How was June for you? It was really busy for us at Chalkboard.

We’re happy to see such enthusiasm for our projects and we’ve added quite a few people to our writers list. We’ve also redesigned our homepage layout in the last week, and we hope it’s easier for you to find the latest submissions, current prompts, and general information now. Let us know what you think!

Our upcoming projects have been waiting for a while to meet you in the new season, and it’s time for these babies to spread their wings. Now for a quick summary on our Chalkboard projects and where they’re at:

Currently open

“Let me edit that for you” is an impish fiction project that will tickle your mind, if not your belly.

Villanelle Vestiges is a chain villanelle project where you take two lines from an existing villanelle and weave it into your own villanelle. The form is beautiful and we recommend to give it a try. [ed. Tamyka is impressed that Dewi resisted the urge to call them villanevilles…]

Readings is our audio project, where we invite you to read and record a poem by another writer. We’ve released the first batch of readings out, and if you haven’t taken the time to listen yet, you’re missing out. You’ll be blown away by the diverse interpretations of each set of words. We are currently accepting readings for the next three poems and would love it if you’d consider sharing your voice.

Out of Site, Out of Minds is an off-site social media collaboration. We’re happy to see this project is triggering more and more people to find new ways to collaborate and inspire each other.

One-Line Poems continue to be a crowd-pleaser, because more does not always mean better.

Coming soon

We’ll open a triolet collaboration very soon, and it’s one we’ve tested and proven in our kitchen (Slack) to ensure it’s the right balance of fun and challenging. We’ve got another cross-genre project brewing in the back room, and we’ll release more details as soon as it’s ready.

Gone…for now

The Murder Room is closed for submission. The Chalkboard editorial team appreciated the many creative ways you plotted Thomas Kendall’s demise, and we’re happy to conclude that you mess with Chalkboard writers at your own risk! We’re toying with some ideas for a second season and a spin-off project. We’ll keep you informed of course.

We’ve just closed the Imagà Imaginings project for submission, but the works will still be accessible if you haven’t gone through all of them yet. The project received enormous love with 21 image prompts that gathered almost a hundred poems, stories and captions as submissions and responses. We’re not sure of the exact numbers, as further stories were published off Chalkboard, but we know those numbers were BIG. Thank you very much to everyone for the success of this project. We hope that it was a meaningful exercise for you.

So you think you know it’s Summer

But some of us are down here on the winter side of the world, braving the elements. Here’s a picture of Tamyka in the recent GeoQuest Adventure Race, a 48-hour event that shrunk significantly when massive storms blew through, bringing four-metre swells that pounded the shore (and the kayaks!) and flooded the region’s rivers (and our crossings). But it’s not all dismal and dreary — right now, all we’re seeing is the red-orange sun.

Photo by Geocentric Outdoors

Got an idea? Let us know!

Remember, Chalkboard only accepts submissions that are either a contribution to a current project or a kick-off post for a new project. So if our current fiction and poetry projects aren’t calling out to you, feel free to submit your own idea. (More info.)

We’ll check in again in August, but until then, you should find everything you need in our publication pages. Have a great week!

Chalkboard editors.

July’s Chalkboard: Villanelles, Readings, and Fiction was originally published in Chalkboard on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

house, not a home.

Poet’s original reading

This reading, performed by the poet, is kept secret until all other readers have recorded the poem.

Other readers

Elizabeth Helmich

the alleged kat

Maitri Shah

New Recording 9.m4a

Tamyka Bell

Kathy Jacobs

Poet’s subsequent reading

The poet is invited to re-read their poem and share their thoughts, once they’ve had a chance to listen to the other readings.

Watch this space! Zev will soon record another reading, after taking some time to hear and reflect upon everyone else’s, and may also share some thoughts about the process — and you’ll find it here.

Read our introduction to find out more about Chalkboard’s “Readings” project:

Readings

Readings: house, not a home. was originally published in Chalkboard on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Days Passing

Poet’s original reading

This reading, performed by the poet, is kept secret until all other readers have recorded the poem.

Other readers

Dewi

the alleged kat

Tamyka Bell

Indira Reddy

Zev

Poet’s subsequent reading

The poet is invited to re-read their poem and share their thoughts, once they’ve had a chance to listen to the other readings.

Watch this space! Elizabeth Helmich will soon record another reading, after taking some time to hear and reflect upon everyone else’s, and may also share some thoughts about the process — and you’ll find it here.

Read our introduction to find out more about Chalkboard’s “Readings” project:

Readings

Readings: Days Passing was originally published in Chalkboard on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Do you have a ‘CURIOUS’ mind ?

Poet’s original reading

This reading, performed by the poet, is kept secret until all other readers have recorded the poem.

