This is excerpted from a voice note my goddaughter, Eleni, recently left me. I had left her a note first, telling her I was so proud of her performance: Singing a Rubén Darío poem (from memory!) at school. I watched a video of the performance, absolutely beaming.

Eleni quickly skipped past the praise in my message, focusing instead on the fact that I haven’t visited yet. She and her mom, Ari, my childhood best friend, just moved to Nicaragua a few months ago.

At four years old, Eleni’s sense of travel logistics, time, and space is all rather compressed. Fair enough.

She ended the note by saying, “Thank you for all the love in your heart. Bye!!”

Unbelievable stuff.

I first spent time in Nicaragua several years ago, thanks to Ari (this was pre-Eleni), and learned from talking to people there that memorizing poetry is an integral part of their education. I could ask any Nicaraguan in their 30s or 40s to recite a poem they learned at 9, and they’d do it no problem, with dramatic flair.

I won’t go on a whole pedagogical rant here, but I wish we memorized more. I’m all for free thinking, creative expression, etc. But I also believe that, to be creative, you must be responding to and in conversation with other things. Reaction, pushback, inspiration—these are all part of the generative process. If you’re finding yourself remembering less and using AI for anything at all, your brain craves this.

The Prompt

Choose a poem or song that you don’t already know and memorize (part of) it. Recite it out loud on your commute, in the shower, or to your lover, perhaps.

Now, if you’re moved, write something in response to what you memorized—try to capture the same feeling as your selection.

Not sure what to choose?

Respond to this email with a little about your current mood and vibe, and I’ll pick a poem for you. It would truly be my pleasure.

xx

Kate

For some reason, that particular one on the beach or on the trail struck you as different, and, even though it looked less special on your dresser than in its original environment, you kept it. Maybe you were more of a bug kid, so you turned over stones to find things crawling underneath.

I did some of each. I’ve always had the magpie tendency of wanting to hoard small, shiny things. I also used to bring caterpillars into the house and get upset when they didn’t like me giving them a bubble bath (and died).

I think we are all born collectors of something close to the ground.

The premise of Louise Erdrich’s short story, “The Stone,” starts along those lines:

Her family drove north every summer to stay at the end of an island in cold Lake Superior, and it was there that she found the stone. It wasn’t on the beach, where stones are usually found, but in the woods. She was wandering in the brush behind the cabin, uncurling ferns, kicking up leaves, snapping the heads off mushrooms. She sat down beside a birch clump, and after a few moments her neck prickled. She had the distinct feeling that someone was staring at her. Looking around, she saw the stone. It was black and rounded, nestled in the crotch of the birch clump. Water had scoured two symmetrical hollows into the stone, giving it an owlish look, or a blind look, or, anyway, some quality that was oddly attractive.

At first, she was startled and a little spooked, but then she ran her hand over the stone and it felt like a normal stone. It was about half the size of a human skull and very smooth. The girl’s mother called to her, and she got up, holding the stone, and carried it into the cabin. At first, she put it beside her pallet in the bedroom she shared with her siblings. But then, thinking that her brothers or her sister might take the stone, she tucked it right at the bottom of her sleeping bag. That night, her feet rested on the cool curve of the stone, and she brushed the smooth eye sockets with her toes.

You can read or listen to the story via The New Yorker or The New Yorker podcast.

The story reads like a fable, with an unnamed girl and her unnamed stone. She keeps the thing from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. Her life evolves and changes, as does her relationship to the stone.

In an interview, Erdrich said: “This story is about finding solace in an entity that isn’t human. A stone is alien, but deeply familiar. It is a heavy secret and a messenger from an epoch of time beyond comprehension.”

Damn.

It isn’t a story about a lucky or unlucky object, but about an object that one person ascribes meaning to. It’s about the unknowable lives of people and the unknowable histories of things and the interconnectivity of those.

It’s also a story about a weird girl and her pebble.

The prompt

If you already have a rock or a shell you collected, you can use that. If not, or if you want a new one for this exercise, go for a walk and pick up a pebble that strikes you for its shape, its color, or some cosmic pull saying “pick me up!”

Now, I want you to take that little stone and place it somewhere prominent for 3 days. It could be next to your bed, next to where you keep the olive oil, or at the sink where you brush your teeth.

For three days, every time you encounter the stone, write down your thought in that moment as best you can. Pick it up and turn it over from time to time. Let this one be more of a somatic exercise.

At the end of the three days, assess your stone log. Is there a connection between these thoughts? Do you think the presence of the stone changed anything? Does the stone hold more meaning for you now? Less?

I would truly love to read your rock log.

xx

Kate

When Lost Lambs came out last month, things got very discourse-y because the book made such a splash. Some were on Substack decrying the “contrived” press it got, with other people rebutting to say “that’s just how successful PR from a big press marketing team on behalf of a writer with clout works, actually.”

I read the book. It’s wickedly clever satire—if a little too cute for me at times—and I had fun reading it, especially the first half.

Regardless! There’s something to take from Cash’s writing. So, obviously, that’s what we’ll do.

When asked where she gets her narrative plots (this interview was before Lost Lambs), Cash said: “They aren’t pulled from my specific life experiences. They’re just random. It’s like an Exquisite Corpse: two things are at odds that I think would be funny if they were paired, and then I mash them together ineloquently.”

In Lost Lambs, there’s a scene where a church support group is given a creative writing exercise (!!!) that goes like this (not a spoiler):

“It’s a creative writing exercise. I want you to invent a world, similar to your own but with no people or places that exist as you know them. They may be analogues to reality but most come strictly from your imagination. For example, in your world Mango Rooney’s might be called Sylvester Strawberry, and so on. This is an exercise in control. You decide everything about this world. In this world, you are—”

“God,” said Kimble.

