Saturday Night Special presents: Fever

A blurred motion shot of a person in a vibrant, multicolored dress against a streaked, colorful background, creating a dynamic visual.

Join us online for an evening of literary performance and open mic readings

Featuring:
Justin Demeter
Amanda Johnston

Theme: Fever
(scroll down for writing prompt)

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

Saturday, August 29, 2026
8:00pm Central time

Online Event
Free Admission

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The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to 3 MINUTES MAX
Scroll down for monthly writing prompt

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Meeting ID: 837 4279 2148

Passcode: 030750

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Author Bios

Justin Demeter is a queer/trans poet and painter who lives and loves in Oakland, CA. He has poems published by New Words Press, Oxford University Press, Beyond the Veil Press, Feather Press, and others. His special talents include climbing things, parallel parking, and catching falling objects. Justin peddles paperbacks on mental health for a living.
Learn more: https://www.justindemeterart.com/

Amanda Johnston is a writer, visual artist, and the 61st Poet Laureate of Texas. She is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter, and editor of Praisesong for the People: Poems from the Heart and Soul of Texas. Her work has appeared in numerous online and print publications, among them Callaloo, Poetry Magazine, The Moth Radio Hour, Bill Moyers, The Rumpus, and the anthologies Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism. She is a former Board President of Cave Canem Foundation and founder of Torch Literary Arts.

Learn more: https://www.amandajohnston.com/

Write with Friends! Register for The Write-In!

LET’S WORK ON THE THEME TOGETHER!

Join me the week before SNS, on **THURSDAY** afternoon, **Aug. 27**, for the monthly Write-In, a generative online workshop with Hollie Hardy.
Write-In Details/ Sign Up

August Writing Prompt: Fever

We usually think of fever as something to cure, a symptom of the body invaded. But a fever is also evidence of a body fighting back, a threshold where perception blurs, dreams become vivid, memories return unexpectedly, and reality takes on the strange logic of heat.

Language, too, can run a fever. Desire burns. Anger simmers. Cities bake beneath record temperatures. Crowds catch a fever for a cause, a celebrity, a revolution. Grief can feel feverish. So can passion. This month’s inspiration poems (see event page for full prompt) move through illness, longing, hunger, plague, politics, environmental catastrophe, and ecstatic imagination, using fever less as a diagnosis than as a kind of energy, vibration, or a way of seeing.

What happens when something overheats? What begins to melt, distort, or transform? What survives the fever?

SOME IDEAS TO GET YOU STARTED:

Write about a literal fever that felt scary or memorable — your own or someone else’s. Paint the scene with unexpected images, metaphors, sensory details.
Think of fever not as illness but as rapture. Write about a moment when you lost yourself completely— laughing, singing, dancing, loving, painting, praying, protesting, rolling down a hill, or watching a storm roll in.
Explore an obsession. What have you caught that you can't seem to shake? A person, an idea, an ear worm, a memory, a fear, a question.
Write from the perspective of something that burns: a wildfire, a light bulb, a star, an engine, a candle, a city sidewalk in August. What kind of fever does it carry?
Imagine a collective fever rather than an individual one. What is your neighborhood, your family, your country, or the internet burning with right now?
Borrow the dream logic of a fever dream. Let impossible transitions happen naturally: rooms become forests, strangers become relatives, the dead return, time folds in on itself. Resist explaining the leaps.
Think about something "running hot": anger, passion, creativity, jealousy, climate, machinery, love. Follow that metaphor until it transforms into something unexpected.
Write a piece in which every image contains heat or its opposite. Steam, sweat, sunlight, friction, embers, melted wax, ice packs, cool sheets, rain on hot pavement. Let temperature become the poem's emotional vocabulary.
Begin with restraint and end in abandon. Let the fever build through repetition, longer sentences, bolder images, or increasingly ecstatic language.

As ever, the theme is optional — an invitation, not a requirement; feel free to interpret loosely or ignore.