Volume 10, Chapter 12 | October 2023

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Image by Marc Schlossman

Dear writers, readers and friends,

We are here with the final issue of Visual Verse. The end of an era; the start of a new one. At this moment, Visual Verse has published 11,234 pieces of original writing from 3,330 writers all over the world. We are yet to learn of another publication that can boast such a prolific output and the myriad of styles, perspectives and ideas that Visual Verse enshrines. Indulge us while we say a few words from the heart, announce the legacy plans for Visual Verse and introduce our image and writers for this month.

From Preti Taneja:

Ten years ago I couldn’t get published. I had a novel draft and over 30 rejections for it. I went to Berlin to see my friend, Kristen. She sat me down over bagels and told me to stop feeling sorry for myself. The first thing I needed was an editor (she was right). The second thing was a project that would remind me why the process of making art is more important than the outcome, that there is joy in community, and that writing is nothing but attempts to say – and sometimes we need a prompt to achieve that. Of course, she was right. She had a project in its infancy with the designer, Pete Lewis, and it needed an editorial collaborator. That’s how Visual Verse was born. Kristen would select the images, I would commission the lead writers, Pete would design a beautiful website and together we would curate a free literary space that people could be inspired by, and surprise themselves with. Its generative constraints: the hour, the word count, would provide a gentle pressure. The image would
be the starting point…

In that first month, we received about 30 submissions. Every day I’d get up and check the inbox, read and publish. Since then, the community has grown to over 150 submissions a month. The team has grown, too, with a rotation of volunteers, assistant editors and guest curators who have stepped in to help out and bring their own eye to the site.

We are so grateful for the camaraderie and commitment you have all shown. Some of you post each month and we’ve got to see your work develop and become familiar with your style. There are names in the archive who were unpublished or relatively unknown when they first submitted but have gone on to become some of the most exciting and award-winning writers working today: Isabel Waidner, Ashley Hickson Lovence, Eley Williams, Nisha Ramayya, Glen James Brown, Will Harris, Megan Hunter, So Mayer, Adam Biles, Alex Pheby, Maame Blue; there are poets such as Sandeep Parmar and Richard Georges, Karthika Nair and Rachel Allen, Anthony Anaxagorou and Inua Ellams, Rishi Dastidar and respected names in international literature: Niven Govinden, Kate Briggs, Jennifer Croft, Nikesh Shukla, Ivan Vladislavić, Chika Unigwe and more. Long after we stop publishing, the list provides a testimony to early 21st Century writing and aesthetics, our concerns, hopes and responses to political moments from the
Johnson-Trump-Modi era, the Black Lives Matter movement and the avoidable tragedy of the Grenfell Fire to the stress of the global pandemic: it offers a treasure box to explore.

The images and writings within Visual Verse are testimony to a decade that has seen so much, and to the group of writers who have defined it. Many of the poems and short stories you’ll find collected in anthologies by writers on our site began life as VV experiments and have grown into bigger things. As my own life has changed with house moves, writing and publishing two books, beginning full-time teaching and more, the writers of Visual Verse have been constant friends. Reading the site each month never fails to refresh my creativity; it helps to remember that when we face the blank page we are all in the same moment of fear and potential as each other…

From Kristen Harrison:

“We are all in the same moment of fear and potential as each other…” – I love this sentiment from Preti. It epitomises the pain and beauty that artists share and the glue that has bound our unique community for ten years. I am blessed to have had this project take root the way it has and to have become connected to so many brilliant minds. My own art does not exist unless it is in conversation with others and the rare alchemy that brought myself, Preti and Pete together, to create conversations with you, is something that I will spend my life searching for again. The holy grail of creativity.

Visual Verse has survived the past few years thanks to the incredibly generous time and energy of our editors Isabel Brooks and Lucie Stevens, and editorial assistants Zaynab Bobi and Ashish Kumar Singh. These people, and those who volunteered before them (Tam Eastley, Jordan Fleming, Luke Smith, Nahda Tahsin, Wes White to name a few), have been the lifeblood of Visual Verse during a period of grueling external challenges. Their work enabled us to continue publishing an incomparable quantity of writing each month and I will be forever grateful to them.

To that end, I have handed over our final issue to our current team of editors so that you can see their extraordinary talents for yourself. The image prompt is a detail from a documentary photograph by our long-time friend and patron, photographer Marc Schlossman (https://www.marcschlossman.com/) . It is abstract and challenging; chosen to push your writing boundaries one last time. As Ashish said, this image is as much about what is unseen as what is seen. I relish these kinds of images as they frustrate the heck out of you writers, and ultimately yield the best and most unexpected writing. The brilliant responses from our leads are proof.

We begin, on page 1, with our co-founder Preti Taneja (https://twitter.com/PretiTaneja) . Preti is a writer and activist. Her first novel We That Are Young (https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/paperback-shop/we-that-are-young) (Galley Beggar Press/ AA Knopf), is a translation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, tracking the rise of fascism in contemporary India. It won the 2018 Desmond Elliott Prize and was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and the Prix Jan Michalski. It is published in translation worldwide. Her second book is Aftermath (https://www.andotherstories.org/aftermath/) (Transit Books/And Other Stories), a creative non-fiction lament on trauma, terror, prison and grief, following the London Bridge terror attack in 2019. It was a Book of the Year in the New Yorker, the New Statesman and The White Review, and was shortlisted for the British Book of the Year. Aftermath is the winner of the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize awarded ‘for literature that is forward thinking
and fearless in its ambition and execution’.

Isabel Brooks (https://twitter.com/izzy_maude14) has just finished an MA in Creative Writing at UEA, and is half way through a novel. She read English at Cambridge and grew up in Suffolk. Her astute editorial judgement has been a huge asset to Visual Verse and it is a thrill to finally be able to showcase her brilliant writing.

Ashish Kumar Singh (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude) (he/him) is a queer Indian poet whose work has appeared in Passages North, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Grain, Chestnut Review, Fourteen Poems, Foglifter, Atlanta Review and elsewhere. Currently, he serves as an editorial assistant at Visual Verse and a poetry reader at ANMLY.

Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi (https://twitter.com/ZainabBobi) , a Nigerian-Hausa poet, artist, and photographer from Bobi, is currently an undergraduate at Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto. She is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Sixteen Songs of Loss (Sundress Publications Chapbook Competition, 2023).

Lucie Stevens (https://twitter.com/LucieStevens_) , who has been my right-arm woman since 2015, isn’t able to contribute this month as she has a big UN editing job consuming her, but I want to say a special thank you to this remarkable and talented woman. Her skill and mindset have kept the car on the road when the rain is pelting, visibility is low and the driver (me) is unfit to be behind the wheel… so to speak! Thank you, Lucie.

The Future of Visual Verse:

A collection of art and words such as ours cannot simply disappear. We are thrilled to announce that Visual Verse will be taken into the archive at Newcastle University’s Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts (http:// https://www.ncl.ac.uk/ncla/) (NCLA) in the UK, which Preti is Director of. We’re grateful to the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics for recognising the incredible resource the archive offers, and working with us to preserve it. Thanks to this support, the Visual Verse website will remain online at visualverse.org for the foreseeable future so you can continue to read, enjoy, teach with and be inspired by it. You can also continue to access (and link to) your work in the archive (https://visualverse.org/images) . There are no active plans to publish new issues of Visual Verse but that is not to say it won’t happen.

All copyright to your work remains with you. But if you do republish your VV-inspired pieces elsewhere, we hope you’ll give us a wave!

So, this is a thank you, dear readers. It has been a beautiful journey and we’re so proud to have shared it with you. We will write again at the end of the month, once publishing of the final 100 pieces is complete.

Kristen and Preti
and the VV crew

Volume 10, Chapter 11 | September 2023

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Image by Kitty Harrison x Dylan Sauerwein

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Behold: the penultimate issue of Visual Verse. Make your words count this month, dear writers. Some of you have been asking what will happen to the Visual Verse website (https://visualverse.org) after our final issue next month. Rest assured that your words are not going anywhere. We are finalising plans with a brilliant partner who will take over the website and ensure it stays online for the foreseeable future. There are no immediate plans to publish new issues but it is certainly a possibility for the future, under the direction of our successor. More to come on this when we launch our final issue next month.

For now, enjoy this little collage by me, Kristen “Kitty” Harrison, remixing a glorious moon image by photographer Dylan Sauerwein. It could almost be an homage to that rare Blue Supermoon of three nights ago; a moon that came and went behind a fog of Melbourne cloud and thus remains an enigma to me. There are endless stories in the sky, especially at night, and I have created this work to begin the next story with you.

For our featured wordsmiths this month, we have made space for some of our most-published writers from the past decade.

Our lead writer for September is an absolute favourite here at Visual Verse and we could not let it pass without bringing his work to the fore once more. Rishi Dastidar (https://twitter.com/BetaRish?s=20) is a writer and editor whose third collection, Neptune’s Projects (https://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/neptune-s-projects) , is published in the UK by Nine Arches Press. He is editor of The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century (https://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/the-craft) (Nine Arches Press), and co-editor of T (https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/maisie-lawrence/too-young-too-loud-too-different/9781472155054/) oo Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (http://) (Corsair). If you do one thing for your poetry selves, make sure you follow Rishi and his work.

We first published our next writer, Angi Holden (https://twitter.com/josephsyard?s=20) , in 2015 and she has amassed over 40 pieces (https://visualverse.org/writers/angi-holden/) of ekphrastic writing with us. Angi is a retired lecturer whose prose and poetry explores aspects of her identity – wife and mother, academic and teacher, writer, gardener and craftsperson.

Lee Evans has also recently retired, from the Bath Family YMCA. He lives in Bath, Maine (USA) with his wife. With this gift of retirement he is devoting more time to building castles in the air… and putting words on the page. He can continue his legacy with Visual Verse (https://visualverse.org/writers/lee-evans/) which started with his first piece published in 2016.

And finally, Myfanwy Cook (http://myfanwycook.com) , also writing under the name Vanni Cook (https://visualverse.org/writers/vanni-cook/) , is another prolific contributor to Visual Verse with her first piece published in 2014. Myfanwy designs and teaches an eclectic range of creative workshops and is a devotee of words and their power to change lives in a positive way. She currently works with medical students in the U.K. to bridge the communication gap with patients and loves encouraging aspiring writers of all genres to share their work. Her own published work includes poetry, short stories, articles and novels.

While you are writing this month, keep space in your thoughts for poet Gboyega Odubanjo (https://www.gofundme.com/f/gboyega-odubanjo-beloved-son-brother-friend?utm_campaign=p_lico+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer) , for whom the British poetry community is deeply grieving. His death this week has come as a huge shock and there are many questions unanswered. You can show your support by reading and sharing his words (some of which can be found at the Poetry Society (https://poems.poetrysociety.org.uk/poets/gboyega-obubanjo/) or circulating on social media (https://twitter.com/gisselleyepes/status/1697269661677592717?s=20) ) and donating to his family’s fundraiser (https://www.gofundme.com/f/gboyega-odubanjo-beloved-son-brother-friend?utm_campaign=p_lico+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer) to establish the Gboyega Odubanjo Foundation for low-income Black writers. Our heartfelt sympathies to Gboyega’s family and friends.

So there you have it. You know what to do now: the image is the starting point, the text is up to you. Submissions close 15th September.

With love,

Kristen
(with Preti, Isabel, Lucie, Ashish, Zaynab and Wes)

Find the VV crew on socials:
Visual Verse (https://twitter.com/pretitaneja/)
Kristen Harrison (https://www.instagram.com/kittyharrison/)
Preti Taneja (https://twitter.com/PretiTaneja)
Lucie Stevens (https://twitter.com/LucieStevens_)
Ashish Kumar (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude) Singh (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude)
Zaynab Bobi (https://twitter.com/ZainabBobi)
Wes White (https://twitter.com/archaeologyBoy)

Volume 10, Chapter 10 | August 2023

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Image by Marie-Michèle Bouchard

Dear writers, readers and friends,

This issue is dedicated to Shuhada’ Sadaqat, Sinéad O’Connor. Some people make art, others are artists. You will know an artist because their life and work can barely be separated. Sinead O’Connor was an artist and her output was not just her music, powerful as it was. Her output was also her motherhood, her spirituality, her Irishness, her activism, her womanhood, her relentless empathy, her resistance and – of course – her willingness to speak on mental illness. She has left us with a catalogue of incredible music and she has also left us changed. She once said: “If I hope for anything as an artist, it’s that I inspire certain people to be who they really are.” That is my hope, too. That we art-makers and artists come to see that the very act of moving through this world can be our most powerful work.
The selection of this month’s image, by Marie-Michèle Bouchard (https://www.instagram.com/minusculemarie/) , was inspired by a quote by Louise Bourgeois, another artist who lived deeply in her work: “Look at it this way – a totem pole is just a decorated tree. My work is a confessional.”

We give you the totem, and a safe space to confess. Dig deep.

In response to this month’s image we kick off with work by Stephanie Ellis who is one of our most prolific contributors. Stephanie is a UK-based writer (Wrexham) of dark fiction whose work includes the novels, The Five Turns of the Wheel and Reborn, and novellas Bottled and Paused. Her poetry collections include the co-authored Elgin-nominated Foundlings with Cindy O’Quinn, the horror novella in verse, Lilith Rising, co-authored with Shane Douglas Keene and her solo homage to heavy metal, Metallurgy. Her latest folk horror novel, The Woodcutter, is out today (August 1st), more information can be found here: Upcoming Releases – Brigids Gate Press (https://brigidsgatepress.com/upcoming-releases) .

On page 2, a piece that made us chuckle by Lui Sit (https://www.lui-land.co.uk) . Liu writes short adult fiction, memoir, non-fiction and children’s middle grade. Her short stories are published online and in print journals and anthologies. Her debut middle grade children’s book is due to be released in 2024. Follow Liu on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Lui_Loowee_Sit) and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/lui.land/) .

And finally, a debut piece on Visual Verse by Ruby Nolan, a Melbourne-based creative. Ruby is passionate about building a sustainable, inclusive and joyous world. She is a published author and journalist, a DJ, and has written, directed and produced plays. She studied Journalism at RMIT University and is a communications officer.

There lies your inspiration for August, dear writers. You know what to do. Submissions close at midnight, UK time, on 15th August.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen
with Preti, Isabel, Lucie, Ashish, Zaynab and Wes White

Volume 10, Chapter 09 | July 2023

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A woman in a pink coat holds a red umbrella while she bends down to talk to someone through a car window. The image is from the 70s and looks like a older archival photograph.