Other readers

Dewi

Michael Stalcup

the alleged kat

Zev

Tamyka Bell

Poet’s subsequent reading

The poet is invited to re-read their poem and share their thoughts, once they’ve had a chance to listen to the other readings.

Do you have a ‘curious’ mind ? — Revealed

Read our introduction to find out more about Chalkboard’s “Readings” project:

Readings

Readings: Do you have a ‘CURIOUS’ mind ? was originally published in Chalkboard on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Starting June 1, 2021

Chalkboard is the home of what we’ve taken to calling asynchronous collaboration: any form of writing that calls for working with multiple people, but not all at the same time.

That’s a pretty broad definition, and that’s how we intend to keep it, because Chalkboard is an open, community-driven writing channel for everyone and every kind of writing. Every project works a little differently:

• Sometimes, Chalkboard writers take turns adding lines or stanzas to a poem…or even whole chapters to a fiction story.
• Sometimes we’ll erase parts of someone else’s story to find new ones.
• Sometimes we’ll build a chain of poems, borrowing a line or two off the writers who played before us or other stories on Medium.
• Sometimes we’ll pair our words with another artistic medium.
• Sometimes we’ll write a one-line poem or tribute in response to an open prompt. (Actually, this one happens on about a weekly basis.)

And sometimes we’ll do something completely different — it all depends on the projects our community comes up with.

The way we publish our projects varies, too. When we’re building a collection, we often feature all the submitted stories in one part of our publication. But if we’re creating a single poem from many contributions, we usually invite participants to publish their poems elsewhere on Medium.

The one thing that all our projects have in common is that we clearly state their rules of engagement in a kick-off post or call for collaborators.

For open projects, this post will be easy to access from the home page or top navigation bar. For past projects, you’ll find them in the archive.

Rules

We’d rather be collaborating than writing a big list of rules, so let’s sum it up as succinctly as we can:

Chalkboard hopes to continue to foster the community spirit of creative writing on Medium. We ask that you always write and interact with other participants in a way that respects us as writers and humans.

Hate speech and other non-constructive writings are not permitted here. If the editors deem anything that we see as hate speech, spam, or the like, we will not publish it.

We ask that if you commit to a project, you participate to the best of your ability. If you need to withdraw for any reason, please let your project host know, so they can find another writer to take your place.

We also ask that you respect other creators by ensuring that all images in your submissions are free from copyright restrictions and are appropriately attributed to the artist, with a link.

Submissions

Chalkboard welcomes all submissions that are either

• a contribution to an existing and currently open project: please be sure to follow all the instructions in the call for collaborators or kick-off post; or
• a kick-off story for a new project that you’re proposing: please work off an example from another project, to make sure you cover all the relevant details.

Chalkboard doesn’t accept general submissions that don’t fit one of the above-listed criteria.

If you’d like to be added as a Chalkboard writer so you can submit a story, leave a reply to this post, and we’ll add you.

Like a bit of history?

Here’s our archive of past projects on Chalkboard:

The Chalkboard Archive

And here are our original posts about how to join in on Chalkboard:

• Welcome to Chalkboard!
• How to Submit

Need more information?

Let us know if we haven’t answered all your questions — just reply to this story and we’ll be in touch.

This article was originally published by Tamyka Bell on 19 April 2017. The content is unchanged, aside from this note — we just wanted all admins to be able to track responses so we can respond more quickly to your questions.

Closed to new Submissions was originally published in Chalkboard on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

an interwoven chain of villanelles

Tamyka has been hanging out for this project for a while, because the villanelle is one of her favourite poetic forms. (Others include the acrostic golden shovel, the abhanga, and the fib poem.)

The goal of this project is to borrow two lines from someone else’s villanelle, and use them as the refrains in your own. This project is super simple…except maybe for the part where you write a villanelle. But trust us — it’s easier than a sestina!

About the villanelle

A villanelle has nineteen lines, organised into five tercets and a quatrain, with two repeating rhyme sounds (aba). But eight of those lines are taken up with one of two refrains, (A1, A2); once they’re written, you just need to come up with another five a-lines (that rhyme with A1 and A2) and six b-lines (their own rhyme). There is no set line length, but 8–10 syllables is a fairly common choice.

