The Time Is Now

Earlier this month, the National Endowment for the Arts notified hundreds of independent publishers, theaters, museums, residencies, and nonprofit arts organizations about the termination of their funding, affecting countless writers, visual artists, dancers, performers, actors, and directors. How can artists continue to create when their support is suddenly taken away? Write a short story about an artist who finds themselves without the support they need—whether financial, emotional, or otherwise. Where does your character turn and how do they keep going? Will your story take on elements of fantasy, horror, tragedy, satire, or dark comedy?

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?

When asked how he fills his days, in a 2019 Paris Review interview by Patrick Cottrell, author Jesse Ball talks about a household rule of not speaking in the morning and waiting until lunchtime to interact. “That leaves the morning for thinking,” says Ball. Write a personal essay about a routine or rule you have created to accommodate coexisting with another person, whether a parent, child, romantic partner, or roommate. How did you negotiate a compromise for your individual priorities? Were there any unexpected outcomes to the arrangement? Consider how the balance played out between what you sacrificed and what was gained with the cohabitation.

Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey, a new documentary directed by Pippa Ehrlich, who won an Oscar for My Octopus Teacher, chronicles the rescue of a pangolin from wildlife traffickers in South Africa. In one sense, the film is about the progression of a baby pangolin named Kulu who learns skills such as foraging, gains a healthy amount of weight, and heals from his trauma before being set free in the wild. But another rescue enters the story as Gareth Thomas, a middle-aged man with a troubled past, volunteers for a nonprofit pangolin center and finds meaning in his life after spending over a year rehabilitating and eventually letting go of Kulu. Write a short story in which your main character is on a rescue mission and ends up being healed or redeemed in an unexpected way. What are the obstacles along the way that provide moments of comedy, suspense, or pathos?

In the New York Times, a recent headline reads: “Universal Antivenom May Grow Out of Man Who Let Snakes Bite Him 200 Times.” Without reading the content of the article, where does this sensational statement take your mind? This could be an act of heroism, foolishness, a desperate cry for attention, or simply one of the many bizarre idiosyncrasies of human behavior. This week, scroll and scan through a range of headlines—whether seemingly legitimate or dubious—and pick a particularly strange one. Before reading the article, write a poem that follows your line of thinking upon seeing this striking bit of reportage. Think about where the story might go and what images are evoked. Are you able to draw a personal connection to aspects of your own behavior that might explain why the headline resonated with you?

In a New Yorker interview about her short story “Marseille,” Ayşegül Savaş comments on a realization she made when putting together her story collection Long Distance, forthcoming from Bloomsbury in July: “Even though friendships are very important to my own life, I would still place marriage, or parents, or children at the center of my preoccupations. Then why do I write so much about friends?” Take a look through some of your past writing and try to locate any patterns of concerns that recur throughout different pieces, thus revealing your thematic priorities. Write an essay that muses on why these are primary concerns for you to explore creatively. How do your subjects influence your writing form and vice versa? Have themes evolved or shifted in big or small ways over the years?

In his introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2019, guest editor Anthony Doerr lists several dos and don’ts one often hears about writing short stories and describes his love for reading and writing stories that break those very rules. Some of the rules Doerr mentions are: “Don’t start with a character waking up. Jump right into the action. Exposition is boring. Backstory slows you down. Stick with a single protagonist. Make sure he or she is likable. Don’t break up chronology.” This week, think carefully about the reasoning behind one of these oft-cited rules, then write a story that explicitly goes against it. How can the incorporation of an aspect of experimentation or innovation effectively push against the possibly clichéd rationale behind the original rule?

In “Leaving the Psychologist: An Abecedarian Ekphrastic,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Grisel Y. Acosta combines two poetic forms—the abecedarian, in which the first letter of each line follows alphabetical order, and the ekphrastic, which describes or responds to a work of visual art. In Acosta’s poem, she uses a 1960 painting by Spanish Mexican Surrealist artist Remedios Varo titled “Mujer saliendo del psicoanalista” as inspiration: “another face has sprouted in my chest / beastly, that’s me, a super freak / cavorting with your skull in my grasp….” Inspired by Acosta’s creation of combined forms, write your own abecedarian ekphrastic poem. Search for an image of a painting or other work of visual art that invokes a feeling of expansiveness or cyclicality. Allow this to buoy your path from A to Z.

In the introduction to his translation of Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz’s I Found Myself…the Last Dreams, forthcoming in June from New Directions, Hisham Matar writes: “It is clear that Mahfouz, the professed realist, admired dreams, coveted their agile and wandering narratives, their convincing and often unsettling psychological and emotional power, and, perhaps most of all, their economy: how, in an instant, a world is evoked that is—no matter how unlikely or strange—convincingly compelling.” Matar goes on to describe the book’s short vignettes in which Mahfouz recorded his dreams in the last decade of his life. “Almost each starts with ‘I saw myself’ or ‘I found myself.’ And isn’t that the case, that we find or see ourselves in dreams…?” Try your hand at recording your own dreams for a stretch of time, perhaps beginning each entry with “I found myself…” Experiment with arranging them in an order that makes sense to you, through any type of thematic, narrative, or dream logic.

In the opening pages of We, the Casertas—a Gothic novel by the Argentine author Aurora Venturini first published in 1992 and translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude in a new edition forthcoming in May from Soft Skull Press—the main character declares with a youthful, fearsome confidence her damaged relationship with a cruel, rage-filled mother who misunderstands and mistreats her. With the use of this limited first-person point of view, Venturini sets up a complex, intensely subjective protagonist who is suffering yet defiant. “My mother knew that she could never tame me,” she writes. Write a scene in which a young person expresses their thoughts about a parental figure. How would things appear differently if written from the point of view of a young person, a parent, a complete stranger, or an elderly person looking back on a distant memory? Write one or multiple scenes to complete a short story.