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In this virtual event for the Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment series, Lidia Yuknavitch reads from her memoir Reading the Waves (Riverhead Books, 2025) and speaks to Porochista Khakpour about the process of rearranging fragments of writing.
In the comedic documentary series The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder helps ordinary people rehearse difficult conversations they may be dreading by creating precisely replicated environments and hiring actors to prepare for each scenario. The elaborate sets include a fully functioning bar with patrons, a household with a child actor, and an exact reproduction of a Houston airport terminal. Compose a personal essay about a necessary conversation that has been weighing on you and write out several vignettes exploring potential ways the exchange might play out given your knowledge of your own mindset as well as the person you’re confronting. Consider incorporating thoughts about how some reactions or behaviors may be impossible to predict. How might this rehearsal of sorts help calm your nerves or provide an understanding of your own social tendencies?
“The price of the ride was listening to people talk.” This sentiment is expressed by the young narrator of Joe Westmoreland’s 2001 coming-of-age autofictional book, Tramps Like Us, reissued this week by MCD, to describe his hitchhiking adventures in search of queer belonging and identity. The novel portrays a wide range of characters Joe comes across, befriends, works with, sleeps with, and sometimes loses on the road and in various cities. Compose a memoiristic piece that recounts a cast of characters you’ve met in the past, perhaps only briefly as you traveled from one place to another, who had colorful tales about lives very different from your own. Incorporate snippets of dialogue, trying as best as possible to recall any idiosyncrasies in their speech or vocabulary. Reflect on what you learned from listening and why these stories have stayed with you through the years.
In this 2009 Granta interview, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o discusses his early life and his memoir Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir (Pantheon, 2010) with Ellah Allfrey. Ngũgĩ died at the age of eighty-seven on May 28, 2025.
In the 1997 film Face/Off, an FBI agent survives an assassination attempt that kills his young son and is out for vengeance and justice. To foil this criminal’s next plot to bomb the city, the agent undergoes a secret surgery to replace his face with that of the criminal, only to have him surgically don the agent’s face, effectively creating a mirrored switch in physical identities and an epic showdown. Notable for its flabbergasting premise, another aspect of the film’s cult popularity is director John Woo’s signature style and trademark motifs: balletic action sequences, doves and churches, deadlocked gunfights, and coats blowing in slow motion in the wind. Write an essay about a dramatic situation from your past in which you insert small details and observations of physical description that complement the tone of your piece. How might you translate a slow-motion effect in cinema to a slow-motion moment in your storytelling?
In her latest book, In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir With Appearances by Virginia Woolf (Algonquin, 2025), poet Heather Christle explores her past and her relationship with her mother through the life and work of Virginia Woolf. Christle reflects on the difficult, and sometimes painful, writing process for the book in an essay published on Literary Hub: “There’s a line from a Tony Tost poem I often think about: ‘I don’t know how to talk about my biological father, so I’m going to describe the lake.’ I had so many lakes. I began the process of draining them.” Spend some time jotting down a wide-ranging list of inspiring works of art, geographical locations, and cultural touchstones that are of interest to you. Then, begin an essay by describing something from your list that is seemingly disconnected from a difficult subject matter from your life, and inch your way toward it.
In this event at the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum in San Francisco, Michael Luo talks about how a series of tweets reacting to a hate crime he experienced led to an exploration of early nineteenth-century Chinese immigration, which began the process for his debut book, Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America (Doubleday, 2025). “In order to understand this kind of present, you have to go back,” Luo says.
In this DC Public Library event, Imani Perry speaks with Clint Smith about the recurrence of the color blue in her life and how it sparked an aesthetic examination of the color’s place in African and Black history for her book Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (Ecco, 2025).
Four Seasons is a new comedy drama miniseries based on the 1981 film of the same name with an ensemble cast of middle-aged characters who are lifelong friends. Over the course of one year, the three couples take four group vacations together and reflect on the dynamics of their relationships, and in particular, the evolving circumstances after one couple’s divorce. Choose a significant relationship in your life and compose a four-part personal essay that relays an anecdote for each season of one year. You might turn back to old journals, photographs, e-mail messages, or planners for ideas and choose incidents not necessarily filled with drama, but that might reveal illuminating details about your bond with this person. Consider incorporating seasonal details to supplement the atmosphere of each section and add a sense of the passing of time through those twelve months.
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.
