Genre: Poetry

In a recent piece published on Literary Hub, Maggie Smith describes her writing space—the objects she considers talismans, the furnishings, and accessories that surround her as she works. Some notable items include: her clear desk from CB2, black Uni-Ball Vision Elite pens, an Audre Lorde postcard from a friend, a fortune cookie message, and a card from her high school English teacher. Compose a series of short poems that zero in on a few favorite tools or accoutrements that you like to use or have with you when you write. Include details of the brands, types, and personal touches of each item. What memories are associated with them? How can you combine functional physical descriptions in your verse with thoughtful reflections of what these objects bring to mind?

“Sometimes colors become points of departure to go into stories or anecdotes from things that I believe correspond to those colors,” says writer and comedian Julio Torres explaining the origins of his solo theater project, Color Theories, in an interview with Douglas Corzine published in the Brooklyn Rail last fall. In the show, Torres performs a memoiristic blend of stand-up and art lecture that “engages with the idea that colors are a form of classification, like saying something is a mineral, animal, or vegetable, something is either red or blue or yellow or green, et cetera.” Launching off from this idea, compose a series of short poems, each focusing on a different color. Incorporate ideas, moods, people, and abstract things in the world—such as systems or cultural concepts—that you associate with that color. How might vastly different objects and memories be categorized as the same color?