Doing the Work 02/10/25
Calls for submissions, reading recommendations, writing prompts 02/10/25
Hello friends!
Welcome to the ninth installment of our Doing The Work series. Apologies for the long hiatus, but we’re so back. For those of you unfamiliar, here, we share opportunities for submitting your work, recommend some great reads, and offer creative exercises for you to try.
In this week's edition:
Calls for Submissions: Opportunities for poets, prose writers, and artists.
Reading Recommendations: A selection of writing I've been enjoying recently.
Creative Prompts: Writing exercises to inspire your creativity.
If you find this post helpful, please share it with your friends and family. Enjoy!
Calls for Submission
It’s the start of the month which means many new journals are opened for submissions. Out of the dozens now open though, I’d like to focus on just one: sage cigarettes. They are the journal that published my very first poem ever. The theme for this issue is “Cycles”. Check out their call for submissions here!
P.S. You won’t need a Submittable account, but for past and future posts we recommend making one. It is free to make, and I’d highly suggest doing it if you want to start trying to publish work, since many journals use them.
Reading Recommendations
Recently I’ve been reading a ton of Sharon Olds via a suggestion from a good friend of mine. He gave me her collection Blood, Tin, Straw (which I highly recommend) but when that ran out I began reading all of her work on the Poetry Foundation.
You can read all about her here and they have a plethora of her poems that are just completely free and phenomenal. Some of my favorites that you can read on the Poetry Foundation are Addiction Sonnet, or Mathematical Love Poem, with a Proof.
Writing Prompts
I just got back from a trip abroad to Scotland. While I was there I went to a few museums and was incredibly inspired by all of the art I saw. We write a lot of poems based on art, also known as ekphrasis. Try getting out of the house to see some art this week!
If you do manage to find some inspiration out there, please let us know in what form it comes! We love writing prompts, and love seeing what comes from them.
We love writing prompts so much we wrote an entire book of them. Check out the book in its entirety!
Thank You & Good Luck
If you found this useful, check out last Monday’s post.
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Thanks for reading,
Sam & Corey.