Image by Jim Pickerell / Documerica
Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to the July issue of Visual Verse in which we celebrate the art of conversing with strangers. I have returned from a visit to Ireland where – despite the ever-invasive presence of technology in our lives – a vibrant culture of simple human interactions remains intact. I couldn’t walk two steps without a stranger making chit-chat. One woman was so keen to engage that, after eavesdropping on a conversation between my son and I as we stood at traffic lights, she insisted on walking us to “the best museum”. Only, she didn’t know where it was. We spent twenty minutes marching in the wrong direction while receiving an unsolicited historical walking tour of Dublin. The things you get for free, eh? Who needs Google maps when you’ve got the kindness of strangers. I’ve left Ireland with a resolve to engage more with random people to see what ideas and inspirations it might bring. Will you join me?

It’s not hard to see where the impetus for this month’s image selection came from. Hidden in this street scene from the archives of Documerica (https://www.documerica.org/) is a conversation. What do you hear? An interaction between strangers? A chance meeting of old friends? Something sweet or something more sinister? The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

We are hugely grateful to our four talented leads this month for their unique ekphrastic interpretations. First up we present Lynn White (https://lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com/) , writing from her home in north Wales. Lynn’s poetry is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Find her at lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com or on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Lynn-White-Poetry-1603675983213077/) .

On page 2 we present Tamanna Abdul-karim (https://twitter.com/TamKarim) . Born in Bangladesh and raised in the UK, Tamanna is a woman after my own heart: she always dreamed of empowering young people to achieve their fullest potential. She is a passionate English teacher who has been in service within Birmingham for sixteen years. She enjoys the raw and authentic experience of writing and sharing poetry. You can follow her work on Twitter (https://twitter.com/TamKarim) or Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/versesbyTam/) .

Róisín Leggett Bohan (https://twitter.com/LeggettBohan) joins us on page 3. Róisín was chosen for Poetry Ireland’s Introduction Series 2022. Her work can be found in Magma Poetry, New Irish Writing, Southword, Poetry Ireland’s ePub, Amsterdam Quarterly and elsewhere. Her poems have been commended/shortlisted for awards including the Allingham, Cúirt and MLC Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition. In 2022 she was the winner of Flash Fiction with Southword and the winner of CNF with Atlantic Currents II. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from UCC and is co-editor of HOWL New Irish Writing. You can find her at inkstainedwings.com (https://www.inkstainedwings.com) .

And on page 4, we welcome Sam Buchan-Watts (https://www.ncl.ac.uk/sacs/people/profile/sambuchan-watts.html) , author of the pamphlet Faber New Poets 15 and collection Path Through Wood (Prototype, 2021). Sam is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Newcastle University and he is currently working on a book about skateboarding, masculinity and queer culture.

Now, over to you, dear writers. You know what to do. Submissions close 15th July, midnight UK time.

Kristen
with Preti, Isabel, Lucie, Ashish, Zaynab and Wes

Find the VV crew on socials:
Visual Verse (https://twitter.com/pretitaneja/)
Kristen Harrison (https://www.instagram.com/kittyharrison/)
Preti Taneja (https://twitter.com/PretiTaneja)
Lucie Stevens (https://twitter.com/LucieStevens_)
Ashish Kumar (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude) Singh (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude)
Zaynab Bobi (https://twitter.com/ZainabBobi)
Wes White (https://twitter.com/archaeologyBoy)

Volume 10, Chapter 08 | June 2023

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A cat poses in the sunlight against two regal looking portraits of other cats

Image by Erica Marsland Huynh
Dear writers, readers and friends,

This month’s issue is dedicated to community. Community and connection have many benefits for us humans and this is particularly true for artists and writers. Somehow, amid the noise, we find ways to build communities that enable us to share our work safely and grow with our fellow artists. Whether it be a writing group with friends, a Friday night book launch or a summer retreat in a remote castle, artist-led events build vital networks and help us all to keep momentum.

When Preti, Pete and I started Visual Verse almost ten years ago, we could not have imagined the community we have today. It is diverse in every way, it is global and it is boundlessly generous. This is how I came to choose our three leads for June. All three writers are involved in running and/or attending writing groups, facilitating poetry workshops and giving their time to other community-based activities. I have seen them support each other with shout-outs on Twitter, encouraging both exploration and celebration of each other’s work. It is heartwarming and it reflects the essence of Visual Verse.

Being the month of the Gemini, we must also acknowledge the other side of the artist’s community-building efforts. Artists also seek solitude. Sometimes it’s physical solitude (a writing retreat, for example) and sometimes mental solitude (wearing headphones in a cafe). However we find it, we manage to be in the world and with ourselves at the same time. Your prompt this month, a portrait of a rather sanguine feline captured by photographer Erica Marsland Huynh, seems the perfect visual for this artistic dichotomy. Cats have a way of needing company and needing only themselves simultaneously. Somehow it works.

Kicking off our written responses is the fabulous Cáit O’Neill McCullagh (https://twitter.com/kittyjmac) , an archaeologist, ethnologist, and educator in higher education and community settings. Cáit started writing poems at home in the Highlands just a few years ago and over fifty of these are published in print and online, including in Northwords Now, Poetry Scotland, The Storms, Howl: New Irish Writing, Ink Sweat & Tears and here at Visual Verse. In 2022, she was a co-winner of Dreich’s Classic Chapbook Competition for ‘The songs I sing are sisters’ co-authored with Sinead McClure. Her first full collection will be published by Drunk Muse Press in early 2024. She continues to outrun her diagnosis of cancer identified in February 2022. You can find out more about her via her Linktree (https://linktr.ee/caitjomac) .

Andrew Stickland (https://twitter.com/AndrewStickland) lives in Cambridge, UK, where he writes poetry and fiction and also helps to run the Angles Writing Group (https://twitter.com/AnglesWriters) (more on that below). His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, and he has three previously published poetry collections. His first novel, The Arcadian Incident, was published earlier this year and two follow-ups, Escape to Midas and War Between Worlds, are due out in September, and then early next year, all from Lightning Books.

And on page 3 we present Kate Coghlan (https://twitter.com/Kate_Cogs) , a freelance writer/editor with an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths. Her work has been published by Mslexia, Loft Books, the Dulwich Festival, Spillwords and the Personal Bests Journal. This is her third appearance in Visual Verse and she is also a member of the Angles Writing Group with Andrew Stickland.

The Angles Writing Group (https://twitter.com/AnglesWriters) , based in Cambridge, has a mission to get as many of their members as possible into print, as often as possible, and we are very grateful that they regularly encourage members to try our challenge. At last count we had a dozen or so Angles members published with us. A lovely example of the tentacles of writing communities reaching far and wide.

There you have it, dear writers. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen
with Preti, Isabel, Lucie, Ashish, Zaynab and Wes

Find the VV crew on socials:
Visual Verse (https://twitter.com/pretitaneja/)
Kristen Harrison (https://www.instagram.com/kittyharrison/)
Preti Taneja (https://twitter.com/PretiTaneja)
Lucie Stevens (https://twitter.com/LucieStevens_)
Ashish Kumar (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude) Singh (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude)
Zaynab Bobi (https://twitter.com/ZainabBobi)
Wes White (https://twitter.com/archaeologyBoy)

Volume 10, Chapter 07 | May 2023

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Image by John Everett Millais/Birmingham Museums Trust
Dear writers, readers and friends,

In case you missed it, we dropped some pretty big news on Twitter (https://twitter.com/visual_verse/status/1650411123706068998?s=20) this week. In October 2023 we will publish our final issue of Visual Verse. This will conclude a full decade of publishing your glorious and eclectic words. We will grieve the beautiful space we have created with you, and the thrill of receiving your responses each month, but the time is right for us to move on to other things.

So, dear writers, there are six issues to go (including this one) and still plenty of time to challenge yourselves with our prompts. This month’s image – an oil painting by John Everett Millais, 1856, courtesy of Birmingham Museums Trust (https://www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/) – has strong fairytale vibes and I love it for all the tiny details. I challenge you to use all your senses to experience this image. Go beyond that immaculate double rainbow and seek out the subtler clues. What stories do they hold?

We are excited to present four fabulous leads this month to inspire you. On page 1, we feature Rani Selvarajah (https://twitter.com/Rani_writes) , a Berlin-based author from north-west London. Her debut novel, Savage Beasts (https://mybook.to/SavageBeasts) (HarperCollins) is out on 25 May 2023 and was longlisted for the Mo Siewcharran Prize. It is a reimagining of the Greek myth Medea, set during the rise of the East India Company in the 18th century. Pre-order (https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/savage-beasts-rani-selvarajah/7139588?ean=9780008556280) available from Bookshop.org.

Ekaterina Crawford (https://www.ekaterinacrawford.co.uk/) is a regular contributor to Visual Verse. She was born and grew up in Russia but relocated to the UK with her husband in 2006. She always loved writing but it’s only in the past few years that she’s pursued her passion and we are delighted to be home to some of her work. In recent years, Ekaterina has won poetry and short story competitions in Writers’ Forum Magazine, placed first in a Romance Category in Farnham Literary Festival Short Story Competition and had two poems and a short published by the Bournemouth Writing Prize Anthologies. Her war poem “Bucha” has reached the top 12% of Bridport Poetry Prize entries.

Sahana Ahmed (https://twitter.com/schahm) is a poet and novelist based in Gurugram, India. She is the author of Combat Skirts (Juggernaut, 2018) and the editor of Amity: peace poems (Hawakal, 2022). Her work has appeared, most recently, in The Hooghly Review, SheThePeople, and The Times of India, along with anthologies by Authorspress, Hybriddreich, and The Chakkar. You can find her online at sahanaahmed.com (https://www.sahanaahmed.com) .

And on page 4 we feature another Visual Verse regular, Jacinta Barton (https://twitter.com/jacbar_j) . Jacinta writes poetry, prose and short stories. She has been published online and in print, and she has an impressive archive of pieces with us here (https://visualverse.org/writers/jacinta-barton/) . She lives with her two sons in Co.Wexford, Ireland.

There you have it, dear writers. Show us your words.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen
with Preti, Isabel, Lucie, Ashish, Zaynab and Wes

PS: We live for originality so please avoid the word “Rainbow” in your title.

Find the VV crew on socials:
Visual Verse (https://twitter.com/pretitaneja/)
Kristen Harrison (https://www.instagram.com/kittyharrison/)
Preti Taneja (https://twitter.com/PretiTaneja)
Lucie Stevens (https://twitter.com/LucieStevens_)
Ashish Kumar (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude) Singh (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude)
Zaynab Bobi (https://twitter.com/ZainabBobi)
Wes White (https://twitter.com/archaeologyBoy)

Volume 10, Chapter 06 | April 2023

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Image by Sarah-Jane Crowson
Dear writers, readers and friends,

Ramadan Mubarak to all those our writers observing this month. May you find calm, set new creative goals and emerge with a fresh creative energy.

For April, we are very excited to present a special month-long collaboration with artist, writer and visual poet, Sarah-Jane Crowson (https://sarah-janecrowson.com/about-sarah-jane-crowson/) . Sarah-Jane was shortlisted for our writing prize in 2021 and we have been keenly watching her work evolve ever since. She creates exquisite collages that combine layers of images with found words.

Not only is Sarah-Jane responsible for your wonderful visual prompt this month, but she is also taking over our Instagram account and will be posting a prompt-a-day throughout April. Each and every day you will be greeted by one of Sarah’s beautiful works via Instagram. Use these prompts to ignite your morning pages, generate new work or to simply spark ideas. You are welcome to share your work in the comments on Instagram or just enjoy the prompts for yourself.

To inspire your words, we are thrilled to feature Lorelei Bacht on page 1. Lorelei is a much-loved contributor to Visual Verse and her recent work has appeared and/or is forthcoming in Mercurius, Anti-Heroin Chic, Menacing Hedge, Beir Bua, Sinking City, Barrelhouse, SWWIM, The Inflectionist Review, After the Pause, and elsewhere. Find her on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/lorelei.bacht.writer/) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/bachtlorelei) .

On page 2 we welcome Erica Viola, a newcomer to Visual Verse. Erica is a London-based writer of fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry and is originally from Omaha. She was shortlisted for Creative Futures award in 2020. You can find more of her work at linktr.ee/ericaviola.

So we invite you to write, as usual, a 50-500 word response to this image and we also invite you to head over the Instagram and enjoy a new prompt each day from Sarah-Jane. Be sure to submit your work to visualverse.org/submit by 15th April.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen
with Preti, Isabel, Lucie, Ashish, Zaynab and Wes

Find the VV crew on socials:
Visual Verse (https://twitter.com/pretitaneja/)
Kristen Harrison (https://www.instagram.com/kittyharrison/)
Preti Taneja (https://twitter.com/PretiTaneja)
Lucie Stevens (https://twitter.com/LucieStevens_)
Ashish Kumar (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude) Singh (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude)
Zaynab Bobi (https://twitter.com/ZainabBobi)
Wes White (https://twitter.com/archaeologyBoy)

Volume 10, Chapter 05 | March 2023

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Image by Adriaen van Utrecht/Rijksmuseum
Dear writers, readers and friends,

As you well know, our modus operandi at Visual Verse is to run a continual cycle of commissioning and publishing in order to reflect what’s happening in the world. Over the past decade your writing, imbued in our unique journal, has reflected many of the key moments in modern history: Trump’s rise, climate action, natural disasters, wars, global anti-racism activism, #metoo and now… the rise of AI.

So of course, we had to feature the most prolific up-and-coming writer of the moment – none other than ChatGPT (https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt) . The headlines would have us believe that this viral AI bot has writing skills so sophisticated we’ll all be obsolete tomorrow. We needed to see for ourselves.

I experimented with the bot over several days, using multiple images and dozens of commands. The results ranged from irrelevant (“Are you writing to the image I gave you? That description doesn’t sounds like it.”) to Hallmark greeting card (So let us not strive for perfection alone, But embrace the flaws that make us our own) and it seems to be very keen on rhyme (“write a poem between 50-500 words in response to X image” “Write it again but as a non-rhyming poem” “you’re still using rhyme, please rewrite again but with NO RHYMING” “why are you still rhyming, do you know what rhyming is?” and so on…). Finally, at 11pm on March 1st (Melbourne time) I got a poem that didn’t rhyme. As you can see from page 1, the final command “Please rewrite in the style of Samuel Beckett” produced a sub-par poem in the name of a legend for which I’m sure he is turning in his grave.