“Well, no, that would be blasphemy, but in this world you’re the boss. Everyone got it?”

“So I can make everyone, say, perish in a fire then?” said the tattooed man in the dirty overalls.

“It’s your world,” said Miss Winkle. “If that’s what you wish to do with your absolute authority, then so it shall be.”

“Can I give everyone fish gills?” asked the divorcee.

“You certainly may,” said Miss Winkle.

“Can I give the me character millions of dollars?” asked the teenager.

“Of course,” said Miss Winkle.

“Can I take away their pain?” asked Miss Ansel with the strange skin pigmentation, “Like, can I make it so my people do not feel pain the way we do?”

“Yes, Miss Winkle smiled. “Yes, you can.”

The Prompt

Do a version of the creative exercise from Lost Lambs in the style of Madeline Cash, but I’m adding constraints.

Write a scene that takes place in a somewhat normal world with one thing added and one thing subtracted (e.g. giving everyone fish gills and taking away everyone’s pain). The thing you add and the thing you subtract should push the bounds of reality and be disconnected from each other.

In my attempt at this, I wrote about a cooking class for tourists in a foreign country that is totally normal except that 1. No one can smell anything and 2. Everyone has a an insurmountable fear of knives.

Have fun! And let me know if you read Lost Lambs.

Kate

I’m happy it’s late enough in January that the ins and outs lists are beginning to fade away. Plans for the whole year, year of this or year of that, vision boards, lists—I love to scheme and dream as much as the next girl, but, at some point, we have to start with still being us; a new year is made up of todays and tomorrows that we meet as ourselves.

And that leads me to plans for tomorrow and everyday things we intend to do.

I’ve been thinking about how Alex Pretti probably had mundane plans for his day and the day after, about how people are always holding small joys with violence pressing in.

Here’s a poem from Bernadette Mayer and a prompt to follow:

Tomorrow

By Bernadette Mayer

for: max and alyssa
malyyssax worelish

tomorrow we’ll see the lightbulb in schenectady,

go to gems farms in schodack, then on to howe caverns,

then to see the wayne thiebaud show at the clark

where we’ll stop to notice the melting ice sculpture

then excellent spinach sap soup at the thai restaurant

in williamstown, a brief stop at the octagonal museum,

on to northampton to see the smith college art museum

& greenhouse where we’ll see a green heron

it would be nice to be able to walk today

so we could go to opus 40 in saugerties

followed by a dinner of oysters & mussels at the bear

then on to check out the sheep at the sheepherding inn

where we’re able to buy riccotta cheese

which means twice-baked, with which we’re able

to make a pizza with fresh figs gotten from the berry farm

war what is it good for?

absolutely nothing

Mayer uses 10 unique verbs in this poem (and repeats a couple) about what the speaker of the poem will do tomorrow. They’re all simple (go, see, notice, buy, make) and act upon specific objects: melting ice sculpture, green heron, mussels at the bar. The result is a wonderful list, a beautifully active and poetic itinerary. It’s a gorgeous day, isn’t it?

The final couplet of the poem is a volta, Italian for “turn,” and in poetry, a departure from what came before it: “war what is it good for? / absolutely nothing.”

Here, Mayer reaches out and touches the violence and protest at the poem’s edge—the day’s edge.

The Prompt

• Write your own “Tomorrow.” Think of it as a poem if you want, or a list or paragraph if you prefer. Either way, write specific places you’ll go, things you’ll see, what you could do. Start with: “tomorrow we’ll see the…..”

• Include 10 different verbs.

• Be specific but restrained in your description. Remember Mayer’s spinach sap soup at the thai restaurant and her brief stop at the octagonal museum.

• When you get to the end, write two final lines that take a turn from the rest. Consider the following to help you: What’s pressing in at the edge of your day?

Love,

Kate

Much has been written about the influence of place on art and writing. Joan Didion wrote “Goodbye to All That” in 1967 and someone has written a version of “Why I’m leaving New York,” (or whatever) every year since.

At present, I’m more interested in arrivals than departures, in people choosing to stay somewhere out of the limelight or make a return to somewhere special.

Musician Ethel Cain spoke on Popcast this year about her decision to continue living in small towns in the south and midwest. “Why the hell would I move to Los Angeles? What would I write about? Sunset Boulevard? Let me stay at home. Why would I leave the well? I need to stay by it if I want to continue drinking and having this inspiration.” Cain had a top 10 album on the Billboard 200.

Similarly, Karly Hartzman of the band Wednesday, said in an interview: “I’ve only lived in two places, Greensboro and Asheville…My music is for North Carolinians. Anyone else who likes it, that’s great, but it’s mostly for the people I share that community with.”

Wednesday’s album, Bleeds, out this year, was pretty universally critically acclaimed, and most of the people reviewing music at NPR and Pitchfork don’t live in Greensboro.

Writing from a specific place (literally or figuratively) can open up a larger story, a broader resonance.

The Prompt:

What is your well? What place influences you? This might be where you’re from, somewhere you return to, or somewhere you still think about after just passing through: town, city, kitchen, neighborhood, shopping mall, riverbank, log cabin.

Describe the place as though telling someone about it for the first time. Where is it on the map? How’s the weather? Who lives there?

Write into all five senses.

• What do you see?

• How does it sound?

• What’s the smell?

• Can you taste it?

• Do the walls or the dirt have a texture?

See where that goes. And safe travels all holiday season!

Kate

PS! My first BRAND plug!

