Welcome to The Daily Aftershock Writing Prompt—a daily invitation to write from the edges of aftermath, memory, rupture, and repair.

Each day, you'll receive a short, charged prompt designed to crack something open. There are no rules, only resonance. Use these however you need: to begin a poem, to open your diary, to find your voice again.

The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Write like departure. Like it’s already too late, or too early. Write with the weight of whatever you’re choosing not to carry. Write as though the page is the last place you’ll say it.

Today I want you to write a poem that leaves something behind. I want you to end it unfinished, lingering, asking the reader for more.

Invent a word that holds what English doesn’t. You can compound two words for this, folding one truth into another. For example, love that is lost: love-spent.

The flicker between hope and guilt. The hum of something unsaid in your ribcage.

(e.g. “ghostwarm”, “unwish”, “saltjaw”, “afterskin”, “griefling”, “hushweather”)

Let your voice shift as you write, like someone standing in a doorway they can’t quite step through.

Welcome to The Daily Aftershock Writing Prompt—a daily invitation to write from the edges of aftermath, memory, rupture, and repair.

Each day, you'll receive a short, charged prompt designed to crack something open. There are no rules—only resonance. Use these however you need: to begin a poem, to open your diary, to find your voice again.

The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Today’s prompt asks you to describe grief as a weather system.

Do this exercise without thinking, just free-write, free-associate phrases and words to do with grief and weather.

Does it spit? Does it pour? Is it a hurricane? Is it flood?

Perhaps from that prompt you'll come up with bare bones for a poem or perhaps little phrases that you can use in your future writing.

Welcome, writers!

This space is for the tremors. For what comes after. For those of us who write from the margins, the wreckage and the edge of reinvention.

Every day, you’ll receive a writing prompt from The Aftershock Review—a spark drawn from survival, grief, rage, resilience, and everything we build after breaking. You don’t have to be a poet. You don’t have to be healed. You just have to begin.

Some prompts are gentle. Some are furious. All are designed to shake something loose.

Save them. Skip them. Use them out of order. There are no rules, just resonance.

If you want to share your work, tag us in a note or post or reply to the email. We may feature select responses (with your permission) in future roundups.

We’re so glad you’re here.

Max Wallis

— The Aftershock Review

The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.