It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to settle on a concept. I went back and forth between asking for art or asking for writing. I was debating asking people for a single word to collage into a poem of sorts, but I decided against it. That would require me to ask way more people! My supervisor suggested the two sentence horror story, and so I ran with it.
To acquire these submissions, I went around my work (I work at the Pratt library) with post-it notes, asking my coworkers and supervisors to write a two sentence "horror something". I explained what the project was, as I felt weird asking for something without clarifying what I would be using it for.
After I became too shy to pester my coworkers, I decided to reach out to people through text:
"(insert name here) my guy,
do you want to help me out with something
i'm doing this crowdsource project where i'm asking ppl
to write something and i'm putting them together to make something
if you want to be a part of it just write a two sentence (or justshort in general) horror something! it doesn't have to be a narrative and tbh it can just be for vibes. it's very much giving "for sale baby shoes never worn" or something like that.
if you do not want to be a part of it that is totally ok i understand thanks!"
Because I didn't provide any sort of prompt besides "horror," naturally everyone's submissions were different. I anticipated and encouraged this. When it came time to assemble the pieces, I grouped together the submissions that were similar in tone and subject matter. I added line breaks and arranged the stanzas to be littered across the page.