I am obsessed with using Brick. I tap my phone to the physical tile and it blocks me from using the apps that I tell it to (for me: social media and shopping) until I tap it to the little tile again. If you’re a different sort of person, you might want to block yourself from checking work email after hours.

It’s made a huge difference. My attention is less fractured when I want it to be.

It works in a way that none of those time-restricting apps ever do because of the physical aspect of it. I also think it’s especially useful at this time of year. I promise you do not need barrel jeans on sale, or barrel jeans at all. You do not need another 15 minutes of scrolling today. What you need is to sit and be bored with yourself for a second and have a meandering line of uninterrupted thought and see where that takes you. Or call someone you’ve been meaning to check in on.

If you want to get yourself a Brick or buy it for a brain-rotted loved one, here’s my link.

Another cup of coffee. Eleni gets a gold charm for every birthday. Feeling my own heartbeat again and googling the reason why again. Grace says ‘life is long’ the day before Brad says ‘life is short,’ but he’s making fun of the type of person who hangs a sign in their kitchen that says ‘life’s short so eat desert first,’ and Grace is talking about the places we might make home and the divergent possibilities of our lives. Here again is my tendency to simply not make eye contact when I don’t want to speak to someone, even if they’re next to me. I got rid of an old perfume which made me think of how I’ve worn 4 perfumes since 2019 and who has smelled one or maybe two versions of me and who has smelled everyone I’ve tried on.

I made a convincing presentation about nothing and thought about the words I’ve lost to Corporate Headquarters. I want to feel like I slept 10 hours every night without sleeping for 10 hours every night—is anyone working on this? I want to make a snow angel. I watched a documentary and cried, which doesn’t happen often. Mamdani winning feels like a drug high for a few hours. Obsessed with a new chicken recipe. Only drip coffee these days. They are both right. Thinking about what is “the devil’s work;” thinking about what are “idle hands.” Three steak dinners in a birthday week, and then what?

Inspired by Sheila Heti’s, Alphabetical Diaries, I wrote the above sentences over the course of the last week or so, and then put them in alphabetical order.

The concept of Alphabetical Diaries didn’t totally grab me at first—10 years of Heti’s diary entries culled down and then input into a spreadsheet to reorder the sentences (you guessed it) alphabetically. Would that be interesting? Would I even follow it?

Yes, actually. I followed it from the first chapter, in which every sentence starts with “A,” right on down the line. Parts are relatable, parts are raunchy, parts are frustrating—especially some of the love affairs. There’s a lot that’s mundane and navel-gazing in a book of diary excerpts, sure, but that’s also what allows for the intimacy, wandering, and interesting representation of patterns in our consciousness.

We think of sequencing as such an important part of the process, right? The order of events in a story, the lines of a poem, the flow of songs in a playlist or on an album. So, what happens when we impose an external system? What new patterns do we see?

This week, I’d like you to put your thoughts in an order that isn’t your own.

The Prompt:

Write a sentence or two each day (or more!) and do not edit them for clarity or style as you go. At the end of the week, throw them into a spreadsheet and sort alphabetically. Maybe reverse alphabetically. At this point, and this point only, you can edit some down if you like.

What remains at the end? What do you notice in the different sequence? Which letter is the most common? What did you gravitate toward in the week?

During the talk, I was bored.

I saw this coming.

The translator himself charmed me because he’s 78 and poetry absolutely lights him up, but the nitty gritty of meticulously translated rhyme and meter is not something that lights me up while I’m perched on an uncomfortable stool in a warm bookstore.

The reason I went, and the reason I’m writing about it now, is because this particular translation of Rilke features poems influenced by his time working as Auguste Rodin’s secretary. And I was curious: What does a poet learn while doing paperwork for a sculptor?

Well, he stopped writing about the personal and sentimental so much and started writing what he called Dinggedicht or “thing poems.” These poems borrow from sculpture; they’re more concrete in their subject matter and more exacting in their imagery. Rilke still uses symbolism, but he starts from a place of grounded observation and language. Here’s one:

Rilke scholars, the kind of people that would have loved the talk I went to, have described these poems as evidence of Rilke’s ability to basically show up to the page and write off the dome. Michal Hoffman (another translator and big Rilke guy) said:

“They are ‘method’ poems. Not waiting for inspiration, but taking the handicraft of a poem, and setting himself subjects, the way a shoemaker might, or a sculptor.”

So much search for creative inspiration gets tangled up in what is the concept, or what is the idea. Don’t get me wrong! If the spirit moves you and your cup runneth over with ideas, I couldn’t love that more. Embrace it when it happens!

But, if you find yourself waiting around for that perfect idea to strike for a long time, then that’s exactly what you’re doing—waiting around. What if you think of yourself as shoemaker or a sculptor, no matter what your medium is, and focus specifically and methodically on a thing in front of you?

The Prompt: A Thing Poem

First, choose a thing as your point of focus. Some ideas:

• A piece of jewelry or another accessory

• An animal

• An artwork

• Something in your kitchen (bowl, pot, loaf of bread, vase of flowers, etc.)

Next, write a “thing poem,” which, as always, you can interpret very loosely. If you want to write a scene, a little story, a paragraph, or make a sketch instead—do that. If you want structure, here it is:

• Write 14 lines about this thing

• In the first 8 lines, focus just on description

• In the next 6 lines, compare it to something else, connect it to its environment, or express why it’s important

This is the vibe (some things I’ve liked recently on Etsy and Facebook Marketplace + special mention for the 1920s clown costume from @strangedesires_):

One show on my watchlist was Midnight Mass, a limited series from Mike Flanagan (Haunting of Hill House, among others) that came out in 2021. It’s about a tiny, struggling island community and its increasingly fanatical devotion with a supernatural bent. There is a priest and there are vampires.

