In a recent essay published on Literary Hub, Jean Chen Ho writes about spending an academic year as a visiting assistant professor in upstate New York and the isolation she experienced as an Asian American in a predominantly white neighborhood. Throughout the piece, Ho mixes her reflections about daily activities—visiting a museum, exercise, meeting colleagues, dating, and going to a local bar—with observations of her environmental surroundings and the violence and devastation in Gaza, as well as allusions to Louise Bourgeois, Jane Hirshfield, and Milan Kundera. Write a personal essay that meditates on a time when you have felt particularly alone. Where were you and what were the circumstances that contributed to your feelings of isolation? How did the environment around you, and the art or writing you connected to at the time, reflect your state of mind?
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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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.
Clunky metaphors, the use of em dashes and the verb “delve,” and the rule of threes. These are some telltale signs that you’re reading prose created by artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT, according to a recent New York Times Magazine article titled “Why Does A.I. Write Like . . . That?” by Sam Kriss. AI creates a certain supposedly distinctive voice that is markedly strange, yet one which is foundationally based on how humans articulate themselves in language. This week write a poem from the persona of an AI bot that is commenting on its own algorithm and how it mines language from novels and textbooks to create what humans request through their prompts. Play with vocabulary, punctuation, and style to mimic the voice of AI. How does your AI persona’s own “consciousness” push it to create hallucinations?
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!
In many holiday movies and holiday-themed episodes of popular TV series, a clashing of traditions stands as a focal point: the combination of Christmas and Hanukkah in The O.C.’s “Chrismukkah” episodes; the tension between older and younger generations in Home for the Holidays; attending extravagant and polished parties while withholding truths in Metropolitan and Happiest Season; and the uncomfortableness of houseguests in The Family Stone and Happy Christmas. Write a short story in which these differences come to a head because of a newly enmeshed relationship, whether that be between housemates, a romantic couple, in-laws, or different sides of the family. How do your characters’ personalities reveal themselves over the course of the narrative? Consider the ways you might craft the story to demonstrate how multiple layers of power dynamics operate in both blatant and subtle ways.
“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.
’Tis the season for spending? The end of the year is often associated with spending money on last-minute gifts, groceries for parties, travel and outings with family and friends, and holiday sales for your own treats. This week write a personal essay on your traditions and philosophies around holiday spending. How have they evolved over the years? Do you have memories or anecdotes of extravagant purchases or of thrift-savvy techniques? You might reflect on how seasonal cultural traditions influence spending and how those traditions are maintained, broken, or might even evolve. What are alternatives to conventional modes of consumption and capital?
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.
In a tribute published in the Yale Review to Ellen Bryant Voigt, who passed away in October, executive editor Meghan O’Rourke writes: “Through her, I learned to read like a poet. Not to identify themes, as I’d been trained to do as an undergraduate at Yale, but to attend to effects.” This type of close examination included describing poems by how many medium-length lines and periods were in a poem, and how many lines a sentence takes up. “Her rigor taught me how to read my own work as I’d learned to read others’: closely enough to see what it was resisting,” writes O’Rourke. Revisit a poem you’ve written and consider what the work may want to be, and what it might be resisting. What about its syntax or grammar might lead you to these conclusions? Explore reworking the poem a little or a lot to shape how it arrives at its desired effects, or resists them.
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?
In Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Tooth,” a woman’s bus ride to the dentist dissolves into a haze of pain, exhaustion, and an uncanny encounter with a stranger. Write about an ordinary trip on a bus, train, or rideshare that is unsettled by your character’s physical state, whether they’re experiencing hunger, sleeplessness, or an illness. Let the journey shift gradually into unease, or perhaps, an altered sense of connection with others. Focus on moments where tension arises from vulnerability and misconnection, and consider how travel reshapes your character’s sense of self and destination.
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.
