What Listening Has Taught Me: The Future Is Shaped by What We Remember
Oral historian Nyssa Chow considers the nested memories she belongs to, and invites readers to do the same.
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Genre: Creative Nonfiction
You’re the Inspiration
In a recent New York Times Magazine interview, Dr. Anna Lembke, a Stanford psychiatrist who studies a variety of addictions from substance abuse to social media, talks about her speculative theory about contemporary society and narcissism. “Our culture is demanding that we focus on ourselves so much that what it’s creating is this deep need to escape ourselves,” she says. Take a break from self-actualization and write an essay that focuses on a close friend or loved one to create a lyrical profile of sorts. If you instinctively relate your observations and memories back to yourself, correct course and try to place the focus as much as possible on someone else. What emerges as a result?
What Listening Has Taught Me: The Smallest Part of Your World
Oral historian Nyssa Chow considers how small routines and rituals tell larger stories.
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Message of Love
Written around 2000 BCE in ancient Mesopotamia, “The Love Song of Shu-Sin” holds the record as the oldest known love poem. Forty centuries later, love poetry continues to be written, in times of joy and sorrow, for all different types of occasions in as many different styles as there are writers. Choose a favorite love poem and spend some time considering the people and things you’ve loved. Write a personal essay that reflects on the elements of the poem that most deeply resonate with you, whether it be the diction, imagery, or sentiments expressed. In what ways does this poem remind you of meaningful relationships in your life? How do these words reflect a message about love?
Hanif Kureishi: Shattered
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In this 2024 LBC Full Disclosure podcast interview with James O’Brien, author and playwright Hanif Kureishi talks about the life-changing fall which led him to write his memoir, Shattered (Ecco, 2025), a mix of dispatches from his hospital bed and his reassembled new life.
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Lee Hawkins
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“This book is not about blame, it’s about understanding.” In this Enoch Pratt Free Library event in Baltimore, Lee Hawkins speaks about the history and research he encountered in the writing process of his debut memoir, I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free (Amistad, 2025). Hawkins’s memoir is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Severance
The science fiction thriller television series Severance, created by Dan Erickson, is centered around a group of characters who work on a classified project at a corporation and undergo a “severance” procedure, in which their nine-to-five workday selves have compartmentalized memories, separate from their outside-world selves, in effect creating two entirely differentiated lived experiences. In the pilot episode, it’s revealed that the main character Mark underwent the procedure after he lost his wife to a car accident, and in his grief was unable to continue with his job as a college history professor. Write a nonfiction piece that explores this idea of severance, speculating on a certain portion or element of your life that you would consider “severing” from your day-to-day consciousness. Though there might be gains, would they outweigh the losses?
Pico Iyer on Learning From Silence
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In this episode of the Keep Talking Podcast, Pico Iyer talks about losing his home in the 1990 Painted Cave fire in Santa Barbara, his experiences with silence, and his new book, Aflame: Learning From Silence (Riverhead Books, 2025), which is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Arts & Letters
Arts & Letters Prizes
Entry Fee:
$20
Deadline:
February 20, 2025
Three prizes of $1,000 each and online publication in Arts & Letters are given annually for a group of poems, a short story, and an essay.
To Animate the Inanimate
Mati Diop’s 2024 hybrid documentary, Dahomey, chronicles the repatriation of twenty-six cultural treasures—including sculptures and a throne plundered during France’s colonial rule over the Kingdom of Dahomey—following them from the Musée du quai Branly in Paris back to the present-day Republic of Benin. Diop intersperses her footage with poetic voice-over narration representing the sentiments of a statue of a king, and uses cameras placed in the perspective of the looted artifacts while they’re in transit, the screen going dark when the crates are sealed and shipped. Think of an artwork, artifact, or other personally significant object that, due to its location in time or geography, has existed during a tumultuous period. Write a lyrical essay that gives the item voice and expression, using imaginative language to animate the inanimate with the capability of experience or witnessing.
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