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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

1:17

Spoils by Clare Pollard & ruminations on poetry

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/11/13

Editorial Note by Max WallisIn Pollard’s second poem in Issue One, Spoils, she returns to one of her most quietly devastating territories: the sweetness we’re taught to accept but can’t quite swallow. The poem begins in honey, golden, excessive, a substance that feels both earned and unearned at once, and moves quickly into the wider question of what we inherit, materially and emotionally, without ever having asked for it.Here, sweetness is labour: the hive, the blooms, the careful work of other

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0:59

The Craving by Clare Pollard

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/11/07

Editorial Note by Max WallisWhat does it mean to be resilient when what you crave most is permission to stop pretending? In The Craving, Clare Pollard writes from the quiet exhaustion of motherhood: the need to hold everything together, the refusal to be seen breaking. Her humour is wry and deliberate: rejection emails, locked bathrooms, the polished insistence of I’m fine.Then the poem tilts from the domestic to the mythical. Toward “an enchanted castle” and its golden fruit, shimmering with the

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0:29

Lessons Learned in Prison by Dominique Dunne

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/11/01

Editorial Note by Max WallisThis final poem closes Dunne’s sequence with quiet devastation. Where Mother exposed injustice and Father held distance, Lessons Learned in Prison becomes an act of paternal and perhaps therapeutic exchange: a daughter and father trading art across walls, both remaking what connection remains.Dunne writes the unbearable with calm precision. The imagery is domestic, almost gentle — drawings, masks, Morrissey tapes — yet beneath it runs the ache of role reversal. The father

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0:24

In the Prison Gardens by Dominique Dunne

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/11/01

Editorial Note by Max WallisAcross Dunne’s sequence, we move from the mother’s humiliation to the child’s car journey toward the father’s absence. By the time we reach In the Prison Gardens, love exists only within visitation hours… a ritual of limited touch, a tenderness fenced by rules.The poem is devastating in its restraint. Dunne frames the setting with almost documentary calm: “lifers play Rummy with their families,” “offenders have picnics with their children.” The world she enters is both

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0:46

Father by Dominique Dunne

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/10/30

Editorial Note by Max WallisIf Mother exposed the violence of public scrutiny, Father turns inward, to a child’s gaze pressed against the glass of memory. There is a quiet pilgrimage here: three hours of nausea and games, the pylons and cats’ eyes transforming the motorway into a living conduit of connection.Dunne captures the way children mythologise distance. Her imagery: pylons “passing electricity / to one another, like a secret” bridges what the law has broken. Even the landscape seems

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0:36

Mother by Dominique Dunne

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/10/29

Editorial Note by Max WallisWhat a poem this is, dear readers. Dunne’s Mother revisits a family story with unflinching clarity — a father imprisoned after a string of bank robberies, a mother wrongfully suspected and humiliated. The poem begins in rumour, with police dubbing the couple “Bonnie and Clyde”, and moves inward, to the mother’s body: a site of both evidence and accusation.What’s striking is the precision of its gaze. Dunne writes not from melodrama but from memory’s still room: each

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2:22

Burnt Divinities by Golnoosh Nour

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/10/27

Editorial Note by Max WallisGolnoosh Nour’s Burnt Divinities quite aptly burns at the intersection of inheritance and identity. Moving between myth, language, and lineage, the poem asks what it means to carry the sins—or sorrows—of our ancestors, and whether grief can ever truly be translated.From the opening declaration: “I am blessed, made of two extremes: my mother’s / death and my father’s madness” Nour situates the self as both divine and damned, glitter and garbage. The voice shifts between

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1:11

Playcircle by Martha Sprackland

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/10/22

The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Editorial Note by Max WallisMartha Sprackland’s Playcircle hums with both tenderness and alarm — a choreography of care performed on the edge of collapse. A doctor’s office becomes a kind of stage; the body, an instrument trying to tune itself against static. WhatsApp pings, bells, flutes, and pulse merge in a rhythm of overstimulation: the modern soundscape

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1:19

Hazard Perception by Martha Sprackland

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/09/28

Editorial Note by Max WallisIn Hazard Perception, Martha Sprackland recasts the road’s sudden dangers: kerbs, erratic bicycles, stags leaping from the verge as the psychic terrain of motherhood. Hazards are everywhere, made sharper by exhaustion: “the baby woke fourteen times last night,” thought turns sluggish, the brain itself “a lettuce completely eaten by slugs.” The poem’s hallucinatory images mimic the way fatigue distorts perception, how care leaves the body porous to threat.What begins with

