I’ve long been an advocate of writing prompts & exercises—they work as a way of transfiguring the blank page from a daunting emptiness to note space to work out this particular word problem. How do the required elements fit together in an organic & interesting way? Each writer will find their own idiosyncratic way to solve the problem that is the prompt.
Going back to when I was in undergrad at Cal State Long Beach I was posting prompts on my defunct writing blog Incendiary Lit, here’s one post courtesy of the Wayback Machine.
& being a connoisseur of literary magazines, I’ve also grown a fondness for ‘irregularly published’ journals, those that eschew traditional issues & post once a week, a few times a week, or even almost every day. I’m hoping to publish 1-3 times a week—depending largely on the volume of submissions.
The primary source of prompts for Sparked is my blog Notebooking Daily. There are daily writing posts for this whole past year as well as multiple years of frequently posted prompts in all sorts of styles & themes. Browse away & write write write! In addition to Notebooking Daily we will be rotating through various other prompt sources, the schedule is located here.
The editor of Sparked is Zebulon Huset, a writer, editor & teacher based in San Diego. He won the 2020 Gulf Stream Summer Poetry Contest, has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize, as well as Best of the Net. His writing has appeared in The Southern Review, Atlanta Review, The North American Review, Meridian, Portland Review, Rosebud, Gone Lawn, Main Street Rag, Cortland Review & Texas Review among others. He received his MFA from the University of Washington where he was assistant editor at The Seattle Review & he’s also served on the editorial staff of RipRap, Acorn Review & he currently edits Coastal Shelf.