blue or yellow or green, et cetera.” Launching off from this idea, compose a series of short poems, each focusing on a different color. Incorporate ideas, moods, people, and abstract things in the world—such as systems or cultural concepts—that you associate with that color. How might vastly different objects and memories be categorized as the same color?
In Sam Needleman’s recent interview with essayist and novelist Darryl Pinckney, published in the Paris Review’s Art of Nonfiction series, he is asked about James Baldwin’s singularity. “Baldwin has this unmistakable voice. The appeal is that it’s at once literary and speakerly,” says Pinckney. “I think the writers, the essayists I’m drawn to have that quality.” This week think of a nonfiction writer whose voice strikes you as sounding distinctively original. Write an essay that attempts to investigate how their individuality is expressed through their use of language and specific observations. Can you pinpoint specific nuances about their writerly style? How does their writing communicate in both literary and “speakerly” ways?
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.
For the past several decades, artist Gordon Henderson, also known as Nib Geebles, has created yearly calendars featuring pen-and-paint illustrations of unremarkable yet distinctive buildings that he and his partner Abira Ali see on their everyday walks around their local Los Angeles neighborhoods. Hand-painted signage, unpolished and derelict storefronts, strip-mall parking lots, powerlines, and graffiti are all celebrated in this year’s “Unknown Landmarks” calendar. Brainstorm and jot down a list of some of your favorite storefronts and facades that make up the landscape where you live or work. Write a lyric essay that details a handful of these sights, reflecting on how they create a vivid portrait of your local atmosphere. What are the small, distinguishing or idiosyncratic features that give these locales an “unknown landmark” status?
Whether created due to convenience or to traverse through mounds of snow, desire paths are made when people diverge from official walkways to get to their desired destination, and others follow along. It might be a trail of worn grass beside a concrete walkway or a narrow, squiggly line through unplowed snow. “Desire lines are inherently subversive. They remind us that we have a choice, and that we can veer away from what was laid out for us. And the paths are personal, uneven and meandering,” writes Anna Kodé in a recent New York Times article. Write a short series of vignettes that imagines the first person who created a certain desire path, and the subsequent users of that pathway. What are the motivations of the characters who go off the beaten path?
Alison McAlpine’s fifteen-minute-long documentary, perfectly a strangeness, follows a posse of three donkeys as they traverse the barren landscape of the Atacama Desert in Chile and happen upon an astronomical observatory on top of a mountain. While there is no dialogue, the movements of the donkeys, their expressive ears, and the mechanized motions of the observatory satellites, combined with the setting sun giving way to a night sky, offer an expansive range of interpretations and discovery. McAlpine, who was a poet before she was a filmmaker, says in an interview for Deadline, “Seeing these donkeys grazing besides these billion-dollar beasts, these metallic domes, I asked a question, how do they see this world?” Write a narrative poem without human presence that attempts to convey the perspective of an animal, or other living thing, discovering the universe for the first time. What diction seems most effective at producing the wonder you wish to evoke?
Scientists studying chacma baboons in Namibia have recently reported findings that seem to demonstrate young baboons expressing feelings of jealousy, particularly in situations where they encounter their mothers grooming a younger sibling. One researcher observed a jealous baboon’s use of trickery, luring her sister away from her mother by pretending to play with her and then taking her spot in her mother’s arms. Think back to an incident in your own life when you felt jealous because attention was being paid to someone else. Write a personal essay that reflects on your emotions at the time and your relationships with each of the people involved. You might meditate on more general ideas of jealousy as well—are there possible benefits of it from an evolutionary standpoint?
In a 2016 interview for the Film Stage, French director Mia Hansen-Løve, known for her philosophical drama films that revolve around familial and romantic relationships and loss, talks about an unexpected connection between her own works and Michael Mann’s 1995 blockbuster crime drama Heat, starring Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. She recognizes that the film about a detective and a career thief is actually about “action vs. melancholy and self-destruction—action becoming self-destruction,” themes Hansen-Løve sees in her own films “except in a very different way, in a very different world.” Think of a favorite film of yours with a genre that is, at least on the surface, extremely different from the type of fiction you tend to write. Consider the larger themes that are investigated in that work and write a short story that explores these themes in your own way, and in your own world.