What’s the story behind the story? Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, the new biopic directed by Scott Cooper, relays a behind-the-music creation story of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 acoustic album Nebraska, which was composed and recorded in a New Jersey bedroom. The album represents the singer’s desire for pure art that is free of the constraints and adornments of being a superstar in the music industry. Think about the story behind one of your own stories, perhaps a personal essay you wrote years ago that sprang from a sense of urgency. Write an essay that recounts the story behind this story describing in detail the emotions that played throughout the creative act, where you worked on it, and how the subject matter dictated the process of its writing.
“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?
In “Man Ray: When Objects Dream,” a new survey exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among the many works on display are over fifty of the artist’s “rayographs,” photograms made in the early twentieth century by placing objects on or near light-sensitive photo paper that is then exposed to create dramatically silhouetted images with high contrast. In these works, everyday objects—a comb, bottle, lightbulb, eggbeater, key, and wrench—become defamiliarized through Man Ray’s manipulation of placement and movement, capturing what poet Tristan Tzara described as the moment “when objects dream.” Browse through some of the rayographs and select one image that particularly resonates with you. Compose a poem that imagines the dreams in your chosen image. In your deciphering of the objects, ask yourself what do they dream?
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?
Justine Triet’s 2023 drama film Anatomy of a Fall chronicles the aftermath of a mysterious death as the protagonist’s husband falls from the window of their Alpine chalet’s attic. Their eleven-year-old visually impaired son finds his father dead from the fall. Amid questions of the possibility of an accident or a suicide attempt, the protagonist is indicted on charges of homicide and a trial follows. Throughout the film, it is never made clear what exactly happened. Instead, the narrative meditates on themes of biases inherent in individual subjectivity. “Sometimes a couple is kind of a chaos and everybody is lost,” says the main character. Write a story that revolves around the chaos caused by the unknowability of a dramatic situation. Perhaps it’s a classic case of he-said-she-said or an incident with no direct witnesses and only bits and pieces overseen or overheard. How do your characters deal with the fallout of never knowing what truly transpired?
“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?
What ever happened to opening a bar tab? A New York Times article from earlier this year reported on a trend of Gen Z bargoers opting to pay for each drink separately instead of opening a tab even if they’re ordering multiple drinks throughout the night, a phenomenon that can result in higher credit card fees paid by the bar, wasted time on a busy night of cocktail concocting, and a diminished sense of camaraderie when friends each pay for a drink separately instead of taking turns buying rounds. Write a personal essay that examines a social behavior that has dissolved over the years and reflect on the wider ripple effects. Consider how you’ve participated in or avoided certain types of etiquette and why you may have followed the trend in the past.
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?
“When does the box of a story—a painting, a sonnet, a name—limit, and when does it free? Can it do both? What do I tell, and what do I obscure?” asks Anne Marie Rooney in a brief description of her poem “Abstraction,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. This week, consider the parameters of a poem—the space on the page and the length of the line, the language, the type of poetic form—and write a poem whose subject matter interrogates the limitations of your chosen form. How can you play with freedom within the confines of this “box of a story?”
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.
Character names in stories do more than identify—they can resonate, offer foreshadowing, and sometimes mislead. The name Hester traces its origins to the ancient Greek language, where it acquired the meaning of “star,” and in Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne shines bright with strength and resilience amid public shaming and condemnation. The cold-hearted Ebenezer Scrooge of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol became so well-known that his name is synonymous for someone who is a miser and uncharitable. Remus Lupin of the Harry Potter series takes his name from the Latin word “lupus” meaning “wolf,” a nod to his werewolf heritage. Write a story in which you name a character with intention. Let the name echo inner conflict, irony, or destiny.
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?
Kate Zambreno’s Animal Stories, published by Transit Books in September, is divided into two sections: “Zoo Studies” and “My Kafka System.” The first section includes essays that meld accounts of various zoo visits with meditations on animals, ideas about enclosure and captivity, and familial relationships and motherhood for human and nonhuman animals alike. The second section examines various aspects of the life and work of the famed author whose stories have centered around an ape, a mouse, a dog, hybrid creatures, and, of course, a giant insect. Taking your cue from Zambreno’s wide-ranging pieces, write a series of short reflections on animals that progresses with associative logic. Allow yourself permission to go down any rabbit holes, as deeply as you wish. Take inspiration from the realms of science and other artistic mediums to include intriguing anecdotes and historical facts.
