Genre: Creative Nonfiction

In the 1990 film Arachnophobia directed by Frank Marshall, a family doctor, his wife, and their two young children move from San Francisco to a small town in rural California that is soon overtaken by deadly spiders. Dr. Ross Jennings suffers from arachnophobia, an overwhelmingly intense fear of spiders, stemming from a traumatic childhood incident when he witnessed a spider crawling up his bed and over his body and was too paralyzed with terror to move. Write a personal essay that examines the origins of one of your own fears—either serious, silly, or somewhere in-between. Are there elements of your reaction to this object of fear that seem reasonable or irrational? How have you countered, enabled, or worked to coexist with this fear?

In a 2019 New York Times essay revisiting Alexander Payne’s 1999 film, Election—based on Tom Perrotta’s novel of the same name about a high school student-body election showdown between overachiever Tracy Flick and a social studies teacher—critic A.O. Scott reconsiders his understanding of the movie’s hero and villain twenty years later. “Payne’s film exposes the casual misogyny baked into the structures of civic and scholastic life,” writes Scott. “How despicably does a man have to behave before he forfeits our sympathy? How much does a woman—a teenage girl—have to suffer before she earns it?” Look back on previous presidential election years and reflect on major events that may have occurred in your personal life during those times. Were there heroes and villains who you might cast in a different light now?