There are four things I’ve learned from working with ChatGPT:

There is craft in the command. For better or worse, getting a poem out of AI is a collaborative process and it forced me to think differently. It is not easy to yield a good poem, and it is clear we are still the ultimate authors of this technology, at least for poetry.

AI can write a poem but it can’t replace the poet. It can’t turn up to a meeting with a publisher and secure a book deal. It can’t sit in a low-lit pub reading poems to a captive audience. It can’t bring the humanity suffused in art. It can’t exist off-line. We can.

There is more to us than we know. We know relatively little about the human brain, so perhaps the proliferation of AI will force us creatives to go deeper into our own intelligence. Our unconscious minds are full of wonder and surprise – as our ekphrastic challenge shows each month – and I feel somewhat hopeful that writers, artists and the entrepreneurial minds will find their way to discovering more of their potential, not less.

If ever there is a time to put your work into the world it is now. AI feeds off the words, ideas and content that we – the humans – have put out there. Our talents and knowledge as artists and writers needs to be present and vocal during this transition. Our voices as a diverse and inclusive community need to be louder than ever. ChatGPT is riddled with stereotypes (as a crude example, try asking it to produce a poem that appeals to men, then a poem that appeals to women, and you’ll see what I mean) and we need to be speaking up and publishing more to ensure our DNA goes into the new life forming around AI.

As a publication, we have not yet formed an opinion about AI. We are watching, reading and talking as the topic unfolds. Personally, I am cautiously curious and this lead piece is presented not as an endorsement but as a call to action. Let’s us write more, better and louder.

It’s over to you, dear humans. We offer you a rich and wondrous still life dating back to 1631 by Adriaen van Utrecht (courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and look forward to receiving your responses. It’s OK if they rhyme, by the way, just not every line please. That’s a command.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen
with Preti, Isabel, Lucie, Ashish, Zaynab and Wes White

Volume 10, Chapter 04 | February 2023

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Image by Olga Naida
Dear writers, readers and friends,

For us artists, the month of February is often about seeking and exploring new pathways toward creativity, so we are inviting you to push yourself beyond your comfort zone with our latest prompt. Those on Twitter will have seen our posts inviting writers to transcend the first interpretation of our images and seek out deeper connections. The late Pau Casals i Defilló (Pablo Casals), a leading cellist from the early 20th century, said “the art of interpretation is not to play what is written”. This is easily transposed to ekphrastic writing. The art of ekphrasis is not to write what can be seen.

So when you are responding to our prompt we encourage you to stick strictly to the timeframe and think laterally. Or better yet, don’t think at all! Our challenge, especially the strict time frame, is about helping you reach a state of automatism to allow unexpected ideas to emerge. Many of you will already do automatic writing or morning pages and these, too, are designed to get your mind producing thoughts without thinking. If you need inspiration, Khan Academy have a great article on automatism (https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/dada-and-surrealism/xdc974a79:surrealism/a/surrealist-techniques-automatism) and lots of companion resources on surrealism.

Our fantastic lead pieces are also a source of inspiration. Working in response to an image by Olga Naida (pure quirkiness) two talented writers have produced perfectly formed pieces that demonstrate the power in evoking an image rather than describing it.

On page one, we feature Nasia Sarwar-Skuse (https://twitter.com/NSarwarSkuse) , a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing at Swansea University. Nasia is co-editing Gathering (https://www.thebookseller.com/rights/404-ink-lands-collection-of-nature-writing-by-women-of-colour) , an essay anthology on nature, climate and landscape by women of colour (forthcoming 2024 with 404 Ink (https://twitter.com/404Ink) ).

And on page two we highlight the work of writer, editor and translator Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig (https://twitter.com/whatisaletter) , a regular contributor to Visual Verse. Marie Isabel’s debut poetry pamphlet Kinscapes (https://hybriddreich.co.uk/kinscapes-marie-isabel-matthews-schlinzig/) is out now with Dreich. Miraculously, she wrote her lead piece for us just days before her new child came into this world (congratulations!) and somehow it feels like these deeply moving words needed to be written, as if to sweep the path for the new babe.

We are in awe of our amazing writers this month and are energised by their beautiful pieces. And now, without further ado, we pass the baton…

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen
with Preti, Isabel, Lucie, Ashish, Zaynab and Wes White

Volume 10, Chapter 03 | January 2023

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Image by an Unknown Artist, circa 1560
Dear writers, readers and friends,

Thank you for your patience while we take some time to update the website. We have started 2023 with a big spring clean, making our digital home ready for more of your wonderful words. It feels good. And it reminds me that a good clean should not be underestimated in the pursuit of creative flow. The outcome is not important (ie. a spotless house or tidy workspace); what is important is the activity itself. The repetitive, meditative action of cleaning releases the creative brain to do it’s thing, a bit like going for a long walk. And, like walking, cleaning is an act of self-care, preparing us to work with a valued mindset. I’m not making this up, people have researched it, so go and clean your bathroom while you ponder our quirky January prompt.

This latest image is taken from a manuscript dating back to around 1560-1570 and comes to us courtesy of Getty’s Open Content Program. I am a huge fan of antiquarian book illustrations and what I love about this one is that it is not complete. Without the page before, or indeed the whole book, we cannot know the full story and that, of course, is where you come in…

To lead the way, we are excited to debut Tan Kelly on page 1, an Australian “writer-in-progress” who left the corporate sector in 2022 to focus on her own writing. Tan is currently traveling the east coast of Australia and has adopted a Luddite Club (https://dnyuz.com/2022/12/15/luddite-teens-dont-want-your-likes/) lifestyle (ie. no socials!) while she works on her first short story collection.

On page 2 we feature Irish poet, academic, and journalist, Oisín Breen (https://twitter.com/Breen) , a Best of the Net Nominee whose work has been published extensively in over 20 countries, including in About Place, Door is a Jar, Northern Gravy, North Dakota Quarterly, Books Ireland, The Tahoma Literary Review, La Piccioletta Barca, Decomp, New Critique, and Reservoir Road. Oisín’s second collection, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín (https://beirbuapress.com/2023/01/01/lilies-on-the-deathbed-of-etain-and-other-poems-by-oisin-breen/) has just been released by Beir Bua Press (https://beirbuapress.com/) .

On page 3, we have a playful homage to Shakespeare by Visual Verse regular, Zach Urquhart (https://twitter.com/zurquhart) . Zach is a K-12 educator who recently earned his PhD from Texas Tech University. He has been writing poetry as a personal release for decades, and as of late has been using it in research efforts. After writing an arts-based dissertation full of poetic self-inquiry, he dubbed himself a “poethnographer”, coining a new term that many a VV writer can probably relate to.

And on page 4, we have Joan Leotta, a writer who plays with words on page and stage. She performs stories of food, family, and strong women. Her work is widely published and her latest poetry chapbook, Feathers on Stone, is available at Main Street Rag (https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/feathers-on-stone-joan-leotta/) in the US.

So there we have it, kicking off 2023 with an eclectic mix of words and styles. May it continue and may you find your flow throughout the year to come.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen
with Preti, Isabel, Lucie, Ashish, Zaynab and Wes

Volume 10, Chapter 02 | December 2022

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Image by Kabiur Rahman Riyad
Dear writers, readers and friends,

Presenting our final issue for 2022 which also kicks off the tenth volume of Visual Verse. Phew! By my calculations, a printed box set containing every issue of Visual Verse would span nearly 2 metres on a bookshelf. That’s a lot of words, capturing a decade’s worth of life-altering history that we have shared together. Thank you to each and every one of you for helping Visual Verse to shape and reshape, month after month, and year after year.

This month we chose to give the lead spots over to four of our regular writers who have submitted consistently good work to us over the years. During commissioning, some of the writers shared a little ‘behind the scenes’ of their process and I was reminded of the special kind of magic that is ekphrasis. The surrealists instinctively understood that, by focusing the mind on a visual stimulus (e.g. an image prompt), an artist can enter a receptive state whereby they need not work to find words but simply allow the words to come. Some call this flow, the holy grail for us artists. The ekphrastic process, and finding flow, is not always easy. As Colin Dardis, one of our lead writers, remarked:

“Sometimes you see an image, and your immediate thought is: my goodness, how am I going to find my way into this?! But as usual, you sit with it, and explore, magnify, bend the head and look at parts in isolation, then the whole, and soon something develops.”
This month’s image, by Kabiur Rahman Riyad (https://www.instagram.com/fakeriyad/) , an amateur photographer from Bangladesh, is deliberately abstract and layered. It requires a second look, maybe a third, and perhaps this deep concentration on the visual will distract you long enough to write something you never expected.

To delight and inspire you we have A J Wilson (https://poetisatinta.wordpress.com ) (Angela) on page 1. Angela was born and lives in rural North Wales, UK. She returned to poetry during lockdown after a gap of 30 years. As well as Visual Verse, she has been published in a number of magazines, such as Ink Drinkers Poetry, Write On Magazine and Spillwords, and recently her writing has been featured in two anthologies. She is currently compiling her work for a poetry collection.

On page 2, a response in three parts by Shujaat Mirza (https://twitter.com/shujaat_mirza) , a poet, writer, curator and artist based out of Mumbai and Ahmedabad, India. Shujaat has a passion for multidisciplinary explorations and his primary interest is art at the intersection of visual aesthetics and verbal semantics, a natural fit for Visual Verse. His work has been published online as well as in literary and art magazines and blogs. Find him on Medium (https://medium.com/@shujaatmirza) or follow @shujaat_mirza on Twitter (https://twitter.com/shujaat_mirza) or Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/shujaat_mirza/) .

Page 3 features one of our most prolific and consistent writers, Colin Dardis (http://www.colindardispoet.co.uk) . Colin is a neurodivergent poet, editor and sound artist from Northern Ireland. His work, largely influenced by his experiences with depression and Asperger’s, has been published widely throughout Ireland, the UK and USA. His latest book is Apocrypha: Collected Early Poems (Cyberwit, 2022). His latest album is Funerealism (Inner Demons Records, 2022). You can find his music on your fave streaming service (https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dardis/dead-leaves-new-seeds) or follow him on Twitter (https://twitter.com/purelypoetry) .

And on page 4 we present the words of Pearl Lorentzen (https://www.pearllorentzen.com) , a journalist and poet who occasionally writes fiction. Pearl is the 2021 recipient of the Canadian Mental Health Association Communications Award (for Alberta). We are proud to have published her work many times in Visual Verse and she has also been published in the Glass Buffalo and The Liar. Her fiction has been published in AE scifi.

Now over to you, dear writers. Let us work together to unfurl another chapter of this beautiful publication. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Sending much love – may you find your flow and ride with it into a new year.

Kristen
with Preti, Isabel, Lucie, Ashish, Zaynab and Wes

Find us on socials:

Our Writers
Colin Dardis (https://twitter.com/purelypoetry)
Shujaat Mirza (https://twitter.com/shujaat_mirza)

Our Team
Visual Verse (https://twitter.com/pretitaneja/)
Kristen Harrison (https://www.instagram.com/kittyharrison/)
Preti Taneja (https://twitter.com/PretiTaneja)
Lucie Stevens (https://twitter.com/LucieStevens_)
Ashish Kumar (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude)
Zaynab Bobi (https://twitter.com/ZainabBobi)
Wes White (https://twitter.com/archaeologyBoy)

Volume 10, Chapter 01 | November 2022

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Image by Kitty Harrison
Today we celebrate nine years of innovative, diverse, brave and wonderful writing.
Happy birthday to all writers, readers and friends of Visual Verse.
Visual Verse is nine years old today! Kristen and I, with designer Pete Lewis, launched the site on 1st November 2013 and since then (through country moves, career changes, successes, knock-backs, crises, euphoria, births, deaths, and trips to London, Newcastle, and Berlin) we have rolled with a team of guest editors and star volunteers to bring you our monthly anthology of art and words. We have not missed a single issue in nine years and have published over 10,000 pieces – an incredible achievement. Visual Verse is not for profit, run by volunteers and our contributors do it for love of the process; to inspire you, delight you and to keep the love going of wild adventures in writing. Over nine years, the worldwide Visual Verse community has grown from around 50 submissions a month to 200, with a newsletter subscription list that runs into thousands from every continent in the world.

Thank you, readers, writers, volunteers and all our supporters: HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Not many of you might know this, but co-founder Kristen “Kitty” Harrison (https://twitter.com/CurvedHouse/) is herself an artist, as well as being a writer, publisher and producer at The Curved House (https://thecurvedhouse.com) , an independent publisher working at the intersection of books, art and education. I am thrilled to debut her work on Visual Verse this month, with a piece called ‘Letter Home’. Kristen recently relocated back from Berlin to be nearer to her family in Australia and that’s what has inspired this month’s birthday image. It’s the first time she’s sharing her art with us, and we love to see it.

I stepped back from regularly curating the site about a year ago, as it’s been a big year for me. Over the last two years I’ve been busy writing my second book, Aftermath and it was published in early 2022; just last month I was astonished to find it had won the UK’s Gordon Burn Prize (https://newwritingnorth.com/gordon-burn-prize/ ) . I am thrilled to return to curate our birthday issue and very proud to welcome back the profoundly important words of Sandeep Parmar (https://twitter.com/SandeepKParmar/) to lead. Sandeep first wrote for Visual Verse as lead in Vol.1 Issue 2 (December 2013): that early poem now appears in her latest collection F (https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sandeep-Parmar-Faust-p470007726) aust (https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sandeep-Parmar-Faust-p470007726) , published by Shearsman this month.

Sandeep is Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University. Her research is primarily in modernist women’s writing and contemporary poetry and race. Her groundbreaking article ‘Still Not a British Subject: Race and UK Poetry (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/not-a-british-subject-race-and-poetry-in-the-uk/) ’ was published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other essays and reviews have appeared in the Guardian, The New Statesman, the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement. In 2017, she co-founded the Ledbury Poetry Critics (https://twitter.com/LedburyCritics/) scheme for poetry reviewers of colour. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Sandeep’s books include Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman, scholarly editions for Carcanet Press of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees and The Collected Poems of Nancy Cunard, and Threads with Bhanu Kapil and Nisha Ramayya, as well as three books
of her own poetry: The Marble Orchard, Eidolon, winner of the Ledbury Forte Prize for Best Second Collection, and Faust (Shearsman, 2022).

