“Although all poets aspire to be birds, no bird aspires to be a poet.”

— Mary Ruefle, "My Search Among the Birds"

If you are juggling kids, vacations, and countless sundry pop-up programs, summer feels like the season when writing does not happen. I know, I know, that's why I should apply for a residency.... but I didn't. I'm learning that lesson now. In the interim, 20 ways to fool around with words and ideas in the hopes of generating something. All you need is a lucky pen, a notebook, and a few minutes behind a locked door.

“Mom, why do you always lock the door to the bathroom and take forever to pee?”

— Alina's children during summer vacation

The mill pond of chill doubt. Mess around with what Bernadette Mayer calls the "concretistic distortion of a text, a multiplicity of o's or ea's, or a pleasing visual arrangement," per the mill pond of chill doubt. Aim for at least ten in your notebook. Run them through your head throughout the day to see if they intersect with ordinary objects or activities.
The imminent ordinary. Read Mary Ruefle's essay, "My Search Among the Birds," and use it as a scaffold for your own "search." Keep a daily update for a month, just one or two lines, on something you are observing, for example, a garden bed or clouds or a neighbor's pet or a car, anything that interests you in an ongoing fashion. Mix observations with introspection. Hat tip to Poets & Writers for this one.
Objective identity. Take ten minutes to describe the room from the perspective of an object on your desk. What does that object need from the room? How does that object belong (or not belong) in the room? Explore various constructions of identity by using both the object's physicality and it's significance.
The sinkhole sentence. Joan Didion described James' long sentences as "sentences with sinkholes" that were capable of drowning the reader. Write a page-long sentence with heavy sensory detail. Pick a few places in the sentence to set up whirlpools that tug at the reader and build pressure until the sentence concludes with a drowning effect. Do not write anything related to water.
Character flaws. In her hybrid collection, Citizen, Claudia Rankine wrote: “Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition.” Study yourself as a character. How are you creating a likable character in your daily social interactions? What do you do that has become a habit of "getting along"? The first time you did it, were you aware? Ashamed? How did you feel? How do you rationalize those feelings? Jot down notes. Keep a running list that you update throughout the day.
Framing with hypotheticals. Read Dustin M. Hoffman's gorgeous flash, "When We" (Necessary Fiction), and notice how he uses hypotheticals to create an ongoing form for drawing comparisons between the narrator and lover. Use this form to compare shared experiences as a couple and how they molded you or revealed you differently. Play with objects that employ significance in that particular relationship.
Use Plato’s idea of anamnesis, the idea that we possess knowledge from our past incarnations, forget that knowledge when we’re born, and then go through life learning what we've forgotten, to frame a short story that is divided into sections.
Twitter frame. Explore using twitter as a medium for fiction, per Jared Pecacheck's example.
Write a poem about breath. About your breath. Stop and listen. Walk around a room and note how it changes. When it slows. When it speeds. How it sounds. Catch its natural cadence. Find words and beats to reflect it. Breath it into a one-stanza poem.
The yield poem. Write a poem or a sketch in response to this statement by Sarah Manguso: “Like a vase, a heart breaks once. After that, it just yields to its flaws.”
Tiny, quiet novel. Borrowing again from Bernadette Mayer's amazing list, "write a soothing novel in twelve short paragraphs." Consider applying Leesa Cross-Smith's thoughts on "quiet stories" to this exercise.
Know differently. The Hebrew word for "to know" translates as the same word for "to desire" or "to covet"--to know that you want, to choose to want despite the murmurs of conscience, to keep wanting anyway. Sketch a poem that explores the verb to know in this way.
Sandra Simond’s exercise in negative metaphor. Find a place you don’t usually go—a place without connotation, one where you can court estrangement—and bring an object of sentimental value. Write a poem in negative metaphor about the object. For example, if it’s a wedding ring, write “it’s not like the weather; it’s not like Hawaii; it’s not like a teddy bear; it’s not like a mother’s hug..” Write about 50 “it’s not like” metaphors about your object. This will free up your mind from getting bogged down by what you think your object represents or should represent. After writing 50, look for the narrative forming about the object and what it reveals about your life and experience. Now cut, hone in, and rewrite.
Self-objectifications. Write the self as an extended metaphor of an object. For example, read Jericho Brown’s fucking incredible poem “Night Shift”, first published in New Yorker. Note how he compares himself to a painting and uses that to probe love, finishedness, persona, etc. Play with similar object-based metaphors in a confessional mode.
Social media first lines. A good opening line triggers a series of responses and beckons, Make a list of ten opening lines inspired by browsing Facebook or social media. See which one summons you closer, which one has the most movement forward. Now try to write a ten line poem or a prose poem from there.
Write an enchiridion poem. An Enchiridion is a handbook or survival manual. Write a 10 line poem that lists titles of interesting (and needful) enchiridions.
Build from parts. In an interview with New Yorker, Donald Glover said: “The thing I imagine myself being in the future doesn’t exist yet… Sometimes I dream of it, but how do you explain a dream where you never see your father, but you know that’s him over your shoulder?” Write a poem in which each stanza begins with a section of this quote. Or a flash fiction in which each paragraph begins with a section of this quote.
Parlour pieces. Chopin's Preludes were written to be played in parlours, those small, bounded rooms built for private talk, small gatherings or other miniaturized forms of entertainment – like tableaux vivants, charades and love. Write a series of parlor poems, whether prose or lineated. Pay special attention to smallness and detail. Image that each should only occupy enough space to be written on a cocktail napkin. Inhabit the tone.
Sonnet collage. This is borrowed from Poets & Writers. Ted Berrigan, a prominent figure in the second generation of the New York School of Poets, is best known for his book The Sonnets (Lorenz and Ellen Gude, 1964). Berrigan’s sonnets were assembled using collage techniques. For instance, many of the lines are found text from outside sources, and many of the individual lines are recycled throughout the book; two of the sonnets even use the exact same fourteen lines, presented in different orders. This week, try writing your own Berrigan-style sonnet (free verse or rhyming, as you please). Create a bank of individual lines—these could be original lines that you write, found text, or some combination—and then assemble these lines into a sonnet. Allow the poem to be nonlinear, if that is what the process calls for, and travel down unexpected trains of thought.
Court astonishment. Write a one-stanza poem that courts astonishment, using vivid images based on experiences with life in your field guide. Keep it between 7 and 10 lines. Use imperative. Read a few poems by Claribel Alegría for inspiration.

“Is it that we can never name that which we love?”

— Mary Ruefle, "My Search Among the Birds"