“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?
In the introduction to John Berryman’s Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, forthcoming in December from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, editor Shane McCrae makes the case that Berryman’s The Dream Songs—a compilation of two books, 77 Dream Songs (FSG, 1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (FSG, 1968)—is an epic poem, pointing to its stylistic concision. “The language of an epic poem must be, in its way, as compressed as the language of a lyric poem,” he writes, “and in those moments when it is not compressed, the language must strike the reader as relaxed from compression, and loaded with the certainty of future compression.” Another feature of epic poems is the presence of a hero, although McCrae notes that Berryman’s Henry is an “unheroic hero,” variably charming, gloomy, facetious, and colloquial. Begin composing a series of poems that contain these two elements of traditional epic poetry. How does your hero or antihero function to create a binding narrative?
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?
A single father living quietly with his daughter in a small mountain village in Japan finds his day-to-day routine and peaceful, self-sufficient existence disrupted by real estate developers in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2023 film Evil Does Not Exist. The collaborative systems of care and mutual exchange that characterize the villagers’ way of life clash with the corporation’s focus on capitalist profit, and the delicate balance of nature and civilization is called into question. This week write a short story that revolves around the disturbance of a balance between nature and culture. You might find it helpful to begin by brainstorming specific areas in your chosen setting where the natural environment and human-made spaces depend on each other or have had to adjust to make way for the other. What are the ramifications of a disruption to this balance?
“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.
The Gilded Age, the HBO television series created by Julian Fellowes, chronicles the lives of a cast of characters living in 1880s New York City, including servants and maids living and working in the garden-level quarters of brownstone mansions, wealthy inhabitants of Manhattan from both old and new money, and Black families living in Brooklyn who reach levels of affluence in the post-Reconstruction period. Together, the characters create a layered portrait of a city where diverse classes come into often conflicted interaction. Write a personal essay that examines your own class status, reflecting on how it manifests in your encounters in society with friends, coworkers, family, and others. How have financial matters evolved through past generations in your family to bring you to where you are today?
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?
For the Poetry Society of America’s “In Their Own Words” series, Suzanne Buffam writes about her poem “Trying,” which circles around the effort to conceive a child. “The poem became, in a sense, a meditation on effort, in which the suspension of effort was the aim of my efforts,” writes Buffam. “I gave myself one constraint. Each paragraph I wrote would have to contain some form of the verb ‘to try.’” Taking inspiration from Buffam’s constraint for her piece, compose a poem that explores your process trying to reach a goal, whether big or small, tangible or more abstract. Play around with different forms of the verb “to try,” or another verb that gestures at effort, paying careful consideration to how the word conveys a sensation of persistence over the course of time and through various obstacles and setbacks.
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.
In Vaim (Transit Books, 2025) by Nobel Prize–winning author Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls, one might search for certainty and stability in vain as the fishing village from which the novel gets its title is not a place in the real world, and perhaps not even a real place within the world of the book. Ania Szremski, senior editor of 4Columns, describes the novel as a “a book of amphibolous belief” with a protagonist who “wavers between ‘yes’ and ‘no.’” Write a short story that revolves around a character who inhabits a place that may or may not really exist. In Fosse’s book, the protagonist’s motorboat grounds the reader while the use of shifting points of view and lack of punctuation can be unsettling. How do you inject your own story with both stabilizing and destabilizing elements to create tension and momentum?
“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?
