Response writing is an wonderful way to get yourself writing, and can have an immediacy about it that other types of writing do not. However the most common way to do this form of writing has historically been to read the newspaper or look at news headlines and write from them. This style of writing goes back to literary greats like Jules Vern but some people might struggle with this style of information and inspiration gathering as news stories can be a little harrowing and even triggering for some. So what to do?

The answer can lay in special interest groups and mailing lists. Many specalist publications like Nature have mailing lists that were orginally designed for journalists but now are often news drops for the interested general public. You can often sign up to these for free and though the free versions do not give you the whole articles to read they do give you summaries and titles which can be used to do further research and to write from. Also if it is a subject you are interested in you might want to get that paid subscription anyway. I personally prefer reading the whole article and then doing research around that but it’s fine to just look at headline or article title and think “what else could that mean?” and start writing from there.

Within education this is known as Magpying and is not considered stealing or a copyright issue in most instances but laws, especially around digital stuff, are often changed and also vary wildly from country to country so checking up on your current local laws can be a good idea.

Another good source are special interest groups like fungi, brutalist archecture, football cards etc… these are often found on platforms like Facebook or specialist blogs and are full of photos and little stories about local history aspects which can often lead you on a research adventure of your very own – do not take peoples photos to publish next to your poems without getting the correct permissions, and as these are not professional publications it is considered nice to ask if people are happy for you to write from the images, but in many countries it is not a legal requirement. Be mindful not to be a creep and only go with publically shared non-personal photos ie trees, fancy cars, landscapes. Camera clubs are normally happy to work with writers if you talk to them first.

There is also the rise of positive news mailing lists and sites that often use platforms such as substack and mastodon.

Of course we here at WoPo also endeavour to supply images and snippets to do response writing exercises with on a regular basis which can be found here.