The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)

Editorial Note by Max Wallis This week I’m proud to share a poem by my co-editor/contributing-editor, Dr Anna Percy . Anna has developed what she calls “Mad Informed Punctuation” : a system where [] marks a short breath and [ ] a longer one, mapping lived experience of bipolar disorder and survival directly onto the page. In Xanthous Motifs [24th August 2023] , form and content are inseparable. Th...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis With Twenties , Jenny Pagdin moves from clinical waiting rooms and homesick interiors to the raw chaos of young adulthood. The poem is a catalogue of what is carried and endured: clutter and mould, street smells of dough and spliffs, the threat of police and A&E, sex, sickness, and survival. Its lines tumble in a rush, mimicking the relentless onslaught of experience,...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis In her third poem, A&E , Jenny Pagdin leaves the private hush of dread and homesickness for the fluorescent limbo of hospital night. “Ambulatory Majors” becomes a geography - “the vista-less hinterland / we’re all called to from time to time” - while those who love us drift “over the sea of sleep.” Pagdin’s eye is exact and humane: short-shorts, fleecy housecoats, “cak...

Buy the magazine here! Editorial Note by Max Wallis Continuing section IV’s theme of PSYCHOSIS / SURVIVAL / HALLUCINATIONS is Jenny Pagdin with her second poem, Hypochondria of the heart . Here Pagdin extends the theme of suspended unease first struck in Before we got the news . Where the earlier poem holds us in the static crackle before catastrophe, this one turns inward, to a homesickness that...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis In Before we got the news , Jenny Pagdin captures the strange suspension before devastation takes form. First, “a dead tone, the line gone down” a failure of connection that becomes a metaphor for helplessness. The imagery is both technological and bodily: filaments, tinfoil, white noise, night terrors. It evokes the way shock lodges in the nervous system, how the body...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis Intrusion, JP Seabright’s final poem, is a poem of hypervigilance. Every time the speaker closes their eyes in transit, an imagined attack floods in: the blade, the blood, the bystanders recoiling. The syntax is clipped, cinematic, and refuses to soften at all. The poem loops between shock and self-blame… “If only I hadn’t closed my eyes. / Maybe. / Stopped it somehow”...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis effluvium is a poem of leakage and revolt. Stains blur into one another, sex, blood, mucus; until the body itself becomes hostile, a site of overflow. The speaker moves between bed and self, between past and present, carrying a lifetime of “undreaming,” of scars visible and invisible. The poem asks how a body can betray itself, how flesh becomes record and trigger, “a...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis In Body in Trouble , JP Seabright builds a poem from fragments, each line a pressure point. The language glitches, stops short, doubles back: “sinful & skinful,” “pseudolirium,” “negative equity.” Bureaucracy and medicine creep in- “pharmaceutical intervention,” “declaring my deadnames” - until the body is measured like a balance sheet, written down to loss. The repeat...

Today I want you to write the moment you decide not to hire someone to do a job. I’ve been renovating my house, or rather decorating it. And that offers an option: pay someone or do it myself. I have self-esteem issues of thinking of myself as someone who can’t do these types of things. But in my year of remaking myself I’ve come to trust my gut. And well, ADHD means you can hyperfocus and learn n...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis Polly Atkin’s three poems move through pain, body, endurance — and with Fox / Plague Year Season 3 she leaves us with survival as practice. The fox is both real and emblematic: a creature stepping into the road, alert and cautious, a guide through the wreckage of the plague years. It’s not mystic but pragmatic, teaching vigilance, mask-wearing, the refusal of shame. It...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis “Polly Atkin’s Pain Parade takes what most of us try to hide or name in whispers and lets it arrive at full volume, in costume. Pain becomes pageant, procession, myth. A bruise turns into a banner. A body’s flare transforms into dragon, unicorn, moth, owl. Chronic pain is not an event; it’s a life. It doesn’t visit for a night and leave quietly, but rather marches in,...

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this episode of After Shop Weekly. I'm in a rush, actually, because I have to go to the dentist, which is prompting me to have a think about things. And I guess what I want you to write today is write from a place of health, write from a place of care, a place of fear. When we... All these things like dentists, doctors, everything else, they come with a mixt...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis Here, Polly Atkin shapes desire as discipline. “Frog Song” begins with refusal, not abandonment, not anger - and turns the body toward water and sun. Relief arrives as touch: a “cool scarf of water,” a face warmed back into itself. Polly asks what it costs to seek light, and what it means to want recognition: “selfdom,” “gilded halls,” the hope that joy might be a pass...