I don’t recommend the show—mostly because of a few unanswered questions and too much singing in four-part harmony—but I did find myself moved at multiple points by monologues featuring dramatically read scripture.

Now, I’m not Catholic (my Irish and Italian grandparents are rolling in their graves over this, I’m sure), or a practicing anything. But there are many reasons holy texts have inspired so much poetry, art, film, and music. Faith is one reason, but others include sheer beauty and powerful meditations on who we are and why we’re here.

One of Kaveh Akbar’s books of poetry, Pilgrim Bell (2021), begins with the following epigraph: “Any text that is not a holy text is an apostasy.” On the next page, he writes: “Then it is a holy text.” The poems go on to explore faith and its limitations in daily life. Akbar’s book, then, is a holy text in the sense that it is a search for meaning and for holiness in the everyday experience.

My question to you is this: What text is holy or sacred to you? Where do you search for meaning, and maybe find it? It’s important that you hold it in your hands.

The Prompt

Two texts I selected for myself were Bluets by Maggie Nelson, which got me through one of my worst crash-outs to date, and my aforementioned Irish-Catholic grandmother’s handwritten recipe cards, which connect me to her legacy.

Interpret the idea of a “text” loosely. Then write on the following:

• What memory does it evoke?

• What do you feel connected to through this thing? What does it bring you closer to that’s bigger than you?

• Why is that connection meaningful?

This is the vibe:

Happy Halloween!

Kate

Weer is about a couple breaking up on New Year’s Eve 1999, with flashbacks to different points of their three-year relationship. The thing is, Weer is a one-woman show, which means Palamides plays both partners—the man and the woman in this couple—with half of herself made up and outfitted as each. She moves back and forth and transforms her face and body constantly to play both parts. Yes, even for a sex scene or two.

The show has a little bit of everything, by which I mean comedy, tragedy, Pearl Jam, and drag. It’s clownish—physically very funny with darkness mixed in. I did participate as an audience member (no choice; front row seat). My role was that of the problematic temptress at the party. Palamides’ girlfriend side accused me of letting her boyfriend side flick my nipples. “It’s just this thing I do,” I told the sold-out theater.

Anyway, what I want to write about are doubles.

The idea of the double—of two wolves inside us—is a big-time literary device since the olden days. The gothic double, the doppelgänger…these are terms you probably learned a long time ago, and there are plenty of current cultural references.

Doubling can extend to form as well as character.

A contrapuntal poem is two poems in one, which you can read separately or together, usually in two columns.

The contemporary poet Jericho Brown coined the term “duplex” for another poetic form he created. A duplex poem is a mix of a few traditional forms (a ghazal that is also a sonnet that is also a blues poem of 14 lines in which each line has 9 to 11 syllables). It’s a little technical, but the result is a cool, divergent poem with repeated lines and lines that flip the script on your expectations.

Brown said, “I decided to call the form a duplex because something about its repetition and its couplets made me feel like it was a house with two addresses.”

I’m not really interested in writing contrapuntal or duplex poems myself, and I don’t expect you to be (though knock yourself out if you are), but I think there’s a lot you can pull creatively from this idea of a double.

The Prompt

Things to think about. Take whatever speaks to you:

• What are the two sides of a personality (yours or someone else’s)?

• Do you have an alter ego? Who?

• Describe a house with two addresses

• What are the two sides of a story you heard recently or an argument you had?

• Where have you been and where are you going?

• Yesterday vs. today; this year vs. last year

• What are the pros and the cons?

If you’re a more visual person, this would be an interesting one to draw, to give shape and color to. Either way, consider dividing your paper into two or using two columns.

xx

Kate

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The most noticeable aspect of Paley's style, what shifts it out of the everyday, is the unexpected specificity of her wording. Here’s one example:

“helpless chubby infancy” and “the wrestling, hugging ages” and “as well as earlier and later”—what a rich, strange way to say “as a baby” and “as a young boy” and “for his whole life.”

In an interview with The Paris Review in 1992, Paley was asked how stories begin for her. She answered:

A lot of them begin with a sentence—they all begin with language. It sounds dopey to say that, but it’s true. Very often one sentence is absolutely resonant. A story can begin with someone speaking. “I was popular in certain circles,” for example; an aunt of mine said that, and it hung around in my head for a long time. Eventually I wrote a story, “Goodbye and Good Luck,” that began with that line, though it had nothing to do with my aunt.

How freeing. Paley isn’t talking about finding a whole subject or a formed idea. Instead, she describes taking one sentence she heard and using it as a jumping-off point that has nothing to do with the original context. She elaborates:

“There were two husbands disappointed by eggs,” which is the first sentence of “The Used-Boy Raisers.” I was at the house of a friend of mine, thirty-five years ago, and there were her two husbands complaining about the eggs. It was just right—so I went home and began the story, though I didn’t finish it for months. I’m almost invariably stuck after one page or one paragraph—at which point I have to begin thinking about what the story could possibly be about. I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.

The prompt:

1. Lift a sentence from a conversation (yours or someone else’s), a text, a sign out the window, the way a waiter describes an entree at a restaurant.

2. Remove it from its context, as Paley does, but let the fragment be your starting point for 15-30 minutes of writing.

Here are some I jotted down that are hanging around my head; feel free to borrow them.

• “He’ll still call and ask me stupid questions, like, ‘Do you wash herbs?’”

• The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding: Completely Revised and Updated 8th Edition

• “The psychic said someone from my past would try to come back. And that is not it.”

