Passing Notes: Four Collaborative Writing Exercises for Pen Pals

In preparation for Palette’s Pen Pal Poetry Challenge, opening on September 25, 2025, editor-in-chief Elyssia Nguyen and associate editor Sara Dudo compiled four writing activities to kickstart your writing, and additionally, collaborated in writing four poems for each activity as an example and guide!

The Pen Pal Poetry Challenge, open for only ten days from September 25 through October 5, is an opportunity for writers to join in a spirit of collaboration, to converse and create together. The challenge aims to be a reminder and opportunity to embody a sense of play in our writing! The Palette editors have tried out all four of the writing exercises below and encourage you to do the same!

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Exquisite Corpse

Think telephone, but with writing. Exquisite Corpse is a collaborative poetry game in which a group of people take turns writing just one word on a sheet of paper before folding it up and passing it to the next person. 

Directions (from the Academy of American Poets):

1. To start, decide on a sentence structure to use for each line. For example, we decided on an adjective, noun, verb, adjective, noun structure. 
2. After the poem is written, you may add articles, punctuation, and change verb tenses as needed.
3. To truly create a Frankenstein-esque poem, all participants should be unaware of what the others have written before them. You should approach the exercise without a plan or vision of how the poem should be written.

Our example poem:

Lucid progeny spies silken threads
On cosmic beds hosting dewy sundew.
The imprinted chorus hums in staggering lace,
A gossamer orchid frames its frivolous multitudes.

Epistolary Poem

Epistolary poems—originating from the Latin “epistula” for “letter”—are, in simple terms, poems that read as letters. The poems can take any form, directly address the subject person or take a more abstract tone, and they can carry different tones—from intimate to colloquial; inquisitive to declarative. (Read more about epistolary poems and their history on the Academy of American Poets website.)

Some examples of epistolary poems:

• “I Could Be a Whale Shark” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
• “Throwing Children” by Ross Gay

Directions:

1. Together with your writing partner(s), choose one person, place, or thing to write a letter to (or write a poem to each other) and agree on a set number of lines and stanzas.
2. Then, brainstorm ways to weave the poems together into one cohesive poem.

For example, we chose to write our epistolary poems to a grandparent, writing 2 stanzas of 4 lines each, for a total of 8 lines. Once the poems were completed, we then decided to weave every other line together to create a collaborative epistolary poem that traverses back and forth between the writers’ experiences (i.e. writer #1’s first line, writer #2’s first line, writer #1’s second line, writer #2’s second line, etc.). See our example below:

Sara’s poem:

Elyssia’s poem:

The woven result:

Exhausting a Place, after Georges Perec

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, (French: Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien) is a short collection by Georges Perec, in which Perec recorded his observations as he sat in Saint-Sulpice Square in Paris. Instead of describing impressive or notable things such as the architecture or food, Perec’s aim was to describe all the things that usually pass unnoticed, obsessively writing brief details of buses, people who pass, colors, etc., not worrying about repetition. He wrote down as much as he could possibly notice in an attempt to truly “exhaust” the place. 

Directions:

1. Together with your writing partner(s), go to the same place, whether a park, building, arena, etc., and attempt individually to “exhaust the place,” writing down everything you see, hear, smell, etc. If you are not in the same area and meeting up is not possible, consider choosing a similar place that exists across state lines, such as the nearest park or coffee shop. 
2. Set a timer for how long you want to write (suggested: 30 minutes). 
3. Then, compare your notes, looking for similar subjects as well as different ones, and how you both described these things. 
4. Finally, work together in combining these observations into one poem. 

For example, we decided to visit different parks in our towns, and write as much description on them as possible. We then took those observations and created two haikus each. Upon returning together, we merged the haikus together by alternating stanzas and page alignment. See our example below:

Blue-stemmed goldenrod
Last vestige of swamp mallow
Bees hurriedly swarm

Choir of crickets
Circle the pond’s mirrored edge
Reflect oolong sky

Chair on the lakeside
Weeping trees, rotten fence teeth
Aching cordgrasses

Distant city lights
Pulse to a cattail’s rhythm
Black oaks bend to hear

Ekphrastic of Shared Photographs

Ekphrastic poems are poems written after a specific image the writer uses as inspiration. Some writers attempt to interpret the image, while others create their own narrative from the image. 

Directions:

1. For this exercise, find a series of 1-3 photographs, and share them with each other. These can be personal photographs or ones found online. 
2. Share them with your fellow writer(s) and spend some time creating individual poems from the photograph series. 

Alternative: If the writers do not want to share personal photographs, they could also find a series from a photographer, book, or another platform to use. The important thing is that the writers should not be familiar with the photographs in order to write based purely on what they see and deduce. 

For example, we chose three photographs from Los Angeles-based photographer Nick Rufo’s Instagram account, @killthecity, and we wrote 2 lines for each photo, for a total of 6 lines and 3 stanzas. When once completed, we decided to weave our writings together by starting with Sara’s lines in the original order of the photograph series, followed by Elyssia’s lines in reversed order (i.e. writer #1’s 1st, 2nd, 3rd stanzas; writer #2’s 3rd, 2nd, 1st stanzas). See our example below:

Photographs by @killthecity Nick Rufo from Instagram (check out his website):

• Image #1: first image in this carousel from December 28, 2023
• Image #2: seventh image in this carousel from November 7, 2024 
• Image #3: fifth and last image in this carousel from October 10, 2023

Sara’s lines:

Elyssia’s lines:

The woven result:

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We hope you enjoy these writing activities and give them a try! Keep in mind that the Pen Pal Poetry Challenge is only open for ten days, from September 25 through October 5, so don’t wait to submit! We’re excited to see what you collaboratively explore, challenge, and create together!