A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2

The form is well suited to haunting ideas, because the poem tends to get stuck on those two refrains. If you want to spice up your villanelle, try using small variations in tense or punctuation, or use enjambment to keep the stanzas flowing. (~Tamyka)

How to play

1. Select any villanelle that’s published on Medium. We strongly suggest you check out one of our favourite poetry publications: Poetry in Form. You’ll also find lovely examples by searching for the tag villanelle, or by browsing right here in this project!
2. From your chosen poem, select two rhyming non-refrain lines (a-lines or b-lines) to use as your refrains (A1- and A2-lines). Remember, you’ll need to link these two lines together in the final stanza, so choose carefully!
3. Write your villanelle. To make it easier, Tamyka made you a handy colour-coded template! It doesn’t auto-populate, though, because we understand that you might like to make small changes within a line. (You might change tense, make something plural, or change punctuation.)
4. Format your Medium story for submission. Starting at the top:
   - give it a title
   - subtitle it villanelle after [@original poet]
   - add an image
   - give the image an appropriate attribution with a link to a webpage clearly showing the image licence information, like our example in this post
   - single-space your poem within each stanza, and use a paragraph break between stanzas
   - add a section break, then this footer — This poem is part of the Villanelle Vestiges project on Chalkboard. I borrowed the refrains from this villanelle:
   [embed URL]
   - add tags, including Villanelle and Villanelle Vestiges
5. Submit your draft villanelle to Chalkboard.
6. Find another poem to work with!

If any of that isn’t clear, take a look at these samples, or respond to ask us a question:

• Taking Leave - Chalkboard - Medium
• Daybroken

Villanelle Vestiges was originally published in Chalkboard on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

an interpretive dance of the spoken word

We invite you to join us on this journey as a poet, a reader, or both. To sign up:

• as a reader, respond to this story
• as a contributing poet, enter your details (including a link to your poem) in this Google Form.

We also welcome creative responses in other forms, So if you’d rather express yourself through visual art or musical composition, please do!

Keep reading for submission details!

Poems are meant to be read out loud — but by whom?

Introduction, by Tamyka Bell

The writer of any text is just one of many possible readers, and each reader brings to their reading a unique set of life experiences that dramatically affect how they interpret the text. The same text can mean two completely different things to two people, and both those meanings can be the opposite of what the writer intended.

On the weight of evidence, who is right: the writer, or one reader, or several, or their entire audience?

While it can be tempting to say that the writer is right — after all, they wrote the thing — most writers could, if pressed, come up with several examples of times when they wrote something and everyone discussed it as if they’d read something else. Take, for example, “Every Breath You Take”, which a lot of people seem to think is a love song, but which Sting will tell you is about stalking. Or the Fifty Shades series, which is a risqué romance for many readers, and a story of an emotionally abusive relationship for others. (In case you were wondering, I side with the latter in both cases.)

If you’ve ever had the good fortune to receive critical feedback on your work, you may have been startled by some of the alternative readings. I suspect this is even more true for poetry than for prose, because poetry is more likely to contain symbols that mean something different to each reader, wrapped up in a veil of ambiguity that — intentionally or otherwise — allows the reader space for interpretation.

I once asked a Medium poet for more information after identifying multiple possible readings of her poem. She responded that both readings seemed to fit with her words, and added that her writing had been driven by a third meaning — one which I could immediately recognise, but only once she’d drawn my attention to it. So it seemed that I had changed the poet’s understanding of her own work by telling her what it meant to me.

Now what would’ve happened if, instead of telling her how I’d read her poem, I’d shown her? What if I’d read it out loud for her, the way I felt it.

What discoveries might we have made if several of us read the poem aloud in a way that reflected our interpretation, our meaning? Would it have changed her interpretation of her poem?

Would it have changed the way she read it aloud?

Come join me; let’s find out.

How this project works

We always try to keep these instructions as simple as possible, but this project has a fair few moving parts, so please let us know if any of the following instructions are unclear.

Before we start: why all the secrecy?

As you read through this section, you’ll notice we’re being a bit secretive, specifically asking participants to keep everything hush-hush until it’s time to publish. The reason we do this is to ensure that

• the poet’s original reading — what we might consider the authorial voice — can’t influence the other readers’ interpretations
• each reader and contributing artist responds only to the written poem, not to others’ readings or responses
• spectators see the whole story at once.

So it’s super important to us that you pay attention to our requests for particular privacy settings on your files — otherwise the whole project could break!

Contributing a poem

When you sign up to contribute a poem, you’ll be asked to supply a link to your poem. This can be to a Medium draft, or a text file in your Dropbox, or a page on your website, or whatever you like — it’s just so we can determine if the poem will be appropriate reading material.

If you are accepted as a contributing poet, we will contact you by email and ask you to submit a Medium draft of your original poem to Chalkboard for publication. Your draft’s subtitle should include [TK: readings] (which we’ll remove before we publish) and a suitably attributed image. Your poem must be your original work and you must:

• grant us irrevocable, non-exclusive rights to publish your poem with attribution in our publication, and
• grant our readers irrevocable, non-exclusive rights to record their reading of your poem and publish that recording online, with attribution.