• “I’ve been dealing with an eye infection. My pupil changed shape.”

xx

Kate

Because I love punishment, I read Discontent by Beatriz Serrano, translated from Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem, in the days before my departure. The book is about a disaffected woman with a job pretty much exactly like mine (content, creative strategy, copy—whatever you want to call it) who has figured out how to keep up appearances at work even though, existentially, she’s spiraling. Her charade comes to a completely unhinged head at her company retreat, just as I left for mine.

The startup I work for, run mainly by former consultants and lawyers, doesn’t exactly resemble tech bro startup culture (which I’m also blessed to be familiar with; ask me about my panic attacks in a WeWork bathroom in 2018 #girlboss).

But it still has its peculiarities.

Retreat activities fell somewhere between theater camp and initiation ritual, with a heavy dose of team-building: We shared our intentions and our “new frontiers,” we did a pushup competition, performed hidden talents, and did our best celebrity and animal impressions. A select few won Values Awards bestowed by their peers dressed in thematic costumes (minions, knights, skeletons, inflatable bouncy balls). There was, of course, karaoke in a room that was too well-lit.

Maybe you don’t have to do literal costumes and skits with your company, but performing is part of your deal, too. Whatever your industry, you perform for clients, customers, coworkers, funders, buyers, fans, or the algorithm. In Discontent, the protagonist says: “I couldn't stand the idea of being forced to live that office pantomime in perpetuity just to pay for things like rent or food or a book or a weekend at the beach.”

Our “job jobs” are often separate from—and sometimes at odds with—free-form creativity. Even if you work in a creative field, it’s hard to untangle your soul from the reality of making money. During my retreat participation, though, I experienced lucid moments of observing the pantomime as an outsider, which yielded both a short story idea and this prompt.

I hope you’ll run with it.

The prompt:

Think about the following:

• In what ways do you perform at work?

• In what ways is the performance a comedy? A tragedy?

• What parts of your performance do you take pride in? What parts constrain you?

Now, with those answers in mind, write a brief workplace scene—however that looks for you. In the scene, write yourself, or a character like yourself, and two other characters (based on colleagues, customers, etc.).

At the beginning of the scene, write it according to the typical script—how everyone usually behaves. Midway through, break the script. Make at least one of your characters do or say something completely unexpected and out of the norm. The weirder the better.

End scene.

Love,

Kate

But hey, we’re all on our own journey. My journey, following the Lorde comment, which came at the tail end of a New England road trip through the stomping grounds of my youth, sent me to a deeply nostalgic place from which I have yet to emerge.

It is September, after all, and back-to-school season is hard-coded into my brain as a time to take stock of where I am. Even though I wouldn’t describe myself as a huge Lorde fan, where I am is hitting her debut album, Pure Heroin (2013), pretty hard.

I imagine my 2013 college self easily:

That a cappella group just sang “Royals” at their jam. I’m walking to a party in the dark, wearing lace-up boots, carrying cheap vodka in a water bottle, and ready to flirt with someone I may or may not even like. I’m doin' this for the thrill of it, killin' it / Never not chasin' the million things I want. I sauté mushrooms for the first time in my life and set off the fire alarm in our building. When the angry texts come, I lie.

So this was my headspace when I recently dropped into a writing group I’d heard about and found that everyone there was probably between 6 and 11 years my junior.

We gathered in one member’s first-ever New York apartment, and, over the course of the evening, I heard about their nascent careers, their hungry propulsion toward certain creative goals, their run-ins with creepy men online, and their particular rhythms in this city that promises you so much and takes just as much from you.

They were all beautiful writers.

On my way home, I passed an office building where I used to work and a bar I remember spending one very long night in (though I don’t remember why). On the train, I texted my first roommate in New York (she’s in Chicago now) to say hi and thanks.

I’m nearing a decade in New York, which means I’ve become myself 100 times here. I’ve imagined countless futures. I’ve spun a fast revolving door and seen who’s still around when the spinning stops. I have enough past to feel nostalgic about, places to return to, and I’m so grateful.

The Prompt

Pick an album that was either popular and/or important to you in your earlyish twenties. Ideally, this lines up with a distinct period: school, a move, a new chapter of some kind. If you’re reading this and still in your early twenties, then pick an album from early adolescence.

Rinse that album for a day or so.

Write whatever arises from memory during or after listening—any fragments. Use at least one lyric verbatim in your piece.

Love,

Kate

I got my aura picture taken in Chinatown—perhaps not at the right time, given how dire things feel pretty much every time I look at my phone lately. The woman who took my picture said I have a bright future and lightness ahead, but that I’m thinking too much, sleeping with wet hair too often, and ingesting too many cold foods. She told me to get the tension in my neck taken care of, which I didn’t, and then I promptly threw my neck out.

So, maybe it’s partially the wet hair, but I’ve been feeling disdain for my surroundings. I live in Park Slope, a very well-to-do, family-oriented neighborhood. Living here is like living in 2007: Frozen yogurt shops never left, and the economy is, by the look of things, going great.

I’ll insert all my caveats now: I live a blessed life. I belong to a food co-op of national acclaim and local infamy. I greet women in their 70s by name on the street. I walk in the park. “Bountiful but boring,” my boyfriend says of the place. This has been true for as long as I’ve lived here, but my irritation feels fresh.

Mostly, I blame the man at the YMCA who takes his shoes off.

The man who takes his shoes off at the Y

I go to the Y because it’s so close to my apartment. The problem is, I frequently rub elbows with folks who lack spatial awareness, baseline gym etiquette, and physical survival instincts. This is, I know, what I get for going to a crunchy family gym in a crunchy family neighborhood. I can’t expect rigor or athleticism, right? It’s none of my business if someone wears a dress on the treadmill or does a solo salsa routine by the cable machine. This isn’t Equinox! So I shut up, and I get my reps in.

