Thought SPWM 2026 was over?
Surprise! SPWM Mag is Back!
Surprise! SPWM Mag is Back!
/Issue ⑪
It’s your editors, Chrystal and nor!
We’re delighted to share with you the first of three issues for SPWM26’s Magazine, in a year that marks the community’s shift from Facebook to Discord, with a new Senior Mod team comprising poets with recently published collections. In these issues, we hope to celebrate SPWM26, by spotlighting the rich variety of responses from participants over the month, and the larger writing ecosystem and processes that SPWM plays a part in.
Also, a huge shoutout to everyone who participated, whether you shared thirty poems on Discord or attempted the prompts in the privacy of your notebooks, as well as the wonderful team at Sing Lit Station and our Junior Mods, whose tireless behind-the-scenes work makes this hectic event possible every year!
As two first-time Senior Mods, we were fascinated by how expansive the prompts were, and the wide range of responses that participants came up with. We were also intrigued by the resonant themes recurring across prompts—all of which were independently designed!—and the common threads that arose in poems responding to seemingly unrelated prompts, speaking to our shared preoccupations and concerns as a writing community.
For this first issue, we want to take a closer look at how the daily writing prompts came to be. To do so, we invited our fellow Senior Mods to join us in providing a behind-the-scenes look into this process. In a serendipitous fashion, we chose prompts from each of the three prompt categories this year: sponsored prompts (Shivram on Day 17: The Big Debut Prompt), prompts inspired by our writing interests and practices (Kimberley on Day 29: The I Have Loved Everyone I've Met Prompt, and Sher Ting on Day 20: The Artsy Prompt), and prompts derived from our recently published collections (nor on Day 4: The Lost in Translation Prompt, and Chrystal on Day 12: The Strawberry Prompt).
In these mini Q&As, we asked each Senior Mod to share how they conceptualised each prompt, the types of responses they expected, and the poems that surprised them, sometimes by defying these expectations. We also spotlight some Senior Mod picks of memorable poems, as well as those with lines that they wish they had written!
We would also like to announce that there is now a SPWM Prompt Generator on the Sing Lit Station website! This random generator contains prompts from all past SPWMs since 2014, for when you are facing writer’s block, when you need inspiration, or when you feel nostalgic for the rush of SPWM, so aptly encapsulated in these following lines:
“weren’t we only just celebrating words?
cool nights at nine sharp waiting for the prompt
will we be sparring - metaphor as swords?
too many drafts are sighed at, scrapped, then stomped!”
— Gan See Siong, “I love everyone at SingPoWriMo” (SPWM26, Day 29)
We hope that you’ll enjoy this behind-the-scenes view of SPWM from the Senior Mods’ vantage point, as well as our selection of poems in this issue. See you in the next one!