We are also really excited this month to collaborate with the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize (https://www.wasafiri.org/new-writing-prize/) , which I co-judged this year. The Prize, run by Wasafiri (https://www.wasafiri.org/) magazine, supports writers who have not yet published a book-length work, with no limits on age, gender, nationality, or background, and rewards work in three categories: Poetry, Fiction and Life Writing. The three winners join us this month…

Hasti Crowther (https://twitter.com/youarehasti/) is a poet and writer living in South East London. A member of the Southbank New Poets Collective and the Ledbury Poetry Critics, they are the recipient of the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry, and have recently published poems in bathmagg, zindabad, and The Willowherb Review. They have also co-written short sci-fi film Digging (https://www.channel4.com/programmes/film4-foresight-shorts/on-demand/70987-001) , produced by Film4. Hasti has created shows for Montez Press Radio and also hosts monthly open mic and poetry night Fresh Lip.

Sylee Gore (https://twitter.com/BerlinReified) is an Indian American writer based between Berlin and Oxford. She received the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Fiction (UK), the 2022 Bird in Your Hands Prize (US), and a 2021 VG Wort Neustart Kultur fellowship (DE). In 2022/23, she co-heads a literary partnership between Kelly Writers House, Philadelphia, and Rothermere American Institute, Oxford.

Nadine Monem (she/her) works in hybrid forms of non-fiction, memoir and theory. Her work has been supported by the Tin House Summer Workshop and the Catapult Books memoir workshop for writers of colour. She is the winner of the 2022 Wasafiri New Writing Prize for life writing, and runner-up for the 2022 Sewanee Review (https://thesewaneereview.com/) Nonfiction Contest. Nadine teaches writing and critical theory at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Hasti, Sylee and Nadine’s prize-winning pieces will be published in Wasafiri 113, published Spring 2023, and accompanied by an illustration by Aude Nasr (https://cargocollective.com/audenasr) .

As we head into our 10th year of publishing we hope you enjoy this month, and look back over our archive (https://visualverse.org/images/) to read the work of the last decade’s most exciting new and established voices practicing across continents and themes.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…

Preti Taneja
with Kristen, Lucie and Isabel

Special thanks and welcome to Zaynab Bobi (Nigeria), Ashish Kumar Singh (India) and Wes White (UK) who join the Visual Verse team this month as volunteer editorial assistants.

Follow us on Twitter
Visual Verse Preti Taneja Kristen Harri (https://twitter.com/pretitaneja/) son/The Curved House (https://twitter.com/curvedhouse/)
Sandeep Parmar (https://twitter.com/SandeepKParmar/)
Hasti Crowther (https://twitter.com/youarehasti/)
Sylee Gore (https://twitter.com/BerlinReified)
Nadine Monem (https://twitter.com/nadinemonem/)

Autumn Writing Challenge 2022 Winners

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Autumn Writing Prize:
Announcing the Winners and Shortlist

Home


Dear writers, readers and friends,

Some of you have already seen the news over on Twitter – the winners of our Autumn Writing Prize have been announced and we are so thrilled with the four winning pieces. Congratulations to our winners:

Excavating by Ankh Spice (https://twitter.com/seagoatscreams)
Ouch by Mims Sully (https://twitter.com/MimsSully)
Kinfolk by Robin Houghton (https://twitter.com/robinhoughton)
Exotic does not mean beautiful? by Osahon Oka (https://twitter.com/osahonoka)

We are also delighted to reveal the complete shortlist giving you another 16 pieces to enjoy over the weekend. These pieces were chosen, through an anonymised judging process, from a total of 141 submissions. Congratulations (in no particular order) to:

Toy Totem by Kelly Bennett (https://www.instagram.com/kellybennettbooks/)
Before the Beginning by Preeth Ganapathy
The witch considers her three transformed memories by Sarah-Jane Crowson (https://twitter.com/Sarahjfc)
Claw Hog by Hamish Gray @HamishM_Gray (https://twitter.com/HamishM_Gray)
Indeterminate in Autumn by Patricia Furstenberg (https://twitter.com/PatFurstenberg)
Early Morning by Carlos Ochoa @MrCarlos8a (https://twitter.com/MrCarlos8a)
Yet, to by Larry Winger @allendalediary (https://twitter.com/allendalediary)
Ruthless by Joanna Busza
Of Distances by Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig (https://twitter.com/whatisaletter)
The Other Side of Us by Andrew Lasher
Transit by Thomas Petty (https://twitter.com/tomspetty8)
Kitchen Observation by Cindy Faughnan (https://twitter.com/faughnanc)
Cups of Other References by J Daniel West (https://twitter.com/archaeologyBoy)
An Abundance of Caution by Valerie Bence (https://twitter.com/BenceValerie)
A Love Story in Pantoum by Allison Renner (https://twitter.com/AllisonRWrites)
Anonymity by Jacinta Barton

Read them all at visualverse.org (https://visualverse.org/) .
This prize wouldn’t have been possible without the expertise, knowledge and patience of our fantastic judging team. We extend our gratitude to the brilliant Isabel Brooks, Jay Délise, Victoria Gosling and head judge and co-founder, Preti Taneja.

Thank you all and stay tuned for our November edition in which we celebrate our ninth birthday!

From Kristen
and the VV Team

Autumn Writing Prize 2022

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Image by Etta/Girl With Red Hat

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

We are thrilled to launch our second ever Autumn Writing Prize, giving us a chance to unearth talent we might not otherwise spot. This is also an opportunity for you to flex your writing ambitions with our fast-paced writing challenge.

How to Enter
Visit the Visual Verse website (https://visualverse.org/submit/) and submit a piece of writing in response to the image prompt above. This prompt comes from Mexico-based artist ETTA, also known as Girl With Red Hat, and we are very excited to see what you find within it. Your submission must be strictly between 50-500 words, be new writing and be written specifically in response to this image. Please also ensure you read our submission guidelines (https://visualverse.org/submission-guidelines/) to see what we won’t publish.

Deadline
Submissions are open for a maximum of 24 hours. We will close submissions at midday UK time on Sunday 2nd October or when we reach 150 submissions, whichever comes first.

The Prizes
Our judges will select four winners who will be published as our featured writers for October. Each winner will receive £50 in prize money. Winner will be announced and published on Thursday 6th October.

The Judges
We are thrilled to have our inimitable co-founder, Professor Preti Taneja (https://www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/people/profile/pretitaneja.html) , back as our head judge. Preti is supported by: deputy editor Isabel Brookes; Victoria Gosling (https://www.thereaderberlin.com/victoria-gosling/) , author of the brilliant novel Before the Ruins; the hugely talented US-based writer, storyteller, and performer Jay Délise (https://www.jaydelise.com/bio) ; and Visual Verse publisher and co-founder Kristen Harrison.

Eligibility
The prize is open to any writer, anywhere in the world except those who have been a lead/featured writer for us in the past. If you have been published by Visual Verse but not as a featured writer you are eligible for the prize – please do enter!

Got questions? Please Tweet us @visual_verse with any questions or email visualverse@thecurvedhouse.com. We will endeavour to reply quickly but please remember we are on multiple timezones so there may be a delay.
Good luck, writers!

Volume 09, Chapter 11 | September 2022

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Image by Omar Musa

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Dreams do come true, people. I have wanted – for so long – to present the work of Omar Musa (http://www.omarmusa.com.au) here on Visual Verse. Omar is a Bornean-Australian author, visual artist and poet from Queanbeyan, Australia. He embodies the power of courageous art, producing hip hop, spoken word, poetry and (as you see here) magnificent woodcuts. His latest book Killernova (https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/omar-musa-killernova) , published in the UK by Broken Sleep Books (https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/) , is a masterful coupling of art and words, woven together with strands of Bornean mythology, ancestry, trade routes, history, identity, connection and so much more. ‘Tis a joy to proffer Omar’s piece “A Leopard Made of Midnight Clouds” and invite you to respond with your words. Before you pick up your pens, take a moment to read and enjoy the brilliance of our featured writers this month.

On page 1, we present Zaynab Bobi, Frontier I (https://twitter.com/ZainabBobi) , a Nigerian poet, digital artist and photographer from Bobi. Zaynab has graced us with a most beautiful diptych – don’t miss page 2. Zaynab is a member of Hilltop Creative Art Abuja, and a Medical Laboratory Science student of Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto. Her poems are published and forthcoming in Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Asterlit (https://www.asterlit.org/summer2022/zaynab-bobi) , Anomaly, West Trade Review, Isele Magazine (https://iselemagazine.com/2022/04/30/self-portrait-of-grief-as-fire-zaynab-bobi/) , Salamander Ink (https://salamanderink.com/contour-salamander-ink-mag/poetry/) and elsewhere.

Ashish Kumar Singh (http://@Ashish_stJude) (he/him) is a queer poet from India with a Master’s degree in English Literature. Previously, his works have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Chestnut Review, 14poems, Bombay Literary Review, Mason Jar Press, Banshee, Tab Journal and elsewhere. He also serves as a poetry editor at Indigo Literary Review. Find him on Twitter (http://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude) and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/ashish_the_reader/) .

Also writing from India is Sahana Mira Sambandam (https://twitter.com/SahanaMira) , a writer and art journal enthusiast from Chennai. Her works have been previously published at The New Indian Express, Live Wire, Remington Review and Verse of Silence. When she is not writing, she mostly spends time strolling through the bookstores, making journal spreads and obsessing over bougainvillea arches. Her Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/sahanamira/?hl=en) is a thing to behold.

Courtenay Schembri Gray, a newcomer to Visual Verse, is a writer from the North of England. She takes pleasure in writing about the weird and the eerie. Find her on Twitter (https://twitter.com/courtenaywrites) and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/courtenaywrites/) as @courtenaywrites and check out her blog www.courtenayscorner.com (http://www.courtenayscorner.com/) .

James Gale (https://jamesdjg.wordpress.com/) is a writer and journalist based in Glasgow, Scotland. He graduated with Distinction in (MLitt) Creative Writing from University of Glasgow, and has been published in newspapers including The Guardian & The Sunday Times, and creative titles such as Osmosis & SPAM. He is currently working on his first book and you can find him over on Twitter (https://twitter.com/jamesgale_) .

So there you have it, dear writers: a big, beautiful issue of Visual Verse to carry you through September. Let us see where the leopard takes you.

As always, for a chance to be published, you can submit 50-500 words, written in one hour, in response to the image. Submissions must be received by midnight, 15th September, UK time.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen
with Preti, Lucie, Isabel and the VV Team

Follow us on Twitter
@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse)

Volume 09, Chapter 10 | August 2022

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Image by John Crozier

Dear writers, readers and friends,

We have had an influx of submissions from new writers (is it the Euro heatwave?!) and with this came lots of enquiries about when to expect confirmation if a piece is published. A gentle reminder that we do not notify writers when a piece is published. We read over 150 subs every month and publish 100 of them. We would love to notify each and every one of you but there’s simply no time. We appreciate this is annoying, so here is a reminder of how you can keep track of your submission:

1. Check visualverse.org (https://www.visualverse.org) regularly. If published, your piece will go up on visualveres.org some time before the end of the month.
2. Create a Google Alert (https://www.google.com/alerts) or similar for your name, to be notified when your piece appears.
3. Search the Archive (https://visualverse.org/images/) . All past issues are kept here and all published writers are listed on the left, alphabetically by first name.

Do you have other bright ideas for monitoring your submissions? We’d love to hear them. Send us an email or Tweet us @visual_verse so we can share your tips with other writers.

Now, to the fun stuff. From our new HQ downunder, we are feeling nostalgic for the UK and Europe. The antidote is a deep-dive into Australia’s artist and writer talent pool. We kick off the issue with an image, by John Crozier, of London’s infamous Underground alongside words by Australian writer Eloise Grills (https://www.eloisegrills.com/) . Eloise is an award-winning writer and artist living in Daylesford, Victoria. Her collection of illustrated essays, big beautiful female theory, is out now with Affirm Press. She tweets and grams as

On page 2, we’re delighted to highlight the work of Luís Costa (he/they) who has been bringing some beautiful words to VV of late. Luís is, among many things, an anxious queer poet living in London. Longlisted for the 2022 Out-Spoken Prize, his recent and forthcoming work can be found in Stone of Madness, Inksounds, Queerlings, Farside Review, FEED and here on Visual Verse. Luís holds a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, and likes Baroque music, numbers and wine. He tweets @captainiberia (http://www.twitter.com/captainiberia) .
And on page 3, we welcome Mitra Visveswaran, a Visual Verse writing prize winner. Mitra is a 24 year old artist, poet and student of psychology from Chennai, India, and we are loving watching her work grow and develop.

So, dear writers, let’s see what you make of this month’s image. I love that we can’t begin to predict your responses to this one. Surprise us. And, more importantly, surprise yourselves.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen
with Lucie, Isabel, Preti and the VV Team

Follow us on Twitter
@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse)

Volume 09, Chapter 09 | July 2022

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Image by Wangari Maathai International School

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Is nine an auspicious number? Today we present Chapter 09 of Volume 09 of Visual Verse. This month our offering is powered by youth.

Your image prompt has been created by primary school students at the Wangari Maathai International School in Berlin (http://wangari-maathai-schule.de/en/) . Under the guidance of teacher and artist Dee Mulrooney (http://deirdre-mulrooney.com/) , and with a little help from The Curved House (https://thecurvedhouse.com/) , these students have been using art to open up courageous conversations about culture, identity and prejudice.

Through carefully designed visual thinking sessions (check out the VTS method (https://vtshome.org/) if this interests you) and exposure to a diverse and talented range of artists, the students have explored topics that might otherwise feel challenging or confronting. They have found their voice through art and, in doing so, have become active “Artivists”.

In the spirit of ekphrasis, students created this image in response to work by another artist: Berlin-based digital artist and musician, Dara Smith (https://darasmith.wordpress.com/) . The students present this image to you, writers of the world, as a call to action. They have said what they need to say, the way they know how, and now it’s over to you to respond.

The students will be visiting the website throughout the month to read your words. There is no need to simplify your language or ideas for this new audience, but please do keep it appropriate.

We are excited to see what you come up with and to facilitate a conversation between artists and writers across generations. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen
with Lucie, Isabel, Preti and the VV Team

Volume 09, Chapter 08 | June 2022

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Image by Reed Geiger

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Thank you for your patience as we find our feet with our new trans-continental team constellation. The Visual Verse home is now Melbourne, Australia, while our chief editors are in Sydney (Lucie Stevens) and London (Isabel Brookes). We will shortly put a call out for new editorial volunteers, who can be based anywhere in the world, so stay tuned if you are interested in joining our team.

For June we present a small, perfectly formed issue that takes us back to our roots. Our image, which comes to us from 20-year-old US photographer/designer Reed Geiger (https://reedgeiger23.wixsite.com/my-site) , is intriguing and somewhat quirky, just as we like them. And our two lead writers have produced a perfect duet of poems in response.

