New Dawn is a collection of stories, essays, and poetry by writers who have achieved sobriety after active addiction. The poetry and prose do not need to be about recovery. However, recovery centered work is welcome, it’s just not required.
The theme of this anthology is ‘gathering fire.’ We live in a world that asks those who struggle with addiction to cool down our passion, go quiet, to become small. In this New Dawn series, we challenge societal expectations and encourage you to gather fire in the dead of winter to light up your creative pursuits. Your submission does not have to be about literal fire. It just needs the elemental inspiration behind it. If you feel stuck on this, below, you can find a few creative writing prompts to spark up some ideas:
- If you are able, sit down with your back straight and your feet on the ground. If this is not accessible to you, just get into a comfortable position. Imagine a green campfire in front of you, sit with it. Listen to the crackle, the popping, the gentle wind that stokes the flames. Now, imagine putting your hand in the fire and grabbing a fireball from the flame. Place that flame onto a loose-leaf piece of paper. Now, free write for 20 minutes. When you are done, grab one to three lines of this piece, and write that on top of a piece of paper and use these lines as the beginning of your gathering fire submission.
- Build a fire in poem form: gather the materials, build the fire, stoke the fire, sit by the fire. Now, write what the fire has to say to you.
- In the dead of winter, we think of death, we await rebirth, we dream of spring. Awaiting warmth can feel a lot like a cycle in addiction. We try to wait for the right time to get right, for the big bad to happen that is the catalyst to our sobriety; but sometimes that warmth never comes and we wait again and again. Did you wait for the warmth, or did you build a fire? What did that transition look like? How did it feel in the body? Write to that fire, to that warmth, to a reader who is waiting for spring too.
Submission Guidelines
- We don’t accept simultaneous submissions or previously published work.
- All submissions must be a Word document using Times New Roman, 12pt, double spaced, numbered pages, with a title page that has the title, your name, word count, and contact information.
- For nonfiction and fiction entries, you may submit up to 3 pieces no longer than 1,200 words each.
- For poetry, you may submit up to 6 pages of poetry.
- All submissions should be in pdf, .doc, .docx format
- Submit to Sarah Velázquez (Program Manager & Editor) at [email protected]