Published in n+1, Jynne Dilling writes a tribute piece to Michael Silverblatt, who died earlier this month and was the host of NPR’s Bookworm radio program for over three decades. Reflecting on his many insights, Dilling writes about an episode of the program in which Silverblatt talks to author David Mitchell about how stammering is a form of learning what to say. “Stammering is the language of the inner self,” says Silverblatt. “Before a writer does a final draft, the first draft is a form of stammering, trying to gum one’s way through the thing one doesn’t yet know how to say.” Compose a poem that begins as a stammer of sorts, in which you are learning how to say something that feels difficult or even impossible to articulate in language. How might holding on to parts of the stammering imbue your poem with valuable insights into your inner self?
“I sit hunched over an open folder, I peer at Lorraine Hansberry’s cursive script, neat and sharp like the thoughts in her eyes,” writes Tisa Bryant in Residual (Nightboat Books, March 2026), an experimental memoir written in the aftermath of her mother’s death in which she includes works by Black women who haunt her meditations and creative work. Bryant writes toward a “shared Black imaginary” as she moves through reflections on art, loss, and literature. Begin composing a hybrid essay that incorporates elements of memoir and criticism by first brainstorming a list of people who haunt your thinking—you might jot down writers and artists you admire, or figures from fiction and nonfiction works. Write a series of vignettes in which you explore these specters while observing how they have infiltrated your personal life. Allow yourself to delve deep into diaristic details, perhaps even adding drawings or photographs.
Argentine French author Copi introduces himself as the recipient and translator of a series of letters from a Parisian rat named Gouri to his former “master” in the 1979 novel City of Rats, translated from the French by Kit Schluter in a new edition forthcoming in March from New Directions. In the faux “Translator’s Preface,” Copi writes, “Decryption is not always a simple matter, although I think I’ve managed to the best of my ability here, even if certain passages penned in the rats’ language (two or three entire paragraphs of nothing but the letter ‘i,’ for example) fell away under my ruthless scissors.” Throughout the zany, fabulist narrative that is both whimsical and sexually obscene, the rat embarks on a reckless journey of adventure and crime. Write a short story in which you pose as the recipient of letters from a nonhuman character. As you select your character, consider the thematic possibilities that can be plumbed and how you might explore elements of conventional fables.
Susan Stewart’s seventh poetry collection, Bramble, forthcoming in April from the University of Chicago Press, traverses a wide range of poetic forms and subjects—including progressions throughout nature, illness and grief, and Biblical allusions—striking tones that are elegiac, invocatory, conversational, and observational at various points. The collection’s title might be one way to connect interpretations of the pieces through their depictions of entanglement and struggle, the presence of thorny destruction, but also of protection and blossoming. Taking inspiration from Stewart’s Bramble, write a series of poems that uses the structure of a poetic form to reflect on a complicated aspect of your own life, whether related to family, romance, spirituality, your job, or your creative practice. Where in other works of literature has your metaphorical subject been used, and how has it functioned?
In her foreword to a reissue of Audre Lorde’s 1982 book, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography, forthcoming this month from Penguin Classics, Evie Shockley writes about Lorde’s version of writing about the self, in which mythologizing becomes a method to explain the inexplicable. Shockley writes: “What biomythography foregrounds is the way myth is central to her writing of her life, her writing for her life, her writing life, her life writing. A myth is a story that explains the nature or origins of a phenomenon—a story that often involves the supernatural.” Write a personal essay that takes inspiration from Lorde’s form and offers context to a particular event from your past by drawing from the lives and stories of people you have known, both in real life and from works of art. Does a supernatural tone arise from this incorporation of mythology to imbue your narrative with a sense of wonder?
On again and off again, breaking up and making up, will they or won’t they—romances are oftentimes full of ups and downs. Write a short story that revolves around a phase of fluctuations in a romantic relationship between two characters. You might choose to have the events of the narrative unfold in just the span of a day or two, or, if the story takes place over the course of months or years, you could spotlight vignettes of intense emotion when the characters are splitting up or getting back together. Whose point of view works most effectively for the tale you wish to tell? Are there elements of comedy, tragedy, horror, or suspense?