Author’s Note – Claire Snook on Seizure 1 This poem was assembled by Max Wallis from my blog posts and Substack entries about living with my tumours and the seizures that come with them. It describes something difficult to explain: how a seizure feels from the inside. The strange detachment, the shift in colour and sound, the way the world blurs and then snaps back, and the exhaustion that follows...

Author’s Note by Claire Snook This poem was assembled by Max Wallis from my blog posts and Substack entries about my tumour(s). It captures the limbo I found myself in; caught between appointments, symptoms, silences. The endless waiting for answers that often don’t come. The feeling that your life has been paused, but the world keeps going without you. Writing those posts helped me stay connected...

Welcome to Aftershock Weekly this fine Wednesday morning. Today, I want you to write from the bus window. Or more accurately, from your reflection. Outside, the city moves in cold streaks. Inside, fluorescent light casts your reflection into double exposure: you, and a version of you watching. You see the kebab shop glowing like an altar, a man in a puffa jacket talking to himself, the wet shimmer...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis In Grief , Di Slaney gives voice to something we have all probably experienced, but also what can be at times unspeakable. That sodden, shapeshifting weight we carry; wanting nothing more than to be light again, to lift, to escape the gloom of “rooms of dark that smell of wee / and tea.” And yet, it doesn’t vanish. It transforms. It sings. This line haunted me as we fi...

What a phenomenal 87 days it’s been. Since launching the daily Aftershock Writing Prompts, we’ve hit over 6,500 podcast downloads… what an incredible response. Thank you. But today, I want to let you know we’re shifting to a weekly Aftershock Writing Prompt, landing every Wednesday at 10am . Between editing the magazine and sending out hundreds of copies, I just can’t keep up the daily pace — and...

Editor’s note by Max Wallis Odontoameloblastoma begins with a name too large for the body it belongs to, a long, Latin mouthful pinned to a lump on a sheep’s jaw. What follows isn’t just a clinical story or a pastoral anecdote, but something deeper: a reckoning with difference, survival, and tenderness. The sheep becomes more than a patient. It eats, plays, lives with the same joy and instinct as...

Editor’s note by Max Wallis In Lay my head on fleeces , Di Slaney writes with tenderness and precision about the body’s vulnerability and the quiet mercy of animals. The poem leans into wool as refuge… both physical and emotional; a place where time slows and care is instinctive. It is how we ground ourselves when the body might not. How those around us can offer us the care, even if they might be...

Yesterday’s prompt was a roaring success with a number of people sending me poems. So let’s continue down that path. Words have more than one world in them. “Still” means unmoving. But it also means still here. Still happening. “Spare” means extra, but it also means to spare someone , to wound less. “Slip” can be falling or a piece of silk. You don’t need to define the word… just hold both meaning...

The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. We often think of “wordplay” as something clever, maybe even flippant. But in poetry, it can be far more serious. Wordplay can be griefplay. It can be an exorcism. It can be a reckoning. Take the word routine . It sounds safe. Clinical. A daily procedure....

Welcome to day 85 of the Daily Aftershock. Today I want you to write in fragments. I want you to actually come up with a sequence of one or two line utterances, I guess is a better way of saying it. And you could almost lean into sort of epigrams or things like that. But basically I want the poem as a whole to be fragmentary. So each individual statement is different. But as a whole, they create a...

Write a prose poem that captures a quiet, unnoticed moment where the past makes itself known, not through memory, but through sensation and the body itself. Let the moment unfold in your body first: a flicker, a tension, a smell, a shift in light. Avoid dramatic revelation; instead, stay with the subtleties. The poem should move like a fog creeping into a familiar room. Optional guiding lines to b...

It is an honour to publish Muzhgan Saghar in this first issue of The Aftershock Review . Born in Kabul in 1977, Muzhgan fled Taliban rule in 2000 and has since made her home in Germany, where she works as a teacher. Her poetry carries the urgency of survival, the ache of exile, and the undimmed force of a voice that refuses to be silenced. This poem arrives like a flare. It speaks from the fractur...