Happy Poetry Month!

Happy Poetry Month, you fragile flowers and overflowing, oversharing, lovesick, rageful poets~

Your amazing 4WORDS team has (at the very last minute, shh) put together some bangin’ poetic prompts for you all. Que bueno. You’re all welcome.

But why!? When there are so many out there?!

Well maybe we wanted to hop on the trend, okay? Maybe we had some cool ideas, okay? Maybe we just wanted to connect with y’all? Gosh. Love you.

So yeah bish, we got organized. We got some ideas. We slapped ‘em onto some decent graphically designed posts. And we’re sharing them daily on our Instagram page and Facebook group. We encourage y’all to try, and definitely tag/share them with us! Let’s make you famous, poet.

Here’s the month's overview, and the daily prompt for today. The rest of the daily prompts will be shared on our socials!

Escapism

Last month we held our second Virtual Writing Retreat event to the theme of: escapism

Why escapism? Well, our theme founder had this to say:

"Because it's needed. Usually the point of escapism is to seek a distraction, maybe create some relief when things are unpleasant, and not to be cynical, but things have been consistently unpleasant, so it’s needed now more than ever.

There's something to be said about writing and reading for escapism . It’s a large part of why people do it, to provide that distraction either when you're curating it or consuming it."

- James (the inspirator of the theme)

For two hours, writers of various styles, genres, and comfy attire (like a flying squirrel onesie whaaat) wrote together. From working on current stories, to editing screenplays, to trying out whack challenges, we shared creative space. We laughed. We got emotional. We wrote words down on paper and digital surfaces. And, we raised awareness for the National Association for Mental Illness (NAMI) in a critical time.

NAMI has been providing education and resources since the late 80s, in over 600 different locations across the United States. If you’d still like to donate (or send this to your rich friends and justifiably guilt trip them), you can check out this organization out! Also, all tips sent on this article on Vocal will be 100% donated to NAMI.

Here are some words from the participating writers:

And stayed tuned with all the lovely community building and creating we’re doing at 4WORDS! All events and participation is virtual and free.