Until I encountered a particularly sweaty man doing sweeping kettlebell exercises, followed by some light stretching, in the (very limited) functional training area. He had removed his sneakers entirely for these activities. His 'ole dogs and his beat-up ASICS stunk up the whole vicinity. He remained blithely unaware of my stone-cold gaze. I made a show of shuffling around him to get my desired dumbbells. He didn’t notice.

I saw him again the following week. Twice. Shoes off. Ass up. Hitting a stiff downward dog. What would possess someone? What wrong turns have I taken in my one precious life to be in such proximity to this degenerate?

The cost of silence

The issue is that I didn’t say anything immediately, and now I resent this man for multiple transgressions and the mental space I’ve used on him.

So, if I say something at this point, it won’t be normal. It won’t be, “Hey man, could you please put your shoes on?” I want to light an ASIC on fire and throw it from the second story (no one is harmed, of course). I want to verbally eviscerate him, and I want it to be devastating. Isn’t this always the problem with letting anger fester into fantasy?

I saw the comedian Ricky Velez do a joke one time about his friend getting banned forever from Madison Square Garden for bringing his own whistle to make calls during a game. It had me roaring. But now I find myself thinking about what I could say to Shoeless McSweaty that would get me banned forever from the YMCA, and how it might be worth it.

The Prompt

What’s an impulse you’ve had that would get you banned literally, socially, or spiritually from a space? Jot that down.

Now, play it out:

• What would you throw, say, sing, yell, or do?

• Is this revenge? A hot take? Wild excitement? Something silly you’ve just always wanted to try?

• How would it feel to give in to the impulse?

• How would you go about it?

• What would you do immediately afterward?

• What would be the reaction? Consequences? Standing ovation?

Have fun being bad, burn after reading, etc.

xx

Kate

Gia, the novel’s protagonist, has recently quit a job and broken up with her boyfriend. She’s also ignoring her mother’s calls and writing to a dancer, Marta, whom she becomes obsessed with after learning about her in the library archive.

But Marta is dead. And I promise there are no spoilers here that aren’t on the back cover of the book and/or in the opening few pages….but….Marta pretty immediately shows up at Gia’s apartment in response to her letter.

At the novel’s start, we get our first image of Marta (ghost) hanging out at Gia’s home, and I’ll remember this description forever:

“Marta slept all through the night, even when lightning struck the neighbor’s tree and sent it through the roof in the shed. In the morning, I found her slowly moving through the backyard like a heron, collecting branches from the storm. She was wearing shiny blue underwear, and looked much younger than even I, even though she died when she was ninety-two years old.

The Prompt

I’d like you to identify, name, and describe your “Marta.” Here’s how:

First: Identify your ghost.

What ideal haunts you—something you want but haven’t gotten?

In Bitter Water Opera, Gia fixates on Marta because she represents (at least at first) this vision of a totally independent, singularly creative life.

Do you long for a creative, independent life while you work 9-5, like Gia? Or maybe you crave stability and calmness if your life moves more tumultuously.

If you think of a noun, like “money,” or “love,” try to get one level deeper into the emotion behind it—money for what? Freedom from stress? Access to status? Love why? To feel seen? You get the idea.

Sum up this desire in a sentence, or just a few words. And that’s your ghost.

Next: Name it.

I’m serious. Pick a literal human name that fits this desire for you. Don’t overthink this. If my primary desire were money, for example, I might choose “Fern” because of the green connection. But that’s just me.

Finally—and this will be the weirdest part, but stick with me—invite your ghost over.

Imagine if this desire were a specter hanging out and haunting your space.

• Does your ghost sleep soundly like Marta?

• How do they move in your home?

• How might they interact with your things? Are they careful? Graceful? Clumsy?

• What are they wearing? Do they have a scent?

• What music do they put on?

• What do you offer them as a snack?

• Do they talk? What do they say? What’s their voice like?

You could invite your ghost to stay awhile, or show them the door.

xx

Kate

Since my last prompt, I’ve been to Charleston, South Carolina, where I ate hushpuppies and watched the sun sink over the Lowcountry. I briefly adopted a southern lilt, saying things like, “Oh my gosh.” My host and friend Anna grew up on James Island, a town in Charleston County, and laughed at my attempts. We prepared to make small talk with the gentleman in town by asking, “Now, what do y’all think of the tariffs?”

Let a Yankee girl have a little fun, okay?

Before I left New York, I saw the much-talked-about production of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Paul Mescal’s biceps and a bunch of British actors doing Mississippi and Louisiana accents to shockingly different levels of success.

I lucked into a pre-sale seat where I could see almost everything happening on stage. Seeing Streetcar and then taking my little trip south got me feeling creative about the roles we play and the lies we tell.

Streetcar is set in the late 1940s, although in this rendition, the actors are dressed in modern clothes, and the set is basically a blank stage. I’ve loved this play since I read it in high school, but the themes of masculinity and fraternity, as well as feminine vice and virtue, felt timely for today’s online discourse.

Stanley is a lonely and lost guy who likes booze and poker with the boys. He clings to domineering violence and learned ideas of what it means to be a man to fight his way through life. He would love manosphere-adjacent podcasts.

And then there’s Blanche, a trad wife wannabe who would 100% make TikToks about feminine energy if she were real in the world today. “It isn’t enough to be soft,” she says. “You’ve got to be soft and attractive.” And so, Blanche lies to make herself more attractive. “I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!”

So, back to my little southern lilt. I so easily slipped into a character who would say, wide-eyed, “Oh my gosh” over a bowl of she-crab soup. I sometimes lie a little for the fun of it, play with affectation when I meet a stranger, ride in a cab, or travel to a new place. As Blanche would say, though, “never inside, I didn't lie in my heart.”

