From the wildflowers of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the white lilies of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, flowers have played a significant role in literature and are symbolic in many cultures. Floriography is known as the “language of flowers” and is a means of expressing emotion through the use of flowers—a method of discreet communication that has existed for millennia and saw heightened popularity during the Victorian era. Whether depicted in a painting, presented as a gift, used as commemorative decor, or worn as an accessory, a flower can symbolize gratitude, love, remembrance, trust, good health, or even danger. Spend some time looking into the language of flowers and write a poem that deploys floriography in some way, perhaps to express something you’ve kept secret until now.

Considering the record-high cost of eggs due to shortages, a recent USA Today article suggests a list of alternatives for the traditional Easter activity of dyeing eggs. A few of the creative contenders include dyeing potatoes or marshmallows, and painting Easter rocks. Think back to a time when you’ve had to alter a long-held tradition because of circumstances outside of your control. Write a personal essay that recounts the emotional trajectory you experienced, beginning with the backstory and memories of your relationship to the tradition. Were you able to preserve the core importance of the tradition? What was lost or gained?

In Laura Wolf Benziker’s short story “The Green World,” published in Evergreen Review, a mother on an outing with her child at a water park has to abandon her glasses to go down a slide and experiences an unsettling transformation through her blurry, uncorrected vision. “She…stood up with a small flutter of panic,” writes Wolf Benziker. “Now she would need to trust, like a baby before it has learned how to see.” Write a short story in which your main character temporarily experiences a shift in sensory perception, such as a loss of taste or smell from illness, or muffled hearing from swimmer’s ear or air travel. What is revealed about your character in how they respond to this difficulty?

What signals to you that spring has finally arrived? While there are signs of transformation throughout the year, the signs of spring often feel particularly special following on the heels of winter as many look forward to the tiniest indications of vernal revitalization. Buzzing bees, daffodils and tulips, pollen that makes you sneeze, the end of clanging heater pipes, wearing shorts, outdoor picnics, and opening windows—there are many associations with the freshness of the season. This week write a series of short poems that focus on the small, perhaps idiosyncratic changes that signify to you, personally, that a new season is upon us.

In her memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May, Yiyun Li writes about the loss of her two teenage sons. After her son Vincent’s death, Li wrote a book for him “in which a mother and a dead child continue their conversation across the border of life and death.” However, she finds that her son James’s character and their relationship evade her desire to write a book for him and in composing this memoir, Li embarks on a project to find a new alphabet, a new language, and a new way of storytelling. Taking inspiration from Li, write a lyrical essay about someone you have lost in a style that reflects their personality and your relationship, in all its complexities. Allow yourself to be experimental with structure and chronology.

A mysterious lunch meeting at a restaurant in the financial district between a middle-aged actress and a handsome, much younger man opens the story of Katie Kitamura’s novel Audition (Riverhead Books, 2025). The reader is momentarily left in the dark as the unnamed first-person narrator recounts this lunchtime assignation and it’s not until the third chapter of the book that the details and reasons for their initial meeting come to light. Start a new short story in which two characters meet and the nature of their connection is kept ambiguous. Are they friends, lovers, family, colleagues, or something else? How can you use shifting points of view and dialogue to maintain an atmosphere of suspense and inscrutability?

In Sean Baker’s film Anora, which won best picture at this year’s Academy Awards, the title character spends the majority of her time zigzagging around New York City with various characters and in one particularly indelible shot, she strides past the iconic Cyclone roller coaster at a deserted Coney Island boardwalk on a gray winter afternoon. This week write a poem that revolves around an iconic location with a depiction that is unconventional or atypical in juxtaposition. You might consider how this locale is usually thought of in the popular imagination, how it was designed to function, or how it looks in different seasons. Play around with diction and rhythm to amp up a sense of tension and upend conventional expectations of your subject.

Among the thousands of structures that were destroyed in the devastating Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year was one home in Altadena. The house had been slated for renovations to become a foundation and residency honoring the late author and critic Gary Indiana, who died in October 2024. A shipment of hundreds of books constituting the writer’s personal library arrived at the home hours before the Eaton Fire, the entirety of which is now lost. Along with the library was an irreplaceable record of the authors who inspired Indiana’s work. In an act of reparative imagination, write a personal essay about a literary hero of yours and reflect on what might drive their creativity. If there are interviews and other materials available in which your subject reveals their muses, allow yourself the freedom to focus on your own speculations and connections.

“The difficulty of living through long minutes is a central concern of Cléo From 5 to 7, a film set in real time and real space, which follows an aspiring young pop star as she endures time—the real running time of the film—waiting for the results of a biopsy,” writes Laura McLean-Ferris about Agnès Varda’s 1962 film in an essay published in frieze magazine. “Subjective time periodically bloating and stretching in confusion and loneliness, while objective time ticks on.” Unlike with a film or play, the reader of a story sets the timing of their engagement with the work by their reading pace, on their starts and stops. But the writer, too, has many tools to bloat and stretch time within the confines of a story. Write a short story that moves slowly and in “long minutes” to allow certain moments to stretch or contract according to your main character’s state of mind.

April is National Humor Month, which means it’s the perfect time to be reminded that everyone has a funny bone. The annual observance was conceived to heighten public awareness of the therapeutic value of humor, laughter, and joy. This week, consider what others have said about your sense of humor over the years. Does it lean toward puns or dad jokes? Is it witty or dark, laconic or bizarre, goofy or lighthearted? Write a short series of poems that showcases your specific sensibility around amusement and how you value humor and joy in your life. You might find it helpful to recount recent experiences and images that made you chuckle or guffaw and try to manifest in your poem what specifically made you laugh out loud.