On page one, we are thrilled to showcase Giovanna MacKenna (http://www.giovannamackenna.com) who celebrates the launch of her first poetry collection this month. Giovanna grew up on Scotland’s west coast and has built her life around words. She is a published and commissioned poet and her first full collection, How the Heart can Falter, is now out with The Museum of Loss and Renewal Publishing (http://themuseumoflossandrenewal.life/publications-and-editions/) . Join her at the launch event, along with Christina Thatcher (see below) and Claire Askew, from 7p.m. UK time on Wednesday, June 8th. Tickets are available from Eventbrite (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/giovanna-mackenna-book-launch-and-poetry-readings-tickets-344035337957) . For more information on Giovanna’s work and past publications visit her website (http://www.giovannamackenna.com) or follow her on twitter/insta @giovmacpoet.

On page two we present the wonderful words of Christina Thatcher (http://christinathatcher.com) , a Creative Writing Lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Her poetry and short stories have featured in over 50 publications including Ambit, Magma, Poetry Wales, The London Magazine and more. She has published two poetry collections with Parthian Books: More than you were (2017) and How to Carry Fire (2020). As mentioned above, Christina will be joining Giovanna at the launch event on June 8th and we encourage you all to sign up and attend to hear these hugely talented writers read their work.

Speaking of talented writers, we are delighted to see many new writers coming to Visual Verse in recent months. We thought it might be a good moment to refresh you all on how we work, and how to get the most out of Visual Verse.

Before you submit… remember that the challenge is to write between 50-500 words in response to our image prompt, within one hour. Only new work that demonstrates a connection to the image will be accepted. You can check the guidelines on our website (https://visualverse.org/submission-guidelines/) to ensure your piece doesn’t break any of our rules. Pieces must be submitted by the 15th of each month.

After you submit… check visualverse.org regularly to see if your piece is published. We will publish up to a maximum of 100 pieces throughout the month. We cannot notify individual writers as we get so many submissions, so you may find it helpful to set up a Google Alert to get an automatic notification.

If you are published… you will see your piece appear at visualverse.org. This will be visible on the homepage until the next issue is published, after which it will go into the Archive (https://visualverse.org/images/) . In the Archive, you can find your work any time by either clicking on the image for the issue, or by clicking your name in the Author list on the left-hand side (alphabetical by first name).

You can also find your work using the following address in your browser:
https://visualverse.org/writers/your-name/
Example: https://visualverse.org/writers/giovanna-mackenna/
(use a hyphen to separate names)

Work published at Visual Verse remains copyright of the writer (you), therefore you are free to publish your pieces elsewhere, re-develop them into longer or different works, or submit them to anthologies.

OK folks, that’s it! We hope you are inspired by our image and writing this month as it’s now your turn. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

The VV team

Follow us on Twitter
@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse)
@giovmacpoet (https://twitter.com/giovmacpoet)
@writetoempower (https://twitter.com/writetoempower)

Volume 09, Chapter 07 | May 2022

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Image by Miikka Luotio

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Today we take flight with a new issue of Visual Verse and we take flight to a new home for Visual Verse. After almost a decade in Berlin, The Curved House is moving to Melbourne, Australia. We will continue to run Visual Verse as a global publication, with half the editorial team in Australia and half in Europe, and we will continue to publish diverse and innovative writers from all around the world.

As a farewell to Berlin, I wanted to find a way to honour the city that gave our unique publication life. In 2013, a chance introduction to Berlin-based designer Pete Lewis (https://uk.linkedin.com/in/mr-pete-lewis-51468049) led to the first designs for the Visual Verse website. Shortly after, Preti Taneja (https://www.preti-taneja.co.uk/) visited Berlin and manifested a whole editorial vision for the publication. She became the founding Commissioning Editor and we launched on 1st November, 2013. A few years in, Berlin gave us another gift in the form of Lucie Stevens. Lucie is now back in Sydney but continues as co-editor. Visual Verse is the kind of dream project that Berlin is renowned for and the city has continued to nurture it, and us, for almost 9 years.

In the spirit of seed-sowing and collaboration, I have chosen an image depicting a special little Berlin scene, by Miikka Luotio. Alongside the image are three writers whose work has had an impact on me, or Visual Verse, helping to shape and evolve us.

We open with Paul Scraton (https://twitter.com/underagreysky) , a writer and editor based in Berlin. Shortly after moving to Friedrichshain, a district in the east of Berlin, I picked up a copy of Paul’s book The Idea of a River, published by Readux. This unassuming little gem is a lesson in linking ourselves and our environment. After reading it I set out to walk the river Spree, through Treptower park, with a consciousness I hadn’t tapped into for a long time. I saw Berlin differently and I’m very grateful to this little book for opening my eyes wider. Paul is the author of a number of other books including the novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019) and the recent novella of the forest, In the Pines (Influx Press, 2021). You can find him atwww.underagreysky.com (http://www.underagreysky.com/) .

Divya Ghelani (https://twitter.com/DivyaGhelani) came my way via Visual Verse patron Cathy Galvin who runs the UK’s leading literary salon, the Word Factory (https://thewordfactory.tv/) . Last year she co-curated the August issue (https://visualverse.org/images/veronica-lissandrini/) of Visual Verse, bringing fresh new voices to the fold, some of whom are Berlin-based. This was a moment when I was personally struggling to keep things moving amid the pressures of the pandemic and other commitments, and Divya came forth with her characteristic ease and grace to re-ignite things. Divya is a writer herself and holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and an MPhil in Literary Studies from the University of Hong Kong. She has published widely, and is now working on a novel. Divya hosts a yearly New Fiction By Women & Non-Binary BIPOC Author Reading Series for The Reader Berlin and co-hosts a short story club for the Word Factory.

It is unusual that we would commission a lead writer twice, but I could not do a Berlin issue without the inimitable Victoria Gosling (https://www.instagram.com/victoriagosling) . Victoria is the founder of The Reader Berlin (https://www.thereaderberlin.com/) and The Berlin Writing Prize (https://www.thereaderberlin.com/2022-berlin-writing-prize/) . She has been the backbone of our Berlin literary life and a great champion of writers, readers and book businesses in Berlin. Some of my favourite memories of Berlin have been facilitated by Victoria – one year she took over an entire old Fort and hosted a magical weekend literary festival. Beyond this generosity, she is a hugely talented writer. Her brilliant debut novel Before the Ruins was published in 2021 by Serpent’s Tail (UK) and Henry Holt (US) revealing a gift for storytelling and masterful character development. I’m indebted to Victoria for her friendship, gentle influence and unending support.

What these three writers have in common is a willingness to create opportunities for others while also remaining dedicated to their own craft. That’s a lot of work, and perhaps what’s most beautiful about Berlin is that it gives people the time and space to give and grow.

The Berlin magic is forever in our DNA.

So now it’s over to you, dear writers, to see where this image leads. Of course, there is no need for you to write about Berlin. The image is simply the starting point, the rest is up to you.

Enjoy and thank you for all of your support and continued participation in this magnificent project.

Kristen
and the VV team

Follow us on Twitter

@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse)
@underagreysky (https://twitter.com/underagreysky)
@d (https://twitter.com/kenkeyandfish) ivyaghelani (https://twitter.com/DivyaGhelani)
@VictoriaGosling (https://twitter.com/VictoriaGosling)

Volume 09, Chapter 06 | April 2022

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Image by Vony Razom

Dear writers, readers and friends,

This month sees the publication of Aftermath (https://www.andotherstories.org/aftermath/) , by Visual Verse co-founder Preti Taneja. Written in the literal aftermath of the killing of Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt, by Usman Khan, this exceptional work is an exploration of grief, guilt, trauma, politics and deeply-rooted injustice. Nikesh Shukla calls it a “masterclass in literary brilliance” while Max Porter calls it “a major landmark in British narrative non-fiction… a vitally important as well as deeply moving book”.

Those who have followed Visual Verse from the beginning will know that we have deliberately evolved our platform to provide literary space to underrepresented writers, and to encourage brave and challenging work. We are extremely privileged to have benefited from Preti’s rigorous intellect, literary expertise and her commitment to human rights and social justice. And now with her latest book she shows us the true power of words.

This month I chose to honour this commitment to brave, inclusive work by featuring an image by artist Vony Razom who is currently producing art from a bomb shelter in Ukraine. This image is complimented by three writers who have had to flee their homes, or whose families have had to flee. We are so grateful to each of them for bringing their completely unique voices to Visual Verse and sharing a piece of themselves in their work. Content warning: Please be aware that this issue contains reference to sexual abuse and violence that some readers may find upsetting.

On page one, we kick off with a beautiful homage to birth and rebirth by Daniela Suleymanova. With Russian, Armenian and Malagasy origins, Daniela explores the dimensions of multiculturalism, and the complexities and the beauty of métissage through visual arts, photography and writing.

On page two, we present Emmanuella Dekonor (https://twitter.com/kenkeyandfish) , a native of Ghana who spent her early years in the UK where she sought refuge in 1982, following the ‘June 4th Revolution’ staged by junior military officers. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck University. You can read more by Emmanuella in our archive (https://visualverse.org/writers/emmanuella-dekonor/) .

And on page three, we welcome Najwa Ahmed (https://najwaahmed.com/) (1989), a Palestinian writer and visual artist based in Berlin. In their short films “when we were already made”, “silence” and “Zehra on the roof” they worked with queer identity politics and the consumption culture of bodies. In their writing and performance such as “the watermelon resistance”, “how dance moves my gender euphoria” they tackle topics of displacement and migration stereotypes, sometimes only to reflect and sometimes to deconstruct. Connect with them on Instagram @purplekarmel (https://www.instagram.com/purplekarmel/) .
For every piece submitted before midnight today, 1st April, we will donate £1 to Poets for Ukraine (https://gofund.me/80ab4dec) and £1 to the Vony Razom (https://vonyrazom.com/) , the Ukrainian artist whose work we feature. Please consider chipping in (https://gofund.me/80ab4dec) to help Poets for Ukraine reach their funding target.
Donate to Poets for Ukraine (https://gofund.me/80ab4dec)

Before I sign off I’d like to say another huge thank you to our most recent cohort of volunteer editors and curators who have valiantly kept Visual Verse running these past few months: Tam Eastley, Anna Mace, Nahda Tahsin and Jordan Fleming and of course our two utterly brilliant editors: Lucie Stevens and Isabel Brookes. Thank you all for your time and commitment.

Now it’s over to you, dear writers. As always, we invite you to be brave with your writing and/or to use Visual Verse as a moment of blissful escapism. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.
Kristen (She/Her)
and the VV Team

Follow us on Twitter

@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse)
@kenkeyandfish (https://twitter.com/kenkeyandfish)
@PretiTaneja (https://twitter.com/PretiTaneja)

Volume 09, Chapter 05 | March 2022

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Image by Susan Fenimore Cooper
Dear writers, readers and friends,

I had planned a special issue for March to celebrate International Women’s Day (8th March). Then, Russia invaded Ukraine*. All plans went out the window but, guess what?! The women rose up. Four brilliant women came to my rescue and helped me to assemble a glorious, unique issue featuring our very first musical response to a Visual Verse prompt. I am so proud and grateful to our talented quartet of leads this month.

Our March visual prompt is from Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813-1894) who was a writer, artist, naturalist and humanitarian. Cooper was the first woman to be recognised for nature writing. I love this image as it is clearly the work of an expert while being labelled with the declaration “By a Lady”. I like to think this was a small act of feminism on Cooper’s part – ensuring no man took credit for her work – but that may be an optimistic reading of herstory.

Back in the present day, I’m overjoyed to debut a brand new song penned by acclaimed Irish musician Nina Hynes (https://www.ninahynesmusic.com/) especially for this issue. Nina Hynes is an artist down to her bones and her creative output is mindblowing (follow her on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/artist/6K6HRAFT5XBbrfATR1vnQh?si=91VPDLe3RtixRiWCTcWOkQ) and Bandcamp (https://ninahynes.bandcamp.com/) ). I gave Nina the challenge of writing a song within the usual constraints (50-500 words within one hour) and she returned the lyrics to me within four minutes of receiving the prompt. The next day a fully formed tune arrived in my inbox:
https://ninahynes.bandcamp.com/track/hummingbird

This is our very first musical response to a VV prompt – pure magic. You can listen and download the track from Nina’s Bandcamp. She is donating 100% of proceeds to the campaign to support African and Caribbean students leaving Ukraine, who have been facing discrimination and racism as they try to cross to safety.

Next up we feature Ioanna Mavrou (https://www.ioannamavrou.com/) , a writer from Nicosia, Cyprus. Her short stories have appeared in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, HAD, Wasafiri, The Letters Page, and elsewhere. She runs a tiny publishing house called Book Ex Machina and is the editor of Matchbook Stories: a literary magazine in matchbook form. You can read her previous Visual Verse pieces here (https://visualverse.org/writers/ioanna-mavrou/) and follow her on Twitter (http://twitter.com/@ioannaonline) .

In what seems like a bitter UK winter, Lizzie Ballagher has certainly longed for spring and perhaps that is reflected in her piece on page 3. The final stanza lifts us up like the first spring buds. Having lived in W New York for a decade, Lizzie unashamedly plundered old memories for images of those much harsher winters near the Genesee River. You can follow her work over on her blog (https://lizzieballagherpoetry.wordpress.com/) .

And on page 4 we are long overdue in featuring the work of Ceinwen Haydon (https://twitter.com/CeinwenHaydon) . Ceinwen holds an MA in Creative Writing from Newcastle University. She lives near Newcastle upon Tyne, UK (also home to our co-founder Preti Taneja) and writes short stories and poetry. She is widely published in online magazines and in print anthologies and has written many brilliant pieces for Visual Verse (https://visualverse.org/writers/ceinwen-e-c-haydon/) too. She is developing her practice as a participatory arts facilitator and believes everyone’s voice counts.

We at Visual Verse would like to wish all the women of the world a Happy International Women’s day. On March 8th we will raise a toast to the creativity and inner power of all women, including and especially women of colour, non-binary and trans women. Thank you all for your contributions to Visual Verse over the years.