That is, if you have granted anyone else the exclusive rights to publish your poem online or to publish recordings of your poem (subsidiary rights), or if you intend to do so, we can’t accept your poem for this project. But if you’ve granted non-exclusive licences and/or retained all rights, we can still accept your poem.

We also can’t accept poems for which critical reviews have been published, which may affect readers’ interpretations. But we’re open to poems you’ve posted on your blog without analysis.

Recording, uploading, and submitting your reading or other creative response

You’re welcome to record either an audio or video file of your reading; we specifically request that your recording

• begins with the poem’s title and the author’s name
• is trimmed, so that it contains no extraneous recordings.

Ideally, we’d like you to host the file on one of the sites that embeds with Medium, such as SoundCloud or YouTube, but you can use other platforms if you prefer.

As with the poetry readings, we ask that those submitting other creative responses to the poem upload their files in a way that restricts access to only those with the link.

Once you’re happy with the file upload, please submit your link to the Readings project host using this Google Form.

IMPORTANT: When you upload your audio, video, or image file, please check your privacy settings will restrict access to only those with the link, so no one can stumble across it.

What happens next?

After a poem is selected for the project:

1. Chalkboard publishes the poem and promotes it on social media.
2. Chalkboard publishes a call for readers and invites other creative artists to respond to the original poem.
3. The poet records, uploads, and submits their poetry reading.
4. Chalkboard selects five respondents to read the poem. Selection is at the discretion of the host, who will consider each applicant’s history of interaction with the poet and with Chalkboard in general. (We welcome new writers to join this project, but if you’ve picked a fight with one of our writers in the past, there’s a good chance you won’t be reading that poet’s work!)
5. Each reader records, uploads, and submits their poetry reading; other creative contributors upload and submit their files.
6. The host creates a draft that compiles the poet’s first reading, all the other readers’ recordings, and creative responses. This draft is shared only with the poet — and we won’t even add it to Chalkboard yet, just to make sure none of the editors sneak a peek! (If this approach doesn’t seem to be working, we might just revert to email.)
7. After taking some time to absorb the different readings, the poet records another reading, and uploads and submits it as before.
8. The host adds this file to the draft.
9. Chalkboard publishes the compiled story and promotes it on social media.
10. Once the readings are all published, you’re welcome to make your video or audio file public and/or promote it as you like, remembering to always include a fair attribution. Please don’t lock down the file, remove it, or change the link without letting the Chalkboard editors know — to do so would break the project, spoiling the fun for everyone.

A quick reminder:

• Interested in joining Readings? Respond to this post.
• Want to sign up as a contributing poet? Here: https://goo.gl/forms/GeWAM9svy7RlHQKh2
• Ready to submit a link to your reading or other creative response? Here: https://goo.gl/forms/hxUaKLXTC6B1eE7R2

If you’ve got any questions, reply to this post and let us know!

Readings was originally published in Chalkboard on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Now, we Chalkboard editors love Medium as much as the rest of you, but we aren’t fans of the constant algorithm tweaks, and we hate the thought of anyone missing out on our project news. So here’s a quick run-down of what’s coming and going on Chalkboard.

Submit here!

The Murder Room is a short fiction project, where writers are invited to reuse the same cast of characters in their very own murder mystery.

Our Cleave Chain is where you’ll want to head if poetry is more your thing. Our new collaboration is about clipping old and new poems together side-by-side.

One-Line Poems are our most popular category of collaboration on Chalkboard, probably because they’re so easy to get involved in. If you’re looking for somewhere to publish your response, please consider sending it to a different publication — it helps us get the word out to a new audience. Got a great idea for a prompt? Tell us about it.

Upcoming projects

More poetry chain collaborations using a several different poetic forms.

A poetry reading collaboration, exploring how much we leave open to interpretation, and how much others’ interpretations affect our own.

Ending soon

Sestina Synthetica is drawing to a close with the two poems about halfway through and a third just kicking off. Individual stanzas have been published in several other publications, which has helped boost our readership (thanks, guys!) and we’ve gone beyond what we expected with beautifully cohesive poems and even a poem-within-a-poem-within-a-poem collaboration. We’ve closed the sign-up forms for Sestina Synthetica, but new stanzas are still going up on a regular basis, so keep checking back!

Gone…for now

The Inspiration: Celebration project has been wildly popular with many poets and storytellers taking the opportunity to thank those who have inspired us. We’re temporarily closing this project to focus on our new projects, but keep working on those tributes, because we’ll reopen for submissions in August.

Got an idea? Let us know!

Remember, Chalkboard only accepts submissions that are either a contribution to a current project or a kick-off post for a new project. So if our current fiction and poetry projects aren’t calling out to you, feel free to submit your own idea. More info.

Until next time!

~ Chalkboard editors

Chalkboard check-in, April 2017 was originally published in Chalkboard on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.