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The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)

Max Wallis" Daily Aftershock Writing Prompts (The Aftershock Review)

Daily writing prompts from the raw edges of memory, survival, and creative reinvention. Each one designed to crack something open. For poets, memoirists, and anyone writing through the wreckage. aftershockpoetry.substack.com

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All Episodes

1:50

Xanthous Motifs by Dr Anna Percy

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/09/03

Editorial Note by Max WallisThis 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. The poem veers between grief, sex, memory, and absurd beauty: jars of mustard smashed in a kitchen, a marigold

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1:00

Twenties by Jenny Pagdin

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/08/31

Editorial Note by Max WallisWith 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, where humour and horror jostle… “the sieve which doubled up as colander” against “the sipping my friend’s

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0:51

A&E by Jenny Pagdin

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/08/30

Editorial Note by Max WallisIn 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, “cake-mix basins” clutched like talismans. Thought itself turns moth-like, batting at a “strip-light moon.”

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0:39

Hypochondria of the heart by Jenny Pagdin

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/08/26

Buy the magazine here!Editorial Note by Max WallisContinuing 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 cannot be resolved. The old diagnosis becomes a way of naming exile within the body: a conscript’s heartbeat

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0:29

Before we got the news by Jenny Pagdin

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/08/23

Editorial Note by Max WallisIn 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 anticipates rupture even before the mind knows. The final image of rain falling “onto a dull sea” refuses

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1:36

Intrusion by JP Seabright

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/08/22

Editorial Note by Max WallisIntrusion, 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” until survival becomes conditional on never resting, never letting go. This is what trauma does. I

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0:51

effluvium by JP Seabright

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/08/21

Editorial Note by Max Walliseffluvium 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 mutiny of function / over intent.” It is raw, unflinching, refusing to sanitise what survival costs.About

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1:18

Body in Trouble by JP Seabright

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/08/20

Editorial Note by Max WallisIn 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 repeated question, “who do you talk to,” hammers at the silence around crisis, the way systems isolate even as

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2:14

Day 90 - Write a poem that has the line "This is...

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/08/20

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 new tasks, so I have tiled my porch (vinyl stick-ons, mind) and painted my living room (albeit just two

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1:42

Fox / Plague Year Season 3 by Polly Atkin

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/08/18

Editorial Note by Max WallisPolly 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’s a presence to hold onto in the glare of denial, a reminder to stay fleet, masked, unashamed.The fox

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1:32

Pain Parade by Polly Atkin

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/08/16

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, day after day, reshaping everything. Polly Atkin’s Pain Parade understands this. It refuses the lie of a

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0:54

Day 89 - Write about the dentist, or doctors, or from...

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/08/13

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 mixture. For some people they're scared, for some people they're not. For some people they're a sign of care,

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1:28

Frogsong by Polly Atkin

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/08/12

Editorial Note by Max WallisHere, 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 passport. Its frogs are not just cute emblems but a chorus for solidarity; amphibious witnesses to crossing

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1:21

Seizure 1 by Claire Snook

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/08/09

Author’s Note – Claire Snookon Seizure 1This 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.These moments can be frightening, yet there is also something oddly beautiful in their distortion when

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0:54

Waiting by Claire Snook

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/08/06

Author’s Note by Claire SnookThis 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 to myself when everything else was shifting. This poem carries some of that, uncertainty, exhaustion, and

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1:46

Day 88 - Write from your reflection in the bus window

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/08/06

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 of pavement giving back everything and nothing all at the same time. But over it all, your own face

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0:47

Grief by Di Slaney

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/08/03

Editorial Note by Max WallisIn 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 finalised The Aftershock Review. So much of this magazine was built in the aftermath; of collapse, of

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0:33

Welcome to the Weekly Aftershock Writing Prompt —...

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/08/03

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 I hope that’s okay.I’ll still be putting as much love and thought into each one. I hope they continue to

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1:09

Odontoameloblastoma by Di Slaney

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/07/31

Editor’s note by Max WallisOdontoameloblastoma 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 the rest of the flock, even as it carries what marks it out. Slaney writes this without pity. There’s no

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1:01

Lay my head on fleeces by Di Slaney

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/07/31

Editor’s note by Max WallisIn 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 animals, to keep going. The first of three poems by Di which I’ll be sharing in coming days.Di Slaney

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