Weekly Challenges

Find an old stuffed animal from early childhood – or still in use! – and depict it in your chosen medium, paying special attention to the texture and quality of its fur.

Write a short story exclusively through dialogue, with the plot being a civil disagreement between characters. The topic of the argument is up to you. How do they come to a resolution in their emotionally charged back-and-forth – or don’t they?

Use all five words in a poem or short story: Lemonade. Tiptoe. Forgiven. Zipper. Abashed.

Plan out your ideal garden, or your ideal, terraformed yard. Include any fun or extravagant details that occur to you, like birdbaths, garden sheds, fruit trees, and raised beds, and feel free to label your flowers and veggies if you have them!

In poetry or prose, write about losing something small and precious to you, and the ensuing ordeal that becomes your desperate search for it – maybe to find it in the end, or maybe not to.

Through poetry, prose, or personal essay, write about the experience of being a teen in 2025. What challenges do you face day-to-day, and expect to face in the future? What do you wish to communicate with the world at large, if only it’d listen?

Draw, paint, or photograph a crowd – such as a group of shoppers at an outdoor mall or attendees of a parade – milling about or surging forward.

Set a poem or short story at the end of a party, after all but one or two guests have left. Confetti and plastic cups are strewn about the living room; there’s so much tidying up to do – but the night isn’t over quite yet…

Imagine you’re driving along a scenic stretch of road: a country lane lined with autumn leaves, a windy mountain pass, a cliffside highway with views of the ocean. Describe everything you see.

Through collage, photography, painting, or any other medium, lay out a perfect picnic spread on a perfect picnic blanket. If you want, incorporate one or more characters to nosh on it all.

Take inspiration from Kurt Vonnegut’s famous “Slaughterhouse-Five” line for a short story or poem: “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”

You’ve made painstaking efforts to pause your everyday responsibilities and relationships to embark on a solo camping trip into the wilderness for one long month. What do you seek? What do you hope to discover inside yourself?