The prospect of a visit to a museum, theatre or art gallery is tantalisingly close. Create a gallery of your heart.

Some of you noticed last week that we’ve now racked up a year’s worth of Dark Angels Notes. The passage of time is inevitable, but don’t those beating wings still catch you by surprise?

Change is happening. That’s good, but the odd wobble now and then is only to be expected.

As we teeter on the emerald verges of May, this week’s prompt celebrates Short Story Month.

Welcome back to our writerly thoughts to distract, inspire and reassure you. Be well, keep reading, keep writing and know that we’re always here.

Northern Ireland has been in the news for all the wrong reasons, but all the right ones too.

Last night on the Advanced Writing Course we had an interesting discussion around the sense of smell, particularly how the perception of odours can vary significantly from person to person.

Think of a family holiday tradition. Who’s there? What do you do? What does the celebration taste like? Smell like?

Consider a problem or idea you’re currently struggling with; it could be something personal to you or an event that’s popped up in the news over the last few days.

This week’s prompt comes via an interview with A.E. Stallings in Lightbox Poetry.

Read the poem below by Taranki poet, Elizbeth Smither. Now, write a poem that begins with a question. Keep going, but don’t try too hard to answer it.

Read the poem below by American poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Read the poem below by serial rulebreaker, ee cummings. Consider all the ways he disregards conventions in punctuation, language, spacing, structure, rhyme and metre.

To honour this month’s love-filled celebrations, we read Pablo Neruda’s yearnful poem Here I Love You at our Tuesday night gathering.

We’re going to run an online Dark Angels course that explores connections between visual and verbal art. It’s a big field, and the connections are many, not least because each individual will make unique connections.

At our gathering this week, we responded to Sarah Howe’s prose poem, [There were barnacles…]. Prose poetry is a genre that mixes up the lyrical and rythmical elements of poetry with the standard elements of prose, such as punctuation and no line breaks.

Last week I had the unusual (for this year) experience of running a Dark Angels course – a live, residential one with real people.