20 Poem Challenge- Invite and Pep Talk!

The Book of Better Things, by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada), 2016.

Another ekphrastic 20 Poem Challenge begins this week. We hope you will join us.
 
The challenge starts on Thursday the 1 of the month.
 
The rules are easy, and the same as last year: every weekday morning for 20 days, a specially selected visual art prompt will be posted on The Ekphrastic Review.
 
www.ekphrastic.net
 
You commit to writing a poem each day, inspired by the artwork.
 
The poem can be intimately connected to the painting, which you are free to research if you wish to have more information to work with. Or it can be a springboard for your imagination.
 
You can spend as little as five minutes or as much as the whole day.
 
There are no deadlines. You can work on your poems forever, or throw them away later.
 
You can submit your best poems. Please do not inundate us with drafts of everything and send only your finest! There is no deadline for when you can submit them. You can do it the day after, or next year.
 
Your commitment is to yourself and the project is self-directed. We will not be emailing you each day to remind you. The art will be posted under “20 Poem Challenge” and you will be writing with other people across the world!
 
I will be posting each day’s artwork on Facebook, so if you need a reminder, add me to your Facebook. But the art will be on site each morning without fail.
 
The selection of visual artworks in this year’s 20 Poem Challenge is diverse and, I hope, unpredictable. I have strived to select a range of curious pieces. Some you will love, some you will dislike, and some you won’t know what to do with. That is the best way to write something you aren’t expecting to write- by approaching your work with a variety of emotions and feelings. You will find yourself looking deeper and this will be reflected in your work.
 
Please tell all of your friends about the 20 Poem Challenge. The Challenge is a way of generating participants and new readers to Ekphrastic, and there’s only one reason for that- a wider audience for the wonderful, brilliant, beautiful, diverse writers we are honoured to have published.
 
New participants are welcome to join the challenge any time. If they are late, they can catch up on early posts on the weekends if they wish. They are free to sign up officially or to just do it.
We hope you do participate with us in this fun project!
 
Thanks so much for reading and writing Ekphrastic.
 
Lorette C. Luzajic