The Time Is Now

William Carlos Williams’s multi-volume, mid-twentieth-century poem Paterson is purportedly inspired by the works of his contemporaries: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Hart Crane’s The Bridge. Through his subject—the former mill town of Paterson, New Jersey—Williams provides a voice for American industrial communities. A launching pad for other artists’ work, the book inspired Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film Paterson, about a bus driver and poet named Paterson in the city of the same name, and Robert Fitterman’s book Creve Coeur (Winter Editions, 2024), set in the segregated suburbs of his eponymous Missouri hometown—an illustration of contemporary America that mirrors the structure of Williams’s postwar epic. Write a poem that draws on specific observations of your neighborhood to express a wider perspective on life in the twenty-first century. Incorporate street names, local landmarks, and history as well as tidbits of everyday conversation.

When you picture sea otters, you might think immediately of the many photos and videos of fuzzy otters holding hands while floating in the water, but do these images of cuddly creatures represent their true character? In a 2013 Slate article titled “Sea Otters Are Jerks. So Are Dolphins, Penguins, and Other Adorable Animals,” the violent behavior of these animals and their instinctive modes in the wild are described in detail and contradict the cute and cuddly depictions humans often project onto them. Write a personal essay that explores the theme of deceptive appearances, perhaps drawing on experiences you’ve had in which you misjudged someone and found your first impression contradicted other facts. Or you might think back to a time when someone else made assumptions about you based on superficial traits. What social conditions or cultural expectations contributed to those first impressions?

In Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 Booker Prize–winning novel, The English Patient, four main characters—a young Canadian army nurse, an Indian Sikh working as a British military engineer, a thief, and the eponymous patient—find themselves at a bombed-out Italian villa toward the end of World War II. Through a convergence of sections that weave in and out of time, between the past and present, and told through the characters’ various points of view, the story comes into focus. Write a short story that takes place in a vivid locale where a small group of characters has converged. Experiment with telling the story from multiple perspectives, and alternating chronology. In Ondaatje’s novel, the nonlinear storytelling reflects the effects of war trauma—how might time in your story work on a thematic level?

“In colonial times, gardens were utilitarian. A cross between a grocery store and a pharmacy. In the gilded age, they became an entrance to high society, a place of conspicuous display,” narrates the main character in Paul Schrader’s 2022 film Master Gardener, a man with a secret past who works as the horticulturalist of an estate owned by a wealthy dowager. This week write a poem about a garden, perhaps a large and well-known one visited by tourists, a seasonal garden tended by family members that you frequented as a child, or one you pass occasionally on a neighborhood walk. You might explore the functions of the garden; list colors, shapes, textures, and smells; or make conjectures about its guiding aesthetics. What can a garden reveal about its gardener and the space in which it resides?

“When I say I have written from the beginning, I mean that all real writers write from the beginning, that the vocation, the obsession, is already there, and that the obsession derives from an intensity of feeling which normal life cannot accommodate,” said the late Irish author Edna O’Brien in a 1984 interview for the Paris Review’s Art of Fiction series. O’Brien, who died last Saturday at the age of ninety-three, was the author of a series of novels beginning with The Country Girls, which were internationally acclaimed but banned in Ireland. Her work included memoirs, biographies, and plays, many of which revolved around intimate stories of women’s experiences of love and loss. Write a lyric essay that responds to O’Brien’s sentiment about being drawn to writing from “an intensity of feeling.” Does writing serve in some sense as an outlet for expressing something that seemingly can’t fit into the strictures of normal life?

In 1996, scientists created the first clone of a mammal, a sheep named Dolly. Since 2015, a company based in Texas called ViaGen Pets has cloned hundreds of dogs, cats, and horses for tens of thousands of dollars each. Scientists have warned of the ethical issues of cloning—both in the ways in which the process requires the use of multiple animals (an egg donor and a surrogate carrier), and in the precedence it sets for humans. Write a short story in which a cloned animal plays an integral role in a plot twist. Is the animal’s cloned history kept hidden for some reason? What made this animal so exceptional to be cloned? Consider the complexity and emotions involved with your characters’ values and ethics in this decision.

In Divya Victor’s poem “Blood / Soil,” which appears in her collection Curb (Nightboat Books, 2021), she writes about Sureshbhai Patel, a man who had traveled from India to visit his son and infant grandson in Alabama and was assaulted by police for alleged suspicious behavior while taking a neighborhood stroll. As she describes the physical encounter, Victor includes Newton’s laws of motion and experiments with the visuals of typography and spacing in her incorporation of quotations to draw attention to movement and a sense of confrontation between bodies and language. Write a poem inspired by a news incident that feels resonant to you and provokes a strong emotion. Consider adding bits of science, research, or reported dialogue that might help create a more expansive, interpretive angle.

Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Annie Baker, who made her feature film directorial debut with the coming-of-age drama Janet Planet, recently shared her inspirations for the film with the New York Times through a mood board. The artistic influences included fin-de-siècle painter Édouard Vuillard’s portraits of his mother; Maurice Pialat’s 1968 film about a foster child, L’enfance Nue; literature by Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke; and an album by Canadian jazz musician Beverly Glenn-Copeland. Write a lyric essay composed of short descriptions of creative works—perhaps similarly spanning visual and performing arts, music, and literature—that have served as inspiration to you over the years. What is special about each one, and what are the elements that draw them together?

This week, in preparation for the upcoming opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris, consider the Olympic creed: “The important thing in life is not the triumph, but the fight; the essential thing is not to have won, but to have fought well.” Write a short story that revolves around a competition of some sort—whether between friends, enemies, strangers, or within a liminal relationship of some kind. Decide between a contest of mental or physical abilities, or a battle of wills. Are there high stakes or is the contest seemingly inconsequential? Does all go as planned or is there a surprising upset? Think about your characters’ respective perspectives on the spirit of competition, and what constitutes as fighting fairly.

In the twentieth anniversary edition of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine writes in the preface about her use of the first-person voice “to bear witness to the witness” and provide emotion while maintaining an intimacy within the text. “Anybody could embody the first person and be our guide through the text,” writes Rankine. “For me, at the time, this was a liberating mechanism for getting at the ineffable affective disorder of the moment without disconnecting from the people affected by it.” Write a poem about an event currently unfolding in the world, either locally or on a global scale. Deploy the first-person “I” as a tool to guide the reader through what’s being witnessed. Are there multiple emotional truths at play? How can you give them shape?