Chalkboard check-in, April 2017

It’s been another busy month for Chalkboard. So busy, in fact, that we’ve now got more than 2K followers. So thank you everyone for helping make Chalkboard what it is: the home of asynchronous collaboration!

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