*The situation in Ukraine remains volatile and we will continue tracking ways to support those most affected – especially minority groups and marginalised communities who face many extra challenges. You can support by signing up for Stuart McPherson’s online Poetry for Ukraine fundraiser (https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/poetry-for-ukraine-an-international-poetry-reading-fundraiser-tickets-279387795417) which is raising funds for the Red Cross Ukraine and the UN refugee council. There is also the GoFundMe that Nina is supporting, to help African and Caribbean students in Ukraine (https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-afrocaribbean-students-leaving-ukraine?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=copy_link_all&utm_campaign=m_pd+share-sheet) (20% of Ukraine’s international students are from African countries) and OutRight Action International (https://outrightinternational.org/ukraine?form=Ukraine&fbclid=IwAR151D6CdyNweItycZ7QHGj2ix62VLo8K0liysu5fYtQ1z3M2u6Spm65cN0) is raising funds to support Ukraine’s
LGBTQ+ community.

So, my friends, as always I hope you enjoy these offerings and feel inspired to write your own. Things are heavy but creativity brings the light.

The image is the starting point, the text us up to you.
Kristen (She/Her)
and the VV Team

Follow us on Twitter

@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse)
@NinaHynes (https://twitter.com/ninahynes?lang=en)
@ioannaonline (https://twitter.com/ioannaonline)
@CeinwenHaydon (https://twitter.com/CeinwenHaydon)

Volume 09, Chapter 04 | February 2022

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Image by Yasin Aribuga
Dear writers, readers and friends,

We’re only a month in but already I have the feeling that 2022 will be a year of change for many of us. In fact, the question is not whether change will happen, but how it will happen. Will it be a transition, displacement, digression, transgression, move, evolution or a seismic shift? Will it happen by design or by surprise? This is what is on my mind and why I was drawn to this month’s image by artist Yasin Aribuga. It is aptly steeped in the ultimate symbol of metamorphosis.

We open our February issue with a summer adventure by Hannah Allies (https://twitter.com/hannahahahah?s=20) , a writer based in Brighton whose work has left an impression on us. Hannah has had poetry and flash fiction published by Reflex Fiction, Writers’ HQ and Visual Verse (https://visualverse.org/writers/hannah-allies/) . She is particularly interested in our relationship with the natural world and most of her work includes themes of environmentalism. She is currently writing her first novel.

On page 2, John Grey explores the transformative power of nature. John is an Australian poet and US resident, who has recently been published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review and Hollins Critic. His latest books Leaves On Pages, Memory Outside The Head and Guest Of Myself are available through Amazon. John’s work will appear in upcoming issues of Ellipsis, Blueline and International Poetry Review.

Page 3 holds a multifaceted self-portrait of a butterfly by K Hartless, a poet and fiction writer who enjoys penning fantasy, science-fiction, and horror as well as the occasional memoir. She’s been recently published in Edge of Humanity Magazine, The Last Girls Club, Paragraph Planet, Pure Haiku, and Spillwords. Her blog, Yardsale of Thoughts (https://khartless.com/) , blends fiction, poetry, music, and art to create new experiences for readers.

Sending you off to your writing desks is a whimsical poem by Stephen Kingsnorth (https://visualverse.org/writers/stephen-kingsnorth/) , a regular contributor to Visual Verse. Stephen, who retired to Wales with Parkinson’s Disease from ministry in the Methodist Church, has had pieces published by online poetry sites, printed journals and anthologies. He tells us that he eagerly anticipates the monthly Visual Verse challenges and likes asking questions of himself, and anyone else looking over his shoulder. He has been, like so many, nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net this past year. You can read his blog at poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com (https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com/) .

So, now it’s over to you. Submissions close midnight (UK time) on February 15th. You can find our full submission guidelines here (https://visualverse.org/submission-guidelines/) and remember: the image is the starting point, the rest is up to you.
Enjoy!

Kristen
and the VV Team

Follow us on Twitter

@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse)
@hartless_k (https://twitter.com/hartless_k)
@hannahahahah (https://mobile.twitter.com/hannahahahah/)

Volume 09, Chapter 03 | January 2022

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Image by Dee Mulrooney
Dear writers, readers and friends,

We made it! Another year over, a new one begins, and to celebrate we present our first issue of Visual Verse for 2022. This one comes with a large dose of gratitude. After another challenging year we are ever more grateful to you, our community of readers and writers, for continuing to deliver exciting, challenging work. This past November were were especially floored by your responses to our inaugural writing competition. Thank you for helping us build our unique publication, woven together with your voices and ideas.

We have been thinking and talking about the vocabulary around beauty and joy. Our editorial team recently had an illuminating discussion about how much easier it is to access vocabulary around pain and suffering than vocabulary around beauty and hope. A common misconception is that a poem needs to mine the darkness to be truly moving. But joy can move us just as powerfully. We need to work a little harder to find the words but the words are there. So, how about this: for your January submission, challenge yourself to explore the vocabulary around beauty, joy, hope and/or optimism. Help us create an issue full of words that will lift us up and carry us into 2022 with a skip in our step.

To inspire you, some of our team have shared the writing that bring them joy:

Lucie Stevens, our Sydney-based Deputy Editor, recommends Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’, specifically section 46: https://poets.org/poem/song-myself-46. She says “It’s an oldie, but a goodie, and one I return to often.”

Isabel Brooks, our UK-based Deputy Editor, has four joyful poems to share:
“Hope” is the Thing with Feathers (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42889/hope-is-the-thing-with-feathers-314) by Emily Dickinson
My Heart (https://poetrysociety.org/poetry-in-motion/my-heart) by Frank O’Hara
Still I Rise (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46446/still-i-rise) by Maya Angelou
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58762/catalog-of-unabashed-gratitude) by Ross Gay

And Jordan Fleming, our NYC-based editorial assistant, recommends some longer reads: Resignation by Nikki Giovanni, Walking Our Boundaries by Audre Lorde, The Perfect Ease of Grain by Toni Morrison and Le sporting-club de Monte Carlo (For Lena Horne) by James Baldwin.

So now, without further ado: this issue invites you to respond to a magnificent, layered image by Berlin-based Irish artist Dee Mulrooney (http://deirdre-mulrooney.com/) . Dee’s work is peppered with little whispers of ancestors, folklore and femininity. Take your time with it as there is much to see.

Launching us into the new year is a reflection on friendship by Allie Coker (https://www.facebook.com/alliecokerauthor) . Allie holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Queens University of Charlotte. She has taught creative writing courses and also worked as an editor. Her second book, a novella titled The Last Resort (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-last-resort-allie-coker/1138584134) , was published in January 2021. She was selected for a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts residency, as well as a Wildacres residency. She is a member of the North Carolina Writers Network and shares a home with her two rescued hairballs, Bob and Queen, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

On page 2, Yen Ooi (https://www.yenooi.com/) invites you to relax. Yen is a writer-editor-researcher who explores East and Southeast Asian culture, identity and values. Her projects aim to cultivate cultural engagement in our modern, technology-driven lives. She is a PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London looking at the development of Chinese science fiction by diaspora writers and writers from Chinese-speaking nations. Yen is narrative director and writer on Road to Guangdong (https://shop.excalibur-games.com/products/road-to-guangdong) , a narrative-style driving game. She is author of Sun: Queens of Earth (novel) and A Suspicious Collection of Short Stories and Poetry (collection). She is also co-editor of Ab Terra, Brain Mill Press’s science fiction imprint. When she’s not got her head in a book, she lectures, mentors and plays the viola. Her latest book, Rén: The Ancient Chinese Art of Finding Peace and Fulfilment
(https://uk.bookshop.org/books/ren-the-ancient-chinese-art-of-finding-fulfilment-through-the-world-around-you/9781787398221?aid=7145) will be available in February 2022.

Page 3 offers a thought-provoking piece by Simon Costello (https://twitter.com/simoncostello13 ) . Simon’s poems have appeared in bath magg, The Stinging Fly, The Rialto, Magma and The Irish Times. In 2021, he won The Rialto Nature and Place Poetry Competition and was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. He lives in Co. Offaly, Ireland.

And now, dear writers, it’s over to you. We look forward to seeing what our January image and bonus writing challenge inspire.

Just a reminder to both long-term contributors and new members of the fold: write 50-500 words in one hour, responding to the image. Please only submit one piece per month. Due to the volume of submissions we receive, we will only review your first submissions each month. All subsequent submissions are removed from our system, so make sure the piece you submit is the one you want us to consider.
And don’t forget to submit by the closing date and time. Submissions close midnight (UK time) on January 15th. You can find our full submission guidelines here (https://visualverse.org/submission-guidelines/) . Good luck and happy writing!

The image is the starting point, the rest is up to you.

With love and new year wishes from the VV team.

Kristen, Lucie, Preti, Isabel, Tam, Nahda, Jordan, Aimee and Anna.
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Volume 09, Chapter 02 | December 2021

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Image by Monica Silva
Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to our final newsletter of 2021!

December marks the festive season for many people, and a time to reflect on the year that has passed. It’s been another year of wide-spread uncertainty, anxiety and social isolation – themes that have run through many of the submissions we’ve received. And as the pandemic flexes its muscles again, the opening of Amanda Gorman’s poem The Hill We Climb seems apt, ‘where can we find light in this never-ending shade?’

We hope you will find some light here, dear writers.

When we offer our prompt on the first of each month, we hope to receive exciting new pieces that grab our attention and lodge themselves in our hearts. And we hope that, by publishing those pieces, we help share your voice with the world. But what we also aim to offer is a reason for you to carve out an hour for yourself, connect with your creativity and experience flow. Because that’s where joy, healing and self-actualisation can surface.

So, here’s our December gift to you, not a flying reindeer but a floating horse’s head. This image, entitled Horse with a Name, is the creation of Italian-based Brazilian photographer Monica Silva (https://www.msilva.photography/) , whose work explores the impact that existential and cultural daily life has on our psyches.

Opening our December issue is a piece by Anna Jacobson (http://www.annajacobson.com.au) that speaks of this impact too. Anna is a writer and artist from Brisbane, Australia. Amnesia Findings (https://www.uqp.com.au/books/amnesia-findings) (UQP, 2019), her first full-length poetry collection, won the 2018 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. In 2020, Anna won the Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Writing (Open Creative Nonfiction), was awarded a Queensland Writers Fellowship, and was shortlisted in the Spark Prize.

Page 2 offers a powerfully visceral poem by Hannah Bent (http://www.hannahbent.com) . Born and raised in Hong Kong, Hannah completed her Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art and Film from Central Saint Martins School of Art in London. She undertook further study in both directing and screenwriting at the Australian Film Television and Radio School and has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Technology, Sydney. She won the 2013 Ray Koppe Young Writers Award for her debut novel as a work in progress. Her debut novel When Things Are Alive They Hum (https://www.ultimopress.com.au/hum) was published this year and has been described by Trent Dalton as a ‘gift’ that has ‘changed the way I’ve been going about my days.’ The Australian reviewed her novel as ‘a wise, wondrous celebration of life.’

Our third piece, penned by Alastair Hesp (http://www.alastairhesp.co.uk) , explores what isn’t on view. Alastair is currently completing a Poetry MA at The Manchester Writing School. His work has been featured in anthologies and journals such as The Verve Poetry Press, Acid Bath Publishing, The French Literary Review and Broken Sleep Books. As a poet with bipolar disorder, he uses poetry to go beyond the language of condition. In addition to formal publications, his work includes interdisciplinary projects in live/improvised performances. He is currently in production on a poetic art installation and a dance performance in Copenhagen around a sequence poem, in collaboration with Kant Fabrik (https://www.instagram.com/kantfabrik/) .

Before you venture off on your own creative paths, take a dawn walk with Shehnaz Suterwalla (https://www.rca.ac.uk/more/staff/dr-shehnaz-suterwalla/) on page 4. Shehnaz is a writer, critic and curator who teaches at the Royal College of Art, London. Her forthcoming book, Two Friends (And Other Stories) is a double memoir that speculates into the future, co-authored with Michelle Jana Chan (https://linktr.ee/michellejanachan) , who was a lead in our November issue.

Remember, dear writers, if you need to gift yourself with more pockets of writing-induced joy, you can submit a micro-piece in response to our daily visual prompt (https://www.instagram.com/visualverseanthology/) on Instagram. But for now, we hope this noble steed will inspire you to craft 50-500 words, written within an hour. Submissions close midnight (UK time) on December 15th.

Wishing you all a safe and happy December.

The image is the starting point, the rest is up to you.

Lucie
with the VV team: Kristen, Preti, Isabel, Tam, Nahda, Jordan, Aimee and Anna.
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Volume 09, Chapter 01 | November 2021

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Image by Frederick Cayley Robinson

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

November has arrived and that means something extra special to us – it’s our birthday!

Happy eighth birthday to every member of the Visual Verse community! Whether you’ve been part of our tribe for some time now, or have just recently entered the fold, we want to thank each one of you for making VV what it is: dynamic, diverse, celebratory and inspirational. Together, this is what we’ve achieved:
* We’ve published 96 issues since 2013 – this month’s issue will be our 97^th.
* Almost 9000 pieces have been published to date – that’s somewhere between 450,000 and 4,500,000 words – the equivalent of around 50 novels!
* These pieces have been written by more than 350 lead writers and 3500 contributors. We’re proud to have created a space that fosters the development of fledging writers, while promoting the work of seasoned scribes and supporting everyone in-between.

All these figures bring one word to mind – collaboration. VV wouldn’t be possible without the artists whose work sparks our imaginations each month; the leads whose pieces open the channels of inspiration; the team of publishers, editors and curators working behind the scenes; and you, our beloved writing community. Even after all these years, your work still excites us, makes us reflect, shares with us a new point of view. We’re grateful for every piece of work we receive and the window it offers us into your hearts and minds. In return, we hope that each month, we foster your creativity and provide you with connection and community.

In the spirit of collaboration, all our November leads work closely with a creative partner, to develop innovative new work and support craft development in others. Our fabulous quintet of leads was inspired by an autumnally hued image by English painter, illustrator and decorator Frederick Cayley Robinson (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/frederick-cayley-robinson-1857) . We love the sense of narrative it evokes, as though it’s a still-shot from an unfolding moment.

Opening this issue is a piece exploring what we choose to hear – and ignore – by Emily Cataneo (http://www.emilycataneo.com/) . Emily is a writer and journalist from New England. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as Indiana Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Lightspeed, and her nonfiction in venues The Guardian, the Boston Globe, Slate, NPR, Atlas Obscura, and more. She is co-founder of the Redbud Writing Project (https://www.redbudwriting.org/) with fellow North Carolina State University MFA graduate, Arshia Simkin. Redbud is a creative writing organisation that teaches workshops across many genres, both online and in community spaces in North Carolina’s Triangle.

Our second and third pieces contrast with each other beautifully, in style and tone. These pieces have been penned by Onjuli Datta and Mikaella Clements – co-authors of The View Was Exhausting (https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/mikaella-clements/the-view-was-exhausting/9781472271730/) , a modern love story about power, fame and privilege. This creative duo is married and live together in Berlin. You can find them both on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/mikandonj/) , or Mikaella on Twitter (https://twitter.com/mikclements) .

