Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (Norton, 1934), is a collection of letters written when he was twenty-seven and living and working with the artist Auguste Rodin in Paris. Rilke’s correspondence was with Franz Xavier Kappus, an aspiring nineteen-year-old poet seeking advice. Many scholars say that much of Rilke’s advice to the younger poet is advice he himself received from a more experienced Rodin when they worked together at different points of their career. Write a short series of letters addressed to your younger self. What experiences can you use to encourage your less experienced self?

In a 2003 Paris Review article recounting the research for her book Solitude & Company: The Life of Gabriel García Márquez Told With Help From His Friends, Family, Fans, Arguers, Fellow Pranksters, Drunks, and a Few Respectable Souls (Seven Stories Press, 2020), Silvana Paternostro writes about how often the Nobel laureate used facts from his life for classic works such as One Hundred Years of Solitude. The article lists various acquaintances and distant relatives who knew Márquez and offered intimate anecdotes that helped shape an organic portrait. Write a story that acts as a portrait of a single person told through the anecdotes of various characters, distant or familial. What does this narrative mode reveal about the protagonist?

On August 26, I curated a virtual reading highlighting New Orleans writers to remember, as I said at the event, all the people, all the cultural places, all the businesses, all the family artifacts, all the schools, all the neighborhoods, and the ways of being that were lost physically and dismantled systematically by Hurricane Katrina. It is hard to believe, but August 29 marked the day the levees broke in New Orleans fifteen years ago.

To commemorate the occasion, Dr. Mona Lisa Saloy, Tom Piazza, Alison Pelegrin, José Torres Tama, Lolis Elie, and Asia Rainey read from their work and shared their experiences. Fourteen-year-old New Orleans saxophonist Akeel Salah Muhammad Haroon treated us with a performance to close the evening.

Readings & Workshops program coordinator Ricardo Hernandez, who helped with tech support, said of the event: “The featured readers were all incredible. I was especially moved to hear Lolis Elie read from “The Whys” and I looked up the piece so I could quote it accurately: ‘Some of us came back because we didn’t believe that the insurance company that we’d dutifully paid for decades would cheat us in our hour of gravest need. (If Dante Alighieri had endured the inferno of our flood, he would have kindled a special fire for insurance companies!)’”

Curating this event was fun but challenging, especially with the added pressure of doing this virtually and praying for no tech hiccups. Luckily it all worked out and our virtual audience was pleased. My goal was to highlight all the ways Hurricane Katrina impacted the city’s writers. It was hard to curate because so much is at stake with a reading that represents the loss and trauma of an entire city. I was happy that each writer brought a different voice and perspective to the reading.

Thank you to all of those who joined us on Facebook for the live event. If you missed the reading, you can watch it here. There is also a wonderful piece written by Joshua Barajas for PBS NewsHour about our event.

Writing about Katrina can be painful, but mostly it is a celebration of what makes New Orleans so special. As Saloy says in the PBS NewsHour piece, “We’re not just authors. We are the carriers of our culture.”

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In “Killing My Sister’s Fish” by Sharon Olds, which appears in her 1996 poetry collection, The Wellspring, she writes of a child pouring ammonia into the bowl of her sister’s pet goldfish and ruminates on the action “as if something set in motion / long before I had been conceived / had been accomplished.” Reflect on a time when you did something wrong, or even sinister, as a child and list the physical details of the event. Write a poem that narrates this memory as truthfully as possible and consider why the event remains so vivid in your mind.

In California’s chaparral plant ecosystem, there are dozens of species known as “fire followers”—including tree and fire poppies, whispering bells, phacelia, lupine, poodle-dog bush, and snapdragons—whose growth is triggered after regional fires by changed chemical conditions of charred soil, and fire- or smoke-activated seeds or buds. Write a series of flash nonfiction pieces, each pointing to a small beginning of sorts after a specific event of chaos or destruction in your life. Does each short narrative pick up a thread from an originating incident and carry it toward something new?

In “Yoshitomo Nara Paints What He Hears” by Nick Marino published in New York Times Magazine, Mika Yoshitake, curator of an upcoming retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, says of Nara’s signature paintings blending the cute, innocent, or childish with an ambiguous anger or menace: “People refer to them as portraits of girls or children. But they’re really all, I think, self-portraits.” Write a short story based on a new character, someone who is seemingly very different from yourself but whom you can use as a vehicle for a self-portrait. What are the superficial ways in which this character is disguised, and what are the characteristics or traits that mark the character as undeniably you?

This COVID Vivid blog series has been a real treat to work on these last couple months, and so, what was supposed to be only five entries will now be extended for a few more. So far, you have heard from Katherine Hoerth, Daniel Peña, Melissa Studdard, and Jonathan Moody. And now I will spin the question on to myself:

What have you been doing since the pandemic started?

“I have been trying to keep it together. I’ll be honest: I’ve been praying. I’ve been cooking. I’ve started three little gardens and built things for my kid. I’ve been playing with my two year old and trying my damnedest not to go down the rabbit hole of what-ifs when it comes to reading about the pandemic on social media.

I’ve also spent a little bit of time trying to write, but sometimes, I just stare at my screen. I’ve been buying useless things and binge-watching shows, and fighting and then making up with my wife, and trying to lose myself in good music. I was lucky enough to get the month of June off (I am an eleven-month contract employee in my local school district) and as of this writing, I am knee-deep in creating updated lesson plans for teachers in my district as well as creating two sets of digital lessons for students under the scenario that they won’t have access to their teachers online. It is tough trying to plan for teachers and students in a situation where we are totally blind as to what might happen next. If you haven’t seen how Texas is handling COVID-19, it’s not pretty.

I am entirely in alert mode. I am in hurricane warning mode. It’s like I stay up at night listening to the house, listening to my daughter sleep, maybe writing late into the night or working on curriculum, but I am lucky if I get a full night’s sleep. I am working on trying to build routines to take better care of myself, but honestly I have always sucked at it. It is easier for me to tend to other people. I probably look a wreck. I know I look a wreck. But everything is a slow movement. I am learning every day to take better care of myself. I am reading more. That’s where I begin.”

And speaking of reading, if you don’t already have your copy of the September/October 2020 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, check out the piece published online about Spanish-language and bilingual creative writing programs, “Writing in Spanish Elevates Academia” by Enma K. Elias.

Over thirty years after the release of the classic sci-fi comedy film Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, this fall marks the release of Bill & Ted Face the Music, the third installment of the series following the two title characters, played by Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, slacker metalhead musicians from California tasked with traveling through time to save the world. Elsewhere in Reeves’s filmography there is more time traveling, including the mind-bending 2006 film The Lake House, in which an architect is engaged in an epistolary romance with a doctor who inhabits the same lake house, but two years apart. Write a series of short poems inspired by the concept of time travel. If you could go back or move forward in time, who would you see and what would you change?

Henri Cole’s latest memoir, Orphic Paris (New York Review of Books, 2018), mixes the forms of autobiography, diary, essay, and poetry with photographs for a complete and intimate look into his time spent in Paris. Each line in the last essay of the book begins with “j’aime,” as Cole uses anaphora, a form which repeats a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses, to write a final moving ode to Paris. Whether it be by your travels or ancestry, what city or place do you feel captivated by? Write a personal essay that uses the repetition of a word or phrase, or the anaphora form to examine your connection to that particular place.