Low-stakes lying, like playing pretend on vacation, can free us. Take it too far, though; commit too hard to an impossible role, and you end up caught in a trap.

The prompt

Tell a lie. One you’ve told before or one that you think of now. I don’t mean “I’m on my way” when you’re not out the door yet—something with stakes.

• Write the lie.

• Add one detail to it. Make it more specific.

• What do you gain from telling this lie?

• What do you lose?

• How does it feel to tell your lie and get away with it?

• To get caught?

• Is this lie inside your heart or outside?

• ….Now, tell the truth.

xx

Kate

With everyone emerging into longer afternoons comes an almost adolescent jitter. I must readjust to my surroundings. I’m so excited to be alive. I’m so fun. I’m also talking too much. My settings are discombobulated. I can’t figure out my schedule.

Y’all heard of Andy Shauf?

He’s a Canadian singer-songwriter, an indie type who plays most of the instruments himself. His 2016 album, The Party, is about one night from different people’s perspectives. He composes the album like a story and makes the whole thing a series of cinematic, self-contained chapters. One of the songs, “Early to the Party,” reads like a socially anxious and wonderfully observant poem (the video is nutty):

Early to the party

You're the first one there

Overdressed and underprepared

Standing in the kitchen

Stressing out the host

Pulling teeth 'til anyone arrives

Excuse yourself and smoke a cigarette outside

There's three new faces coming up the drive

Exhale nervous greetings as they shuffle past

Can't he ever show up on time?

Bird on the wall

Catch her calling all the shots

Catch her tying you in knots

Won't let you leave

What happened to manners

I guess he's had a few

He's talking shit

He never thinks of you

So bite your lip and watch him walk off with his friends

Leaving you all alone once again

Bird on the wall

Catch her calling all the shots

Catch her tying you in knots

Won't let you leave

Bird on the wall

Catch her calling all the shots

Catch her tying you in knots

Won't let you leave

Bird on the wall

Catch her calling all the shots

Catch her tying you in knots

Never lets you leave

The Prompt

Next social gathering you attend, or you can draw on recent memory, paint the scene. Consider writing in the lyric style of Shauf’s song here — short, fragmented lines. Even bullet points! Let your attention flicker.

Try your hand at a refrain or a rhyme that you return to, similar to “Catch her calling all the shots / Catch her tying you in knots.”

Answer some or all of these as part of your response:

• Who is in the room — who stands out in the crowd, if anyone? If no one stands out, why not?

• Is there music playing?

• How are you dressed?

• What is there to eat and drink?

• Take note of posture. How are people standing or sitting? Where are their hands? What are you doing with your hands?

• Find the person commanding the room. Is this the host? Someone else?

• Do you meet anyone new?

• Do you notice any moments of tension, big or small, between attendees? What do you see and/or hear?

• Does anyone make you laugh? Be honest — was it a fake laugh?

• How do you feel on the way home?

• Now, what would it have been like if a radically different song played, or if everyone had arrived in costume? Flip a detail on its head.

Enjoy, party people !!

xx

Kate

I looked up the etymology of the word homage. If you’re interested (and even if you aren’t), it originally had something to do with the ceremony in which a vassal declared himself to be his lord's “man” (Latin: homō). So the original vibe was very, “I’ll fight to the death for you, my lord!” Now, it more straightforwardly connotes respect and honor (not so much the fealty part).

You always hear about people paying homage to a legacy or a legend, per my examples above, but we can also pay homage to the quotidian—many poets do this well. I think we should all declare our love and loyalty to the mundane things that make our lives richer. So!

Homage Poems

Take a read through these three short(ish) poems. They’re by different poets with varying styles, but all pay homage to the familiar—to women with no shirts on, to the power of one’s own hips, to a favorite diner and its pickle relish.

“Homage” by Franz Wright

Where is the speaker of this poem going? Is he leaving Earth? Leaving town? Who knows? Wright gives us more questions than answers here. But he’s evocative in his sparseness, and these disconnected images point to one sense of longing and nostalgia.

“homage to by hips” by Lucille Clifton

Clifton’s poem, in stark contrast to Wright’s, focuses on a single and tangible image. The repetition in words and rhythm has an incantatory effect, which builds to Clifton’s penultimate line of casting a spell.

“Homage to “H & the Speedway Diner by Bernadette Mayer”

Mayer’s poem takes us to a diner, starting like an anthropological tour of a cave. You need not have ever been to this diner, or maybe even one like it, to get a sense of its particulars. “It’s a lot like…” and “It’s five miles from…” and “You can get X for Y” put it on the map for us to visit.

The Prompt

It’s time to write your homage, to declare your respect/ appreciation/honor for someone/something/somewhere. Some things to consider:

1. Make this for someone you know. Make it for somewhere you go frequently. Make it for something you are familiar with. Ideally, it’s something or someone you haven’t elevated in this way before. If this inspires you—go forth!

   But…

2. If you’re looking for more direction, here it is: Choose from the Franz Wright, Lucille Clifton, or Bernadette Mayer poem above—whichever most spoke to you.

   1. If you chose “Homage” by Franz Wright: Pick three specific and disconnected images as your points of focus. If you have trouble conjuring them, take yourself on a little walk and pick the first three things that catch your eye as things of beauty. Write an homage to them.

   2. If you chose “homage to my hips” by Lucille Clifton: Use repetition the way Clifton does to hero the subject of your homage. She writes the word “hips” nine times (not including the title). Try to name your subject at least five times.

