IndieWeb Carnival hosting Q&A with Zachary Kai

I hosted my first IndieWeb Carnival in May 2024 on the topic of creative environments and I’m hosting another one in May 2026 with a new topic.

While waiting for May, a fellow carnivalist Zachary Kai (who is hosting this month’s carnival with the topic of Intersecting Interests, you should participate!) reached out to do a bit of a Q&A with me about hosting the carnival. In addition to me, he has also asked a bunch of others.

The original one was posted in Zachary’s site but I wanted to share my answers in my blog as well.

What drew you to this theme?

My theme was creative environments. At the time, I was unemployed and spent more time than usual following my creative ideas — mostly writing — and spent a lot of time doing that outside of my home: in the libraries, pubs, trains and so on.

To me, leaving home and going somewhere with vibrant life and buzz was a major influence in my own creativity. I was wondering how others experienced the effect of their environment to their creative process so I picked that theme.

Manu's People and Blogs was an inspiration as well. Around the same time, I had read a bunch of stories from fellow bloggers on the topic through their interviews for that publication.

Did you consider any other prompts before settling?

No. It was already something I had been thinking about and when I was encouraged to host one myself, I immediately knew where I wanted to go with it. I have been thinking about other prompts ever since though which led me to pick up another hosting spot for this following May where we'll explore love letters.

How did you decide on your prompt's wording?

The main part of my prompt was:

What kind of environments you create in and what works for you or what you’d like to improve. Has things changed lately? If yes, was it intentional or forced and how has it affected your creative energy?

I had an idea for what I wanted to ask: how different environments affect people's creativity and output (or does it even affect at all). I wanted to keep it bit vague and open however because there are so many different people participating in these carnivals and I wanted to give everyone an opportunity to explore it from their perspective.

I added a

Or you can interpret in a different way that I didn’t even consider when choosing the topic. World is your oyster.

prompt to explicitly give people the permission to write about whatever they wanted — it is their blog after all! While I appreciate the narrowed focus these kinds of thing bring, I always enjoy open prompts that allow me to write about whatever fits my blog best so I tried to offer the same to people participating in my festival month.

Did hosting change how you think about the theme?

Not really. I expected this to be a thing that affects people differently and the posts reflected that. Some people didn't see an effect at all and they wrote wherever they happened to be at, some were similar to me that they got their ideas flowing best when they were outside of home and others found their creativity best when in familiar environment at home.

Did the submissions surprise you in any way?

I wouldn't say surprised by I was definitely delighted! I got 26 entries and many of them from blogs that I hadn't followed before. There was a lovely diversity of people doing different things, people from around the globe and a few that led to me staying in touch and continuing discussions about variety of topics in the year and half that followed.

Hosting a carnival is a wonderful opportunity to learn about new things, new perspectives and meet new people. I highly recommend it for everyone!