Every December, I take a deep dive into National Public Radio’s Books We Love list. Books are endlessly fascinating to me and NPR’s recommendations guide my holiday shopping as well as my To Be Read/ Listened To list for the upcoming year. I am starting off 2024 with 40 creativity prompts drawn from the books NPR’s staff loved in 2023. Some of these books were read by someone in my household in 2023 (my favorite audiobook listen of 2023? Peggy Ornstein’s Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater.) Some were purchased as presents for my favorite readers (All the Beauty in the World, Cassandra in Reverse, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, Hit Girls: Women of Punk in the USA, 1975-1983, and Lou Reed: The King of New York.) The rest have been added to my very ambitious- and very long- To Be Read/ Listened To list. I hope that these prompts inspire you creatively and encourage you to add at least one of these titles to your reading list for the upcoming year.
There is only one rule to this prompt challenge: the daily prompt should serve as the title of your piece OR all the words in the daily prompt should be integrated into your piece somehow.
It is my honor and pleasure to publish your prompt responses on Brave & Reckless. I welcome poetry, prose, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, essays, and high-res original art inspired by the prompt.
How to Submit
- Email your submission to her.red.pen.wordsmithing@gmail.com
- Writing can be submitted in the body of the email or as a separate Word document or PDF
- If you are submitting writing, please include a suggested image to accompany your work. Unsplash and Pixabay are two of my favorite sites for royalty-free images.
- Your email should include your name EXACTLY as you want it to appear on Brave & Reckless, a short biography (if you haven’t sent me one in the last few months), and any links you want shared.
I will start accepting responses to the NPR’s Books We Love Creativity Prompt Challenge immediately, but I will not start publishing them until the day that particular daily prompt is published. For instance, writing and art inspired by the book title A Study in Drowning will be published starting January 4, 2024.
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January/February 2024
NPR’s Books We Love Creativity Prompt Challenge
Hosted by Brave & Reckless
Artificial
The Wren, the Wren
The Frozen River
A Study in Drowning
What the Dead Know
Symphony of Secrets
Our Hideous Progeny
The Salt Grows Heavy
My Head Has a Bellyache
Hestia Strikes a Match
Landscapes
Weyward
Some Desperate Glory
Ink Blood Sister Scribe
The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It
Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries
Cassandra in Reverse
Take What You Need
The God of Endings
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
Time’s Echo
Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers
You, Again
The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen
The Collected Regrets of Clover
To Shape a Dragon’s Breath
All the Beauty in the World
Unraveling
Yellowface
We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I
I Have Some Questions for You
The Last Devil to Die
We Were Once a Family
The Probability of Everything
He Who Drowned the World
This Bird Has Flown
The Reformatory
The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece
American Whitelash
The King of New York
Submit by email to her.red.pen.wordsmithing@gmail.com for publication
Instagram: #NPRBooksWeLoveChallenge | @stitchypoet
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