Page 4’s piece is the perfect accompaniment to your bucketful of Halloween sweets. Its author is Redbud Writing Project (https://www.redbudwriting.org/) co-founder, Arshia Simkin (https://www.arshiasimkin.com/) . Arshia was born in Pakistan and spent the first six years of her life there. She grew up in Arlington, Virginia and currently lives in Raleigh with her husband. A former lawyer, Arshia’s writing has appeared in Crazyhorse. She was one of three winners of the 2020 CRAFT Flash Fiction contest, and received honourable mention in NC State’s James Hurt Prize for fiction.

Our final lead piece for November is a beautiful reflection on shifting relationships with shadow, written by Michelle Jana Chan (http://www.michellejanachan.com/) . Michelle is travel editor of Vanity Fair; her TEDx (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2ZnosgO8XA) is “Hitchhiking, galaxies, and why travel is not bad for the planet”. Her debut novel Song (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Song-Michelle-Jana-Chan/dp/1783525479/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=) (Unbound) was described by Bernardine Evaristo as ‘a wonderfully lush and atmospheric odyssey of survival against all odds’; Elif Shafak called it: ‘Precise, heartfelt, breathtaking’. Her upcoming book, Two Friends (And Other Stories) is a double memoir which speculates into the future, co-authored with Shehnaz Suterwalla. She is launching a literary/travel podcast The Wandering Book Collector in December.

And so, dear writers, now it’s over to you. We can’t wait to receive your electronic birthday parcels, filled with fresh, innovative, experimental writing between 50-500 words, in response to this image and written within an hour. Challenge yourself. Push your boundaries. Go beyond the literal. Surprise us and, most of all, surprise yourself. Submissions close midnight (UK time) on November 15th.

The image is the starting point, the rest is up to you.

Lucie
with the VV team: Kristen, Preti, Isabel, Tam, Nahda, Jordan, Aimee and Anna.
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Volume 08, Chapter 12 | October 2021

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Image by Nickhil Jain

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

We are delighted to announce the winners of our first ever Autumn Writing Prize. These four pieces have been selected from an astounding 279 entries:

WINNERS

T18.0XXA – Breathing Obstruction by K Roberts
Head judge, Preti Taneja, says: “It is very hard to use this device of forward slashes without them distracting from the feeling of the piece, instead becoming part of its focus, language and its drama. But the piece’s marriage of content and form, and its response to the image, its play with time, trauma and with ways of representing emotion is moving and accomplished and in the true spirit of Visual Verse.”

Liebe Radioaktive Damen und Herren by Clio Velentza
Preti says: “The everyday made extremely vivid, gothic and strange, yet populated with everyday fears of being made responsible, feeling ridiculous, being invisible and hypervisible – and being special but also normal. This writer understands loneliness and desire for connection that cities can offer. I loved the sudden turning point and yet the central protagonist continues her refrain. Ambitious and achieved.”

Movement by Mitra Visveswaran
Preti says: “I chose this for its imagery and its onomatopoeia – an art difficult to master – and its handle on the circularity of things gives it a self-reflexivity. Another piece about falling through wormholes, but very distinct from the other one.”

Stunted by Benedict Welch
Preti says: “I liked this one for its sense of a person coming to terms with their own strangeness, their own story – refusing to give up childhood habits but adapting them to a new self. I thought the nesting of characters and mother-child relationship well achieved; the child locked inside the poem while the reader is strung along in the narrative.”

SHORTLIST

Congratulations also to the shortlisted writers (in no particular order) whose work greatly impressed the judges:

Pandora by Corinne Lawrence
Why I Kept Losing My Keys by Hannah Whiteoak
A Mechanism Far Too Finely-Wrought by Ankh Spice
The Day of the Hanging Key by K. J. Watson
The Key to it All by Marilyn A. Timms
The Art of Looking by Emma Hynes
Putting the Tin Lid In It by R. J. Kinnarney
Anamorphosis by Ella Skilbeck-Porter
Fob by Sarah-Jane Crowson
Family Recipe by Jude Higgins
Little Lena by Sallie Anderson
Separate Floors by Ceinwen E. C. Haydon

Special mention to Marion Clarke for the very punny Fishy Tale–A Haibun, which gave us a belly laugh.

The judging process was anonymised and our committee applied the same principles that guide our selections on Visual Verse each month. That is, unearthing pieces that hit these three characteristics (what our editors call “the Golden V”):

1. Accomplished, high-quality writing
2. Masterfully evokes the image
3. Innovative and/or brave

Our four winners and our shortlist hit the Golden V, but so did many of the other submissions. In fact, we started to compile a “Special Mentions” list but it became far too long. There were so many wonderful moments and beautiful interpretations among the submissions. So, this is to say, congratulations to every writer who submitted to this competition. We hope that you surprised and impressed yourself, just as you did us, and that you will continue to write in extra-ordinary ways.

The October issue is now open for submissions. A selection of entries from the competition will be published throughout October so please do not re-submit. For those who did not enter the competition, you know what to do: the image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

With thanks and congratulations from the VV Editorial team and judging committee:
Preti Taneja (Head Judge) with Kristen Harrison, Isabel Brooks, Lucie Stevens, Tam Eastley and Nahda Tahsin.

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Autumn Writing Prize 2021

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Visual Verse Autumn Writing Prize

OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS

Image by Nickhil Jain

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Dear writers,

The Visual Verse Autumn Writing Prize is now open for submissions.

This is your writing prompt courtesy of photographer and developer, Nick Jain. Your task is to write 50-500 words and submit here (https://visualverse.org/submit/) by 10am Uk time (GMT) today, 30th September.

Please ensure you start the submission process at least 10 minutes early as the site will close promptly at 10am. We cannot accept submissions by email. Please also read the submission guidelines (https://visualverse.org/submission-guidelines/) to ensure your piece complies. The word count is strict.

Please proofread your work before submitting.

If you are a disabled writer and need additional support to submit your work, please let us know. Email visualverse@thecurvedhouse.com asap to let us know how we can support you.

You can write in any style or form and we encourage you to be brave and innovative.

We will announce the winners at 9am GMT tomorrow. All winners will receive a £50 prize and a one-to-one mentoring session with our publisher, Kristen Harrison.

The prize is judged by Dr Preti Taneja, publisher Kristen Harrison and deputy editor Isabel Brookes, with assistance from Tam Eastley, Nahda Tahsin and Jordan Fleming.

Good luck!
Start Timer (https://vclock.com/timer/#countdown=01:00:00&enabled=0&seconds=3600&title=Visual+Verse%3A+One+image.+One+Hour.+50-500+Words.+)
Submit (https://visualverse.org/submit/)

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Volume 08, Chapter 11 | September 2021

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Image by Vika Wendish

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Another issue of Visual Verse is upon us. It has been a cruel and trying month for many around the globe. Our hearts go out especially to the people of Afghanistan who have endured unimaginable anguish. I often think about how those in such circumstances process their trauma and a recent conversation with a group of artist friends reminded me that a person’s own creativity – however it manifests – can be such a powerful part of that process. The act of writing, drawing or making brings us back to ourselves and in that moment we are safe. It is my hope that Visual Verse provides this space for everyone, everywhere.

Now, I have a feeling that some of you will be cursing me for this image selection. As beautiful as it is, it makes for a challenging writing prompt. That’s why I love it. And that’s why I chose it. This prompt, by artist Victoria (Vika) Wendish (https://www.instagram.com/vikawendish/) is designed to cause friction and make you work. How you all respond to this image cannot be predicted and thus we are on tenterhooks as we await your words.

Our featured writers this month have exceeded our expectations in terms of showing us the possibilities with this image. First up, we learn the art of balancing with Farhana Shaikh (https://twitter.com/farhanashaikh) , a writer and publisher born in Leicester. Farhana is the editor of The Asian Writer (https://theasianwriter.co.uk/) and she manages small independent press, Dahlia Books (http://www.dahliapublishing.co.uk/) , who we hope to collaborate with in the future. Be sure to follow her on Twitter (https://twitter.com/farhanashaikh) where she talks about all things books and publishing.

On page two, we’re excited to highlight the work of Michelle Davey (https://twitter.com/cockneybloggirl) , a poet, radio presenter and primary school teacher from East London. Michelle is a mother of three children and an advocate for autism awareness. She co-hosts the podcast Let’s Talk Autism (https://www.letstalkautism.co.uk/) as well as blogging about life as The Cockney in the Countryside (https://cockneyinthecountryside.com/) . Michelle has graced us with many wonderful pieces over the years and we love her original take on this month’s image.

And on page three we present a beautiful, fading poem by Wes Viola (https://linktr.ee/wesviola) , another regular contributor to Visual Verse whose writing has impressed us. Wes Viola is the pen name of Wes White, who was the Bard of Glastonbury (http://ynyswitrin.org.uk/) in 2015/16. His recent projects include the Way to Zed (https://www.camberwellarts.org.uk/caf20-fringe/the-way-to-zed-by-wes-white) , a poem cycle and tarot deck inspired by the letters of the alphabet, and Wedding Ritual (http://theweddingritual.blogspot.com/) , a series of artist profiles in which reflection on creative growth, tributes to other creatives and downright filth are all encouraged. If you are a writer or artist featured in Visual Verse and would like to be profiled on Wedding Ritual, you can contact Wes at theweddingritual@gmail.com (mailto:theweddingritual@gmail.com) to express your interest.

So, it’s over to you. As always, we are looking for fresh, innovative, experimental writing between 50-500 words, in response to this image. Challenge yourself. Push your boundaries. Go beyond the literal. Write within an hour to conjure thoughts and ideas you didn’t know were in you. Submission close midnight (UK time) on 15th September.

The image is the starting point, the rest is up to you.
Kristen
with Lucie, Isabel and the VV Team

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Volume 08, Chapter 10 | August 2021

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Image by Veronica Lissandrini

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Rise, write and shine. Your August issue is here and isn’t it a beautiful one? With the help of my co-curator this month, Divya Ghelani, we showcase four women to watch: one artist and three writers, all with abundant talent. I was deeply moved by this month’s writing – actual tears in some cases – and I felt a kind of tectonic shift as I read them. I felt the impact of both excellent writing and work that speaks to the moment we are in. That combination is the dragon we chase at Visual Verse. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

Our writing prompt comes from Italian artist Veronica Lissandrini (https://veronicalissandrin.wixsite.com/portfolio) , whose work spans visual art and writing. She has a fierce manifesto on her website that centres many of the values we share: freedom, creativity, disruption, truth, community, joy and dream. Follow Veronica on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/iamverolix/) to see more of her fabulous work.

And now, our magnificent lead writers: On page 1, we welcome Amy Stewart who makes her Visual Verse debut with a brilliant piece, Luna. Amy is a writer living in York and she recently won the Word Factory Northern Apprentice Award (https://thewordfactory.tv/word-factory-apprentice-award-announcement-2021-22/) . She is currently researching a PhD at the University of Sheffield about female circus artists and the carnivalesque. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the 2021 Mairtin Crawford Award and the 2019 Bridport Prize. Amy’s work can be found in Test Signal (DeadInk Books/Bloomsbury, 2021), Ellipsis Zine, Bandit Fiction and the York Journal.

On page 2, we are thrilled to feature Avrina Prabala-Joslin (http://www.avrinajos.net) , one of our regular contributors whose talent shines brighter with every submission. Avrina is a South-Indian writer living in Berlin. Her short story She’s a Tank, a Battalion, a Banyan won the Short Fiction/University of Exeter International Short Story Prize 2021. Her works have been shortlisted for the Indiana Review Fiction Prize 2021, Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize 2021 and the Berlin Writing Prize 2019. She’s currently finishing a novel that follows a few nomads and we are very excited to read it.

Alaya Mays, on page 3, is a student at Western Washington University studying German and Creative Writing. She has been writing and performing her own spoken word poetry since she was 16. Alaya tells us she has a special love for calculus, sushi, and playing cards at brunch. Her first piece on Visual Verse was published when she was still in school and we are enamoured by her work: the style and maturity she already displays is something special. Watch this space.

My deepest gratitude to Divya Ghelani (https://www.divyaghelani.com/) who co-curated this month’s writers. Divya is a British-Indian writer living in Berlin. She holds and MA in Creative Writing from UAE and in 2016 she won an Apprenticeship at The Word Factory (http://www.thewordfactory.tv/site/divya-ghelani/) . (http://www.thewordfactory.tv/site/apprentice-scheme/the-workers/) That’s where we were introduced to Divya’s work and she was later featured in Volume 5, Chapter 3 (https://visualverse.org/submissions/the-peacock/) . Divya has also been published in the BareLit Anthology, Litro: India, Too Asian, Not Asian Enough, Radio 4 and many more. As it turns out, she can not only write herself, but also spot exciting talent in others. Thank you, Divya.

So, know what to do. Deliver us your dragons. We are looking for fresh, innovative, experimental writing between 50-500 words, in response to this image. Challenge yourself. Push your boundaries. Go beyond the literal. Write within an hour to conjure thoughts and ideas you didn’t know were in you.

The image is the starting point, the rest is up to you.
Kristen,
with Divya Ghelani and Team VV

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Volume 08, Chapter 09 | July 2021

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Image by María Victoria Rodriguez

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we are able to socialise again. The sun is shining and the air is a-buzz with energy. It is particularly enlivening to feel a sense of community once more and to be part of a place. Culture, food and the spirit of people can give us so much. That’s why this month’s image felt just right.

María Victoria Rodriguez (https://victoriarodriguez.com.ar/) , an Argentinian artist and animator living in Berlin, created this artwork for a small artisan food business in Shropshire, UK, called Pueblo. They sell handmade foods from South America and bring a taste for empanadas to their local British community. It’s these small, independent initiatives that bind us and keep the spirit alive.

A small side note before we announce our three lead writers. We have opened up our internships again and are looking for two or three new team members, to help us edit and publish pieces each month. We invite applications from anyone, anywhere, with any level of experience. We welcome entry level applicants and those who are looking for a career change or just some “behind the scenes” publishing experience. You can apply here (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfjCuLjjso6W0MU6fQvvv8MpA2YZ91vWotga7tt59EUNjDDcg/viewform) until 9th July.

Now, to our lead writers for the July issue of Visual Verse. These three have been on our radar for some time, as each of them has contributed some excellent writing to our publication.

