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?

“I love snow and briefly. / I love the first minutes in a warm room after stepping out of the cold. / I love my twenties and want them back every day. / I love time. / I love people. / I love people and my time away from them the most.” In his poem “Love,” published in the American Poetry Review, Alex Dimitrov lists dozens of beloved things, each line beginning simply with, “I love.” The items listed often play off of each other and seem to meander associatively, in a stream-of-consciousness manner. Compose a poem that uses a list format to meditate on things you love. You might begin each line with a repeated phrase, or allow the entire poem to encompass one long list. Try experimenting with associative thinking, fluctuations of line length, and playful tones.

“This letter is likely too oblique, no doubt, too fragmented. It is not in the tradition of the epistle. Perhaps not an offer to correspond. I am no correspondent. Accept this witness as a journal glimpse,” writes Heid E. Erdrich in Literary Hub’s Letter From Minnesota series in response to the national turmoil over recent ICE operations in Minneapolis. “In my mind, our city is a body, alive and coursing through us, even where sacred streams are sluiced under streets.” Write an open letter or a note to yourself that includes bits and pieces of language from recent news events with your personal reflections on ideas revolving around political power and the ways in which communities may break or come together in response. Allow yourself the freedom to circle obliquely around emotions you may feel confused about, and to depart from traditional epistolary form in using fragments and diaristic vignettes.