Write into the Week: February 8, 2026

“Writing is its own reward.”
–Henry Miller

Dear Writer,

I hope you’re having a good start to your week. In this newsletter:

• A writing prompt to inspire your creativity.
• Reading and listening recommendations in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
• Publishing, residency, and retreat opportunities available now.
• Join our free Monday and Friday write-ins, and meet our community of writers.

Happy writing this week!

—Elle, Curriculum Specialist & Community Manager

Writer to Writer: Writer Olympics

My favorite two weeks every two years has arrived: the Olympics have started! You might be asking, Elle, what does that have to do with writing? Well, every time the Olympics roll around, I’m reminded how misleading the highlight reel can be. We see the perfect landings in big air skiing, the impossible speed in short track, the quiet focus just before the start of the downhill. What we don’t see are the years of training—the failed routines, the painful injuries, or the days and weeks when nothing seems to go right, but the athlete keeps grinding anyway. Writing looks the same from the outside. We notice the finished book on the shelf in the store, the polished essays in magazines, or the prize-winning poem, but we rarely witness the long, private stretch of the creative practice and struggles that made it possible.

So, if your creative life feels unglamorous right now, try to see it as training, not failure. You are learning, improving. You are building stamina and trust in your own process. All of that is part of the work. You can win a gold medal everyday, nor would you want to, but you can keep showing up. If you do, the wins will come. 

Writing Prompt: Before the Starting Gun

Write a scene, poem, or short piece that takes place just before a moment everyone else would consider the important one—the performance, the race, the conversation, the confession, the departure, etc. Stay with the quiet training space instead. Write about the warm-up, the waiting, the private ritual, how the body or mind prepare itself to try. Let the real tension live in the part that most people don’t see, and end the piece before the “main event” ever arrives.

A Closer Look: Great First Lines

“Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” –Franz Kafka, The Trial

I adore a first line that wastes no time pulling the reader into uncertainty. Many great first lines drop us into the middle of a situation with little context, no explanation, and without stable ground to stand on. Pay attention to how the sentence begins with an assumption, not a fact: “Someone must have…” The story immediately opens with suspicion, and a lack of trust. Even before we meet Josef K., we’re already inside a world where both the truth and authority are being questioned.

You should also notice how carefully the sentence balances innocence and accusation. “Without having done anything truly wrong” sounds like an affirmation of innocence at first, but the word “truly” quietly complicates things. If you pause to consider, doubts start to creep in. Wrong by whose rules? Wrong according to whom? In a single line, Kafka gives us a character who believes himself innocent paired against a system that does not agree. 

As a first line, this is a stunning example of creating in tension through withholding. It’s a reminder that you don’t have to start by explanation or story setup in order to hook readers. Sometimes starting in the middle with a bit of chaos is exactly what a story needs!

Listening Recommendations:

• From the How to Write for a Living podcast: “320: Write that damn book! (with Neera Mahajan)”. Author Neera Mahajan joint to talk about writing books fast, building authority, and turning a single book into a scalable business. 
• From the Always Take Notes podcast: “Nicole Vanderbilt on how Bookshop.org is taking on Amazon through recommendations, not algorithms”. In this episode, Rachel and Simon talk with Nicole Vanderbilt, Managing Director of Bookshop.org UK, about how the platform supports independent bookstores, its growth since launch, and what it really means to be an ethical alternative to Amazon.

Publishing Opportunities:

• Prairie Schooner – Submission Deadline: February 15, 2026. Special call for submissions for their 100-year anniversary issue. They are seeking poems, short stories, and essays on the them of Awakening. Please review the theme and submission guidelines on their website. 
• The Brooklyn Review – Submission Deadline: February 28, 2026. Currently accepting submissions of fiction only. What they’re looking for: Urgent, atmospheric narratives; deeply inhabited characters; formal invention; precision of language; self-aware humor; and generally polished, thoughtful stories. Accepted stories typically range between 3,000 and 7,000 words.
• Narrative Magazine Winter 2026 Story Contest – Submission Deadline: March 1, 2026. Open to all fiction and nonfiction writers. They’re looking for short shorts, short stories, essays, memoirs, photo essays, graphic stories, all forms of literary nonfiction, and excerpts from longer works of both fiction and nonfiction. Entries must be previously unpublished, no longer than 15,000 words, and must not have been previously chosen as a winner, finalist, or honorable mention in another contest.

Residency, Retreat, & Fellowship Opportunities:

• The Rabbit Island Residency – Application Deadline: February 22, 2026. This is a unique opportunity for writers and artists whose work intersects with nature and/or conservation. This three week residency is fully funded, and offers a stipend of $4,000. From the website: “Founded in 2010, the Rabbit Island Residency is a platform to investigate, expand, and challenge creative practices in an exposed environment. By living and working on Rabbit Island, residents engage directly with the landscape and respond to notions of conservation, ecology, sustainability, and art.”
• The de Groot Visiting Fellowship at the American Library in Paris – Applications Open: February 1 – March 1, 2026 – The Fellowship offers writers the opportunity to pursue their work in Paris for one month. Fellows receive a stipend and a “room of one’s own” at the Library. Open to all writers, from novelists to poets to historians. 

Monday: Free Group Writing Session

Come write with us! Community write-ins are a great way to meet other writers, and carve out space in your calendar for your writing.

Monday: Write Into the Week with Elle

Join me (Elle) for an hour of mindset support, goal setting, community, and dedicated time to write! We’ll meet on Monday at 11 AM Eastern time, at this Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83999379617

To add yourself, click here, and we’ll send you a Zoom link the morning of the call. You can also always add yourself to or remove yourself from the “Friday Write-Ins” list at the bottom of this newsletter.

Note: There will be no Friday Write-In this week, as Frederick has travel. We will resume the following Friday, February 2.

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