   3. If you chose “Homage to H & the Speedway Diner” by Bernadette Mayer: Write your homage entirely without your own feelings on the subject. Instead, capture the person, place, or thing exactly as it is in all its glory as Mayer does with the diner. Borrow some of her phrasing if it helps. “It’s a lot like…”

I love to read/see/hear your responses. Please send them!

xx

Kate

Anyway, one of my favorite Substacks about things happening online is After School by Casey Lewis. And now I’m once again thinking about what she wrote in the wake of A Complete Unknown and this Guardian article a while back:

A Complete Unknown has sparked interest in Joan Baez and her doomed romance with Bob Dylan (who, I must add, just yesterday joined TikTok). Young women are finding solace in her songs like "It Ain't Me Babe," which speak to the pain of being in a toxic relationship. As Lynda Saldana, 19, said, "She couldn't let go, even though she knew it wasn't good for her. That is so real. It's currently happening to girls everywhere, and it's happening in the 60s?”

I loooove the youthful perception of being the first and only person to experience a situation or a feeling, however canonical. It’s a feral kind of self-obsession that comes from having lived less life rather than more.

I do remember thinking my first-ever period cramps were going to end me. And my first break up. And the first time I sent a text meant for a friend to someone I’d been seeing. The humiliation felt singular. unknowable. Unsurvivable, even. Until I did it again like…two years ago.

As we get older, we learn that we aren’t the first person ever, or even the only person at this moment, to experience something. Every personal feeling is reflected back to us in our algorithm, our friends, or in art—personal in how it stings us, but recycled and interconnected in a larger sense.

For today, I want you to have the naiveté of a 19-year-old who is discovering Joan Baez and Bob Dylan for the first time. It’s fine if you aren’t familiar with their love affair either. The point is: Imagine being shocked to learn that love has been complicated since at least the 1960s.

The Prompt

Pick a strong feeling you had recently.

It might be heartbreak if that’s where you are (and I’m sorry), or it could be white-hot annoyance with your boss. It could be pride in a recent accomplishment or a budding infatuation. Big or small, it doesn’t matter. But strong.

Got it?

Now, describe it like you’re the first person to feel it.

Use strange words. Try a simile, even if you’re not sure it works. Use a cliche, but change it a little. This is all new territory.

If you felt anger, don’t just say your blood is “boiling.” Your blood is…WHAT!? Slapping against the walls of your veins? Revving in your heart like a car stuck in the mud? Try different images, even if they feel silly.

If you’re a more visual person, try colors, shapes, or textures here. Maybe sounds or sensations. Mix and match ‘em. Remember: No one has ever felt this like you have!

Imagine this as your diary with a lock on it (mine had a little gray cat on the cover, which is weird because I didn’t like cats) or your Tumblr— give in to your most earnestly emo teen self.

Feels kinda good, doesn’t it?

xx

Kate

This is a creative prompt newsletter, but not one necessarily for writers. That’s my medium, so it’ll lean that way, but I don’t think the final output is the point. You might make clothes or cakes. This might be the year you finally do The Artist’s Way (I’ve never managed it, but Godspeed). Maybe you know you’ve got a poem, pilot, or song in you. Maybe you just want to wrestle back some of your attention span in 2025 (I’m too far gone). You don’t need to have an end goal at all—focusing on something small and new is powerful on its own.

So, here’s how this’ll go:

Twice a month (?) I’ll write a thought prompt based on something I’ve read, heard, or talked about. Vibes will vary, but the prompt will explore what grabbed me in the first place and give you something to get your little wheels turning.

Follow it exactly or go rogue. Write your response by hand, notes app it, sketch it in pictures, or read it as a conversation starter on a date (if you do that, please ask your date to subscribe).

What you do with this is none of my business unless you want it to be. But I do hope you want it to be. Please send feedback, adoration, rants, and drafts by replying to me here and/or finding me on Instagram @kaycavs.

So, I’ll dedicate the time and attention to creating this, and when it hits your inbox, I hope you’ll dedicate some time to working with its material. We’ll see what happens from there. Easy? Easy.

Here’s a poet and poem and prompt to start !!!

I think of James Tate as my poet dad(dy). His work feels foundational to me, part of some lineage I feel connected to. He’s often put into the“absurdist” or “surrealist” category for creating wacky, incongruous worlds. Sometimes, I’m totally enchanted by a weird image or contrast in his work—he writes of aliens, cowboys, Jesus on a donkey, and a violent book club. Sometimes, though, I feel like I’ve walked into the wrong room, like everyone except me is in on the theme. Maybe that’s why I especially love this poem about portraiture. It feels pleasantly grounded and intimate for Tate.

That’s where we’ll begin.

The Shifting Dapples of Sunlight

Julie was painting my portrait. I

had been sitting for her for two weeks.

We barely talked, and of course I tried

not to move. My neck ached, my back was

killing me. At the end of the day we

drank scotch and laughed and sometimes

rolled around on the floor. That was

about the only exercise I got. My

impatience was killing me. All during

the sitting my own thoughts swarmed my

brain with a turbulence that was down-

right nauseating, surfing through the

rough waters of time without a map.

When the painting was finally finished

I shuddered to imagine what grotesque

creature she might have captured--

old pipes obstructed by sludge, the

dreams of Russian peasant women and

utter sloth, a swimmer's pale yellow

teeth. But, alas, there was none of

that. There was just me, looking happy

with my hair thinning and my big blue

eyes saying whoopee I'm alive.

Prompt

I want you to stare at yourself in the mirror and write your own self-portrait. I would be most interested in what you observe in the space between what you expect to see and what you actually encounter.

Do your best to answer this question: What are your eyes saying?

xx

Kate

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