In the new thriller miniseries Black Rabbit, created by Zach Baylin and Kate Susman, Jude Law plays a restaurateur whose life is turned upside down with the sudden return of his brother, played by Jason Bateman. Their historically fraught bond spins into a vortex of the consequences of past betrayals and catastrophes, and the violence of the criminal underworld. Write a personal essay that explores your relationship with a sibling or someone with whom you share a close, long-standing relationship that may have similar elements of inextricable intimacy and rivalry. Incorporate memories of the experiences that have tied you together, as well as circumstances that have been challenging because of your closeness. What are the differences in your personalities that might have, at varied times, created complementary, synergistic energy and also been the root cause of clashes?
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?
“This is how the text exchange ends. / Not with an explicit farewell but with a two-day pause followed by a thumbs-up-emoji reaction,” writes Reuven Perlman in “How Other Things End” recently published in the New Yorker with an epigraph of T. S. Eliot’s famed last lines from “The Hollow Men.” “This is how the career ends. / Not with a retirement party and a gold watch but with a second career in the gig economy.” Taking inspiration from Perlman’s comedic perspective of dark times, write a humorous poem that consists of your own inventions of anticlimactic contemporary situations in which the outcome is a letdown, with more of a fizzle than a gratifying conclusion. What modern references would you include to put your own stamp on this concluding episode?
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.
If practice makes perfect, what do we do with the imperfections of being out of practice? This week write a short story that revolves around a character who finds themselves unexpectedly back in the mode of performing a skill they once did well, but have now grown rusty after years of unuse. It might be a creative practice—playing an instrument, dancing, photography, writing, or painting—or perhaps it’s a job-related task—writing a report, managing a team, or speaking in front of a large audience. Consider anything learned that one might fall out of practice with, such as a language, camping, or even dating. How does your character adjust to revisiting an old skill? Does everything come flooding back or is there a steep learning curve?
“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.
Write an essay about something in your daily life that has quietly broken down but remains in use. Perhaps it’s a favorite chair with a wobbling leg, a jacket with a missing button, or a smartphone with a cracked screen. Begin with the object itself, describing its flaws in detail, then follow the thread outward: What does your continued reliance on it reveal about your habits, your history with broken things, and your relationship to loss? Consider how the imperfect object serves as a stand-in for resilience, denial, or attachment. Let the essay move between the object’s material reality and the emotional truths it props up.
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?
“Life itself is kinship. We’re all a community of air,” says Mohammad Saud who operates a bird clinic in Delhi with his brother Nadeem Shehzad that predominantly treats the city’s omnipresent black kites and is the center of Shaunak Sen’s 2022 award-winning documentary, All That Breathes. The film is filled with footage not only of the raptors, but also of the many other creatures—including insects, reptiles, rats, and dogs—that have adapted to an urban environment teeming with pollution and sectarian violence, creating a sense of precarious, precious kinship between human civilization and nonhuman life. Write a poem that draws on observation of all the things that breathe around you. What lives in your local “community of air?”
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.
A career criminal, a florist owner, an aquarium tour guide, and a prison drama teacher. The characters in the 2022 French comedic heist movie The Innocent hold an array of colorful jobs, which provide intriguing imagery and set pieces, and assist in placing the characters in specific circumstances with rippling effects. This week write a short story that makes use of multiple unconventional jobs, as you define them. Choose a few that seem wildly different from what you know and are evocative to you personally. How do the tasks of these odd jobs circumscribe your characters’ actions and ways of problem-solving? Incorporate elements of comedy and action into your narrative to create a funny, fast-paced story.
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.
In I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, translated from the Chinese by Jack Hargreaves and forthcoming in October from Astra House, Hu Anyan collects essays he began writing while feeling stuck and unfulfilled in the many short-term jobs he moved through as a young man. Turning to reading and writing for solace, he began sharing his stories and connecting with readers. “Supposing work is something we are compelled to do, a concession of our personal will,” writes Hu, “then the other parts of life—those that remain true to our desires, that we choose to pursue, in whatever form they take—might be called freedom.” Compose a series of vignettes that look back on several past jobs you’ve had. What do they say about your work-life balance?
“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?