Like Prompt #11, this exercise requires you to consider an unexpected antagonist: your own body. There are countless memoirs about illness, so many that “sick lit” has become an established term, perhaps because there are countless ways your body can turn against you. Humans face chronic illness, invisible illness, and mental illness. Even without a diagnosis, we often turn to our bodies with self-loathing, willing it to become something else, to the point where the body becomes a burden. But the piece you write doesn’t have to be a downer. You might find meaning in the infinitesimal–the ever-returning zit, the too-long toe, the pair of eyebrows that perpetually need tweezing.

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Details on EVENT’s 2016 annual Non-Fiction Contest.