It’s been just under a year since I started the Spooky Poet Club, an online community of poets and other writers with a fondness for horror and the supernatural. It began back in October 2023 (aka Spooky Poem Month, but that’s another story), with a series of four horror-themed workshops on Discord. The themes for each week were Haunted, Alien, Occult and Monstrosity, and the results were some brilliant, spine-chilling poems.
Since then, I’ve been hosting an online writing workshop each month, each on a different theme. Coming up with the exercises has been a fun challenge, making for some enjoyable research and challenging me to broaden the horizons of my own writing!
Here’s a few examples:
Right: slide from ‘Gothic’ workshop, image created by Peter Bucks on Unsplash.
Since then we’ve had some pretty diverse themes, although each one has had some thread connecting it back to the core theme of the Spooky Poet Club. The themes have been: A.I, Magical Thinking, Administration, Sublime, Liminal, Gothic, Drowned, Deviant, and this month, Dirt (because some horror is far from glamorous):
Magical Thinking cover image by Hanusan Fabregas on Unsplash.
Administration cover image by fritsdejong on Unsplash.
The Sublime cover image ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ painted by Caspar David Friedrich.
Liminal cover image by Antipolygon on Unsplash.
Gothic cover image by Nathan McDine on Unsplash.
Drowned cover image by Stormseeker on Unsplash.
Deviant cover image by Alexandre Boucey on Unsplash.
Dirt cover image by Sahand Hoseini on Unsplash.
A pretty fun mix, right? I’m pretty proud of the aesthetics too, which I owe entirely to copyright-free photography available on Unsplash. It makes me happy to look at all those cover images together and reflect on how far me and my modest community have come.
And that’s without even getting into Spooky Poem Month 2024… watch this space!