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2:15

Son by Angi Holden

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/09/27

Read with permission by Max WallisEditorial Note by Max Angi Holden’s Son is a poem of tenderness complicated by the world’s gaze. What begins as an intimate moment - a grown son’s affectionate embrace, his “childlike grin and wave” - is quickly reframed by a stranger’s blunt intrusion: What’s the matter with him? The poem catches this collision between love and stigma, and in doing so, it slows time. Boats drift, butterflies settle, water cascades… the scene becomes almost unbearably heightened as

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2:34

What Eagle Saw by Pascale Petit

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/09/26

In Pascale Petit’s final, fourth, poem, What Eagle Saw, Petit turns her focus skyward. The eagle hovers above the neonatal ward, her vision both forensic and mythic, maternal and ecological. War and armistice across a battleground of the body, the family unit and the environment itself.Petit’s images fuse the anatomical with the ecological. “She saw into the chests of newborns / where the twigs of lungs were torn.” Hearts become roses, veins rivers that dry to deserts, skins crack to release

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0:41

Day 94 - After Eliot - “These fragments I have shored...

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/09/25

Eliot wrote: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”What does it mean to live among fragments, to call survival itself a kind of architecture?Write a piece that gathers your fragments. Begin with something broken or incomplete… a line overheard on the train, a memory cut short, a half-kept promise. Let it stand as a fragment. Then, one by one, add to it until you glimpse the shape of a ruin you can live inside. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers

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1:34

Day 94 - After Mitochondria by Max Wallis - Write...

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/09/16

New research suggests the reason we might sleep is because our mitochondria are leaky, tiny sparks of energy spilling out, signalling the body to shut down and repair. Sleep, then, is less mercy than circuitry: a fuse that saves us from burning out.Today, write about the fuse that saves you. What shuts you down before the overload? What small, unseen system keeps you alive?Here’s my poem, After Mitochondria:After Mitochondriaby Max Wallis My body is a breaker, tripped by its own wiring. My cells

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2:42

House of Puberty by Pascale Petit

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/09/13

Editorial Note by Max WallisPascale Petit’s second poem in Issue One, House of Puberty, moves deeper into the territory glimpsed in My Mother’s Provençal Dress. If the first poem placed the mother within a vineyard sewn into fabric, here the house itself is transformed into a rainforest, a hallucinatory world where trauma finds its truest shape.A Welsh mining village terrace becomes a jungle of threat and wonder. The living room teems with caimans, leafcutter ants, anteaters, peccaries. The mother’s

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1:53

Day 93 - Break the form - Write a poem that refuses...

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/09/11

Write a poem that refuses to behave.One that can’t be read in a straight line.One that only exists if something is crossed out, folded, ripped, blacked over.One that makes the reader do something physical — turn the page sideways, skip a line, double back.The challenge is to make the poem itself misbehave, so the act of reading becomes part of the meaning.What happens when you break the form wide open?Here’s my example:Self Portrait with My Deadmy great-uncle, Hans [crossed out] my

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2:15

My Mother's Provençal Dress by Pascale Petit

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/09/10

Editorial Note by Max WallisIn My Mother’s Provençal Dress, Pascale Petit returns to one of her great themes: the mother’s presence lingering in absence, a fabric of love and accusation stitched into the landscape itself.The poem begins with theft – “I stole my mother’s Provençal dress while she was in hospital” – but what follows is not just an act of rebellion. The speaker inhabits the dress like a vineyard, a landscape stitched from kermes oak and cicada-thrum. It is a garment, but also

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1:51

Day 92 - Epigenetics / homecoming / family

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/09/09

What’s in your DNA? And what isn’t?DNA is a script, but not the whole story. Epigenetics reminds us that life leaves annotations on the script — chemical tags called methyl groups that attach to the DNA, turning certain genes up or down, on or off. A famine, a war, a long season of stress: each can leave a methylated mark, a reminder etched into the body that may echo for generations.The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming

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3:52

The C Word Diaries by Dr Anna Percy

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/09/04

Editorial Note by Max WallisIn The C Word Diaries, Dr Anna Percy’s second poem in Issue One, we are thrown back into the beginnings of the pandemic, and the unknown tension of a world we were about to lose. It is mid March 2020, days before 23 March when lockdown is announced. The poem keeps close to what that week felt like at street level. Parcels on doorsteps. Empty shelves. Quarantine rules forming in real time. The hunger for touch that keeps turning into risk. Humour and horror in the same

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1:17

Day 91 - Write about the bird that will not leave you...

The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt) ·

2025/09/03

I have a soft spot for birds in poetry. But the way I theme The Aftershock Review is never prescriptive. It comes about organically, as if the poems themselves decide what the issue wants to hold.For Issue Two, something unexpected happened: birds arrived. They kept landing in the submissions. Blackbirds, crows, great tits. Not as decoration, but as companions to grief, as emblems of survival, as voices of warning. The avian thread became impossible to ignore. So a whole section of the issue now

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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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