In “The Tally,” an essay by Anne Enright recently published in the New Yorker, the author thinks back on a childhood memory in which her mother returned to a grocery store to settle the difference because she had been undercharged for a Christmas turkey. Enright explores her feelings of indignation at her family’s morality in the face of “corporate interest” and “predatory capitalism,” but then concludes that “integrity is also a way to hold the self together” and that “honesty may be a one-sided contract with the world, but it is the only side that we can control.” Write a personal essay that reflects on how your own stances around honesty and integrity have been shaped by how you were raised and what your family valued. How has your point of view on honesty evolved over the years, whether maintaining consistency or broadening to a more open-minded flexibility?

As climate collapse transforms our experiences of the natural world, researchers are sounding the alarm that smells and scents will become extinct alongside changes in plant biodioversity, weather-related phenomena, and the evolution of the world’s landscapes of man-made structures. According to a recent article in Smithsonian magazine, scientists warn that not only will the changing climate have a reduced “scentscape,” but that human beings may gradually experience diminished abilities to smell, due to the harmful effects of pollution. Write a short story that takes place in a universe where smells have largely disappeared from everyday life. What sort of adaptations have been created to compensate for this sensory loss? Will memories, which are strongly associated with smell, function in different ways?

In an interview for the Poetry Society of America, Diane Seuss talks to Jennifer Franklin about how she writes with a keen awareness of the body as a site of both immense precarity and radical agency. When considering the role of structure in poetry, Seuss draws a parallel between the literary form and human form, how language can be compressed and lead through the formal constraints of a poetic form in the same way the human body can act as an impediment and a guide. “We write with all of ourselves,” she says, “at our best.” Write a poem that uses the structure of a poetic form to reflect on the nature of the body. Explore how the lyrical imagination pushes against structure, like the body “compresses the soul,” as Seuss describes. How does the inclusion of the body anchor your writing, and how might you play within these confines?

In her translator’s preface to The Narrow Road of Oku, a new edition of Matsuo Bashō’s seminal haibun diary published by New Directions in June, Meredith McKinney notes that though it is possible to read the work “as a straightforward, episodic travel diary of a seventeenth century Japanese poet and his companion,” the haibun form of prose writing followed by poetry “asks the reader to slow down, to pause and focus.” Spend some time jotting down notes and memories of a significant trip you have taken. Try your hand at writing in a similar style, interspersing travel journal vignettes with brief, poetic observations of a singular moment or image in time that distills a particular sensation. “I make the cool / my lodging / lounging at ease,” writes Bashō after one particularly long journey. Consider how the slowed-down pace of short, poetic lines might balance each episode’s narrative.

At the start of Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein, a hybrid-genre book merging biography with fiction, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June, the first-person narrator finds a silver lining to her friend’s cat going missing, noting that the drama “was a relief from writing my essay on Gertrude Stein, about whom I knew too much and nothing at all.” The narrator goes on to express her frustration while studying who Stein was as a writer and a person. “Sometimes, when I read her baffling and beguiling writing I wanted to smack it in the chops,” writes Levy. Select a writer or artist whose personality, mythology, and life story pique your interest, and write a short story that revolves around a character who is working on a project about your chosen person. Consider how the subject’s real biography might play with parallels in your fictionalized character’s life and world.

Jane Kenyon’s poem “Three Songs at the End of Summer” features three portraits of late summer, each evoking its own distinct sounds, moods, and atmosphere. The first section of the poem begins with “a second crop of hay” and “five gleaming crows,” continues through the sights and sounds of summer camp, and ends with a couplet that gestures to autumn: “Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts; / water, silver-still, and a vee of geese.” The second section consists of two three-line stanzas infused with the sound of cicadas, and in the final section, Kenyon explicitly reaches back in time to the speaker’s childhood and the scent of a damp dirt road on a foggy morning. Taking inspiration from this structure, write a three-part poem that explores a few resonant memories of the end of summer—fleeting images and sounds and smells of various activities. Experiment with sections of varying lengths to create dramatic effect.

When asked in an interview published on Creative Independent whether there is a common thread throughout the works that he’s translated from various languages, Max Lawton mentions that there is usually “an element of transgression, whether that’s on the level of language or on the level of content” and that “shocking movies, transgressive music, loud music, not as a form of real rebellion, just mischievousness” are what brought him into art. Taking inspiration from this prioritization of transgression and mischief, write a personal essay that uses language in a shocking way or recounts something shocking in its content. Allow yourself to experiment with syntax in a way you’ve never tried before, or to write about a memory you’ve never dared to touch. How can you strike a balance between a playful sense of mischief and an intense subject matter?

Kane Parsons’s debut horror film Backrooms revolves around the discovery of a labyrinthine parallel universe of mysteriously empty rooms and hallways which are entered through the basement of a furniture store. The concept originates from “Backrooms” website threads in which users post and contribute writing—essentially cocreating fictional horror accounts akin to urban legends—about an otherworldly dimension that exists in a liminal space, inspired by a photo depicting several empty rooms tinged in fluorescent yellowish lighting. This week, think of a space that feels mundane or familiar to you, such as a furniture store, the corridors of an expansive hotel, or a school basement. Then write a short story inspired by the image of the space when it’s devoid of any activity. Consider the lighting, furnishings, and sounds that accompany the space and what might enhance a menacing or unsettling scene.

In a recent New York Times Magazine article, Nitsuh Adebe speaks with a linguist about the ways in which words evolve over time, noting recent shifts in the use of terms like “POV” and “aesthetic,” especially in social media posts. “How people use a language is what the language is, and most everything we do in an effort to steer one another’s usage—teaching grammar, mocking errors, writing columns—is just an exercise of social power,” writes Abebe. Compose a poem that incorporates a word or phrase that has gained a new meaning in contemporary use, possibly through the rapidly changing landscape of language mediated, distorted, or abbreviated in texting and social media. What sorts of ingenuity, misinterpretation, and customization propelled your selection from its original definition to a new one? How might using it in a new poetic context subject it to an additional layer of meaning?

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?