MONDAYS ARE FREE, a reservoir of writing exercises by Ross Gay & Patrick Rosal
curated by Essence London & janan alexandra
What We’re Doing
At MONDAYS ARE FREE, we offer 5 writing exercises per week, every week, for an entire year (our effort began on February 24, 2025). These exercises will come directly to your inbox if you subscribe. All subscribers will receive Monday’s exercise for free! And if you pay $5 a month, you will receive the entire week’s worth of writing exercises (Monday through Friday), written by Ross Gay or Patrick Rosal or both.
These exercises are sometimes “poetry” exercises and sometimes “prose” exercises, but in fact, the older we get, the less invested we are in the particularities or rigidities of genre. In other words, all the exercises will hopefully be useful for whatever you might be working on. After all, beautiful writing is beautiful writing. And practice at beautiful writing is practice at beautiful writing.
This is a resource, a reservoir of exercises, a river of possibles. Use the exercises as you like, revise them, make them better, make them different, make them what you need or want them to be. Some writers like to follow an exercise to the letter, and some like to take the idea and make it their own. (Kinda like recipes.) And, please, share them—with your friends, your students, your co-workers, your writing group, your book club, your meditation squad, your pickleball team, whoever.
Why We’re Doing This
It has come to our attention that there are many writers out there—folks who’ve been at it for a while and beginning writers, people who write for themselves and folks who publish books, people who are at the beginning of projects and people who are stuck in the middle of them— for whom a regular writing exercise might be of use. We’ve also realized, having taught at many levels (middle school, high school, college and graduate school, community workshops, etc.) for what turns out to be a long-ass time (more than twenty-five years, weird), that such exercises could also be useful to teachers in all these settings, across disciplines and subjects. And being writers and writing teachers ourselves for that long-ass time we have a deep and ample bag of exercises that we hope will be useful for you.
Commenting & Community
One of the pleasures of Substack is that it provides people with online community. People get together in various ways around shared interests, and important, beautiful things can happen. We’re grateful for that. But, and maybe at the expense of some subscribers, this particular series is not about making an online community; it’s not about emails.
If you have a question about a writing exercise, that’s great, and maybe you can share such questions with your various communities, whoever they may be. How should I do this? What do they mean by “digression”? It’s good, in fact, if you are sometimes confused or uncertain. We encourage you to dwell in that uncertainty and allow it into your writing practice.
You will notice that janan & Essence have added little tidbits & supplemental material to some of the exercises. It’s important to us to be good literary citizens and to support other writers. If we’ve included part of a poem or essay or piece of writing by another author, we would love it if you would look them up! Take a deep dive into their work.
We won’t be doing emails and comments and other online commenting-things for at least a few reasons. The first is that there seems to be an abundance of online community-ing already. The second is that we suspect that the very muscles the internet trains (impatience, distraction, competition, suspicion, approval thirst, bleary-eyedness) demand the atrophying of those needed for good writing (patience, curiosity, love, soul, enthusiasm), or good thinking for that matter. The third is that we don’t want to look at our computers any more than we must. But what we hope is that these exercises provide you with community all the same. Perhaps community with other writers in your life with whom you do the exercises. Perhaps community with and among the students to whom you offer these exercises. Perhaps community with the tree you sometimes write under, and community with the light coming through the leaves that shudder in the breeze. Or community with the park bench on which you sit to compose, and the people walking by, and the pigeons wobbling atop the awning across the way. Or community with the café where you work, or the library, or the bookshop or pizza place. Or community with the writers we will be mentioning, and sometimes (always!) in various ways be imitating, learning from, beholden to. Or community with whomever you share your work, at the kitchen table, or over the phone, or sometimes along with a handwritten note signed Love, in an envelope with a stamp. Sometimes, maybe, even that. Or community, most sacred of all, with ourselves. Community with ourselves we hope this might be a gentle exercise in too.
Why subscribe?
Writing exercises will come directly to your inbox if you subscribe, and all subscribers will receive Monday’s exercise for free! And if you pay $5 a month, you will receive the entire week’s worth of writing exercises (Monday through Friday), written by Ross Gay or Patrick Rosal or both.