Our first piece is by Carl Burkitt (https://carltellstales.com/) , who likes to tell tales. He tells long tales, short tales, silly tales and sad tales. He likes to tell them online, behind a mic, in books, in schools or on the sofa with his young family in Manchester. His debut collection What Does A Baby Think It Is? And Other Questions (https://carlburkitt.bigcartel.com/product/what-does-a-baby-think-it-is) was published in 2020 by Enthusiastic Press.

Page two features Megha Sood (https://meghasworldsite.wordpress.com/) , an award-winning poet, editor, author and blogger from New Jersey, USA. She is the recipient of the 2021 Poet Fellowship from MVICW (Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creating Writing) and a National Level Winner for the 2020 Spring Mahogany Prize. Sood is an Associate Poetry Editor for literary journals Mookychick (UK) and Life and Legends (USA), and is Literary Partner with Life in Quarantine, Stanford University. She has authored a chapbook My Body is Not an Apology (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and a full-length work My Body Lives Like a Threat (FlowerSongPress, 2021).

Our third piece comes from New York City resident Kerfe Roig, who enjoys transforming words and images into something new. Follow her explorations on her blogs methodtwomadness.wordpress.com/ (which she does with her friend Nina) and kblog.blog/. You can read more of her work on her website (http://kerferoig.com/) .

And so, dear writers, the blank page of possibility awaits you. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.
Kristen
with the VV team, Preti, Lucie and Isabel

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Volume 08, Chapter 08 | June 2021

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Image by Tanya Layko

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Last month was one of the best issues of Visual Verse. The writing you submitted throughout May was brave, innovative and unpredictable. It was a pleasure to watch the issue grow and we especially loved seeing more experimentation. Keep it up! We look forward to seeing what comes from this new prompt, a magnificent image I was drawn to for it’s collage-like quality. It’s by Tanya Layko (Таня Лайко) – check our her Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/tanyalayko/) for more technicolor beauty and kooky portraiture.

For the month of June we are thrilled to introduce you to a new indie publisher based in Greater Manchester, UK, with whom we have created this issue. Master House Publishing (https://masterhousepublishing.com/) is founded by author and spoken word artist, Fehmida Master (https://twitter.com/fehmida_master) , and its mission and vision is to empower, strengthen and amplify as many voices of women, and voices of colour, as possible – voices that are so often under-represented in mainstream publishing. Master House Publishing launched with an online journal which quickly developed into a wonderful community. Following the launch of their debut collection, by our June lead Lisa O’Hare, Master House will be reviewing the submissions that have been received by them over the past few months, with a plan to publish more diverse poetry in the coming months. For now, you can enjoy the words of four writers from the Master House Publishing community, with thanks to Fehmida Master for co-curating this
selection.

First up we feature new writing by Lisa O’Hare (https://www.lisaoharewriter.com) , a regular contributor to Visual Verse and the author of the debut poetry collection, Lockdown Life: A Rollercoaster of Emotions (https://masterhousepublishing.com/shop/ols/products/lockdown-life-a-rollercoaster-of-emotions-paperback-lisa-ohare) , just published by Master House Publishing. Lisa’s poetry has been featured in several anthologies, zines, podcasts and on BBC Radio Manchester. Connect with Lisa on social media @thelisaohare or visit her website (https://lisaoharewriter.com/about-me) .

On page 2 we present the mighty talent of Jay Délise (https://www.jaydelise.com/bio) . Jay is a NYC/UK based writer, storyteller, and performer. Her 2019 solo spoken word show Black, And… premiered at the Greater Manchester Fringe Festival in July of 2019 and was nominated for both “Best Newcomer” and “Best Spoken Word” at the Manchester Fringe Awards. Her self-published audiobook tenderhead. (https://www.jaydelise.com/tenderhead) debuted at #1 in bestselling poetry audiobooks.

On page 3, enjoy the words of Linda Done, a writer who is also from Manchester, UK. Linda is a teacher, wife, mother, sister and friend with one book published: Everything Changes in Your 50s. More of Linda’s writing (https://masterhousepublishing.com/online-journal/f/linda-done) can be found on the Master House Publishing website.

And finally we welcome Zahra Pourmohseni (https://www.instagram.com/zahra.zpm/) , a 22-year-old English teacher from Iran who says she is “in love with literature”. Zahra is keen to let the social changes in Iran, that she hopes will happen, to influence her writing. She has recently started to write poetry in English and she has dedicated her piece to the people who never got a voice.

And so, here we are with your June visual prompt and a whole lot of gratitude to you all for keeping this publication fresh and inventive.

As always, the image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen
with the VV team, Preti, Lucie, Isabel and Luke.

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Volume 08, Chapter 07 | May 2021

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Image by Unknown Artist / Wellcome Trust

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Dear writers,

This month we have a special collaboration with the much-respected imprint, Serpent’s Tail (https://serpentstail.com/) , to celebrate the debut novel (https://uk.bookshop.org/books/before-the-ruins/9781788163798?aid=7452) of Victoria Gosling.

Let me tell you a little anecdote about Victoria Gosling (https://twitter.com/VictoriaReaderB?s=20) . Several years ago, I found myself an hour from Berlin, in a strange little Fort (replete with a moat) with cavernous rooms and an honesty bar. This was The Reader Berlin (https://www.thereaderberlin.com/) ’s Fort Gorgast Writer’s Festival and I was there to represent Visual Verse. I sat in on a workshop that Victoria ran, in which she took participants through a number of writing activities that were very much in the spirit of the surrealists, and in the spirit of Visual Verse. These were activities designed to tap the subconscious and remove mental barriers to one’s own creativity. I expected to be more of an observer than a participant but as Victoria unfurled her intriguing, thoughtful array of writing exercises I found myself deeply engaged. I have kept the work I did that day. And I have never forgotten the feeling of liberation as her prompts evoked words I never knew I had in me.
Victoria has a special kind of magic: she’s a gifted writer and also someone who can share that gift, conjuring other people’s talents with great empathy and sensitivity.

So without further ado, I present your May visual writing prompt, an intriguing artwork thought to be from around 1850, by an unknown artist, and courtesy of Wellcome Collection. It is an honour and pleasure to present Victoria’s response on page one. Her first full-length novel, Before the Ruins (https://uk.bookshop.org/books/before-the-ruins/9781788163798?aid=7452) , will be published on May 6th by Serpent’s Tail. It is a fabulous book, full of mystery, speculation, characters that oscillate between dark and light, a complex but accessible narrative, and a protagonist who keeps us at arms length while anchoring us to her plight. Put it on your summer reading list immediately.

On page two, we are thrilled to feature another new Serpent’s Tail writer, Alice Ash (https://twitter.com/aliceash_?s=20) , whose short story collection Paradise Block (https://uk.bookshop.org/books/paradise-block/9781788165549) was released in February. Alice is the current Writer in Residence at Open Book (https://openbookreading.com/) , a literary organisation working across Scotland; you can read Alice’s stories here (https://openbookreading.com/unbound/#lockdown) . She lives in Brighton with her boyfriend and 2,000 books.

And as you know we often invite regular contributors whose work has caught our eye month-to-month. On page three we are delighted to introduce you to Rachel Belward (https://twitter.com/RBel2?s=20) . Rachel grew up in northern Italy, and she now lives in London. She is a regular contributor to Visual Verse, and her short stories have been published by Dear Damsels. She works for a mental health charity, and is working on a novel about love, music and climate disaster. She loves to read, and her Instagram book reviews are my go-to for reading recommendations. Follow her on Instagram at @rach_is_reading (https://www.instagram.com/rach_is_reading/) .

Now it’s your turn, dear writers. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Enjoy!

Kristen
with the VV team, Preti, Lucie, Isabel and Luke.

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Volume 08, Chapter 06 | April 2021

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Image by Cris Martín

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

This month at The Curved House HQ (Visual Verse mothership) we have been busy creating a new series of children’s books. So, in this spirit, we offer something playful to inspire your writing: a children’s book illustration by Spanish artist Cris Martín. We’re thrilled to be publishing Cris’ debut children’s book, coming out in the UK and US in October, so in the meantime you can see more of her work on her website Gato Marino (https://gatomarino.com) .

Before we dive in to our lead writers, a quick update on some improvements we are making to Visual Verse. In the feedback form we circulated earlier this year, many of you requested improvements to the Archive (https://visualverse.org/images/) section of visualverse.org. Your wish is our command… You can now see the Author and Artist names organised within an alphabetical list (still by first name as we can’t change that) and you can search by title. We hope this helps you to discover and share more great writing from the Visual Verse community.

So without further ado…

On page 1 we present the brilliant Tam Eastley, whose piece is a cleverly constructed choose-your-own adventure! Which way will the story unfold for you? Tam is a writer and web developer based in Berlin. She likes writing about reality TV, tech, the post-apocalyptic world, and is currently editing her way through her first novel. She has been published in The Wild Word (https://thewildword.com) and here on Visual Verse (https://visualverse.org/writers/tam-eastley/) , and is the co-creator of ongoing, a prompt journal for music and prose. When she’s not writing, you can find her cross stitching or going for various hikes around Berlin.

On page 2, Visual Verse regular Misky Braendeholm (https://visualverse.org/writers/misky-braendeholm/) brings all the nostalgia of childhood. Misky is a retired British-American poet who has called the UK home for the past 32-years. When not at her desk writing, you’ll find Misky with a pair of secateurs in the garden, or in the kitchen testing recipes as a “home cook”. Her poetry is regularly published with Ten Penny Players (https://www.tenpennyplayers.org) , Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream (https://tenpennyplayers.org/mags.html) , which is a non-profit publication that supports children with additional needs. Misky never buys clothing without pockets.

And on page 3, John Solloway (https://visualverse.org/writers/john-solloway/) delivers a gem of a piece in a single sentence. John studied graphic design at the London School of Printing and Graphic Arts before pursuing a career in practicing and sometimes teaching graphic design. He has always had a love of words and language. He is a member of a creative writing group in Kingston-upon-Thames, his home town.

So, dear writers, we challenge you to evoke your inner child this month. Let your imagination write for you.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen, Preti, Lucie, Isabel and Luke

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Volume 08, Chapter 05 | March 2021

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Image by Stefan Keller
Guest edited by Zoe Turner, Comma Press

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

For your March inspiration, we offer otherworldly vibes via a fantastical image by Stefan Keller. This scene, with its juxtaposition of worlds, is a nod to our core objective: bring together the worlds of artists and writers to create something spectacular. A wonderful offshoot of this aim is the way our platform also brings us together with like-minded publishers, so we are thrilled to unveil the March issue in collaboration with Comma Press (https://commapress.co.uk/) , an indie publisher whose work we have long admired. Like us, Comma Press celebrates the alchemy of collaboration with collections by new and established authors, interdisciplinary collaborations between authors and experts (e.g. writers + scientists), and translation by voices from across the world, including the first ever collection of science-fiction from Palestine, Palestine +100 (https://commapress.co.uk/books/palestine-100/) . They have twice been shortlisted for the British Book Awards for ‘Small Press of the Year’
(North of England) and in 2016 they founded the Northern Fiction Alliance (http://northernfictionalliance.com/) alongside Peepal Tree Press, Dead Ink Books and And Other Stories. The Alliance is a radical publishing collective showcasing the creativity, diversity and outward-looking agenda that sets publishers in the North of England apart. Since our co-founder Preti moved to the North-East a year ago this March, now seems a good time to celebrate that anniversary with the best of Northern England’s publishing.

We kick off with a brilliant prose piece by Gaia Holmes, a freelance writer and creative writing tutor who works with schools, universities, libraries and other community groups throughout the West Yorkshire region. She runs ‘Igniting The Spark’, a weekly writing workshop at Dean Clough, Halifax, and is the co-host of ‘MUSE-LI’, an online writing group. She has had three full length poetry collections published by Comma Press: Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed (2006), Lifting The Piano With One Hand (2013), Where The Road Runs Out (2018) and Tales from the Tachograph, a collaborative work with Winston Plowes (Calder Valley Poetry, 2017). She also contributed to Comma’s latest horror anthology, The New Abject (https://commapress.co.uk/books/the-new-abject) , and she is currently turning her attention towards writing short stories.

Sarah Schofield (http://icallitresearch.blogspot.com/) , on page two, also contributed to Comma’s horror anthology, The New Abject (https://commapress.co.uk/books/the-new-abject) , and her stories have been published in Lemistry, Bio-Punk, Thought X, Beta Life, Spindles and Conradology (all Comma Press) Wall: Nine Stories from Edge Hill Writers, (EHUP) Best of British Short Stories 2020 (Salt) Spilling Ink Flash Fiction Anthology, Back and Beyond Arts Publication, Litfest’s The Language of Footprints, Synaesthesia Magazine, Lakeview International Journal, Woman’s Weekly and others. She has been shortlisted on the Bridport and the Guardian Travel Writing Competition and won the Orange New Voices Prize, Writer’s Inc and The Calderdale Fiction Prize. An excerpt from her story ‘The Bactogarden’ featured on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book. Sarah is an Associate Tutor of Creative Writing at Edge Hill University and runs writing courses and workshops in a variety of community settings. Her debut short
story collection is due out in 2021 with Comma Press.

On page three, we welcome Karline Smith (https://www.blacksapphirepress.com/) . Born to Jamaican parents who arrived in Britain in the 1960s, Smith was one of the first black female crime writers to deal with the subject of drug gangs in inner-city Britain. She is the author of three novels, Moss Side Massive, which was dramatised by Liverpool’s Unity Theatre, Full Crew, and Goosebumps and Butterflies are Fairy Tales (published by Black Sapphire Press). She is also the author of several short stories, variously published in The City Life Book of Manchester Short Stories (Penguin), M.O.: Crimes of Practice, and Resist (Comma). She is currently working on her fourth novel.

And on page four we feature Gregory Norminton (http://www.gregorynorminton.co.uk) , whose novels include The Ship of Fools (2002), Arts and Wonders (2004), Ghost Portrait (2005) and Serious Things (2008), all published by Sceptre. Other books include The Lost Art of Losing (2012), Thumbnails (2013) and Beacons – stories for our not so distant future (editor, 2013). His stories have appeared on BBC Radio 4, and in Prospect, Resurgence, London Magazine and The Lonely Crowd. He teaches creative writing and English at Manchester Metropolitan University.

You’ll notice a large learning toward prose this month. In our recent survey a few people mention that there’s a heavy leaning toward poetry on Visual Verse. May these prose/prose-poetry pieces signal to all writers that we accept (and, indeed, welcome) all kinds of writing, not just poetry.

So, what will you write? As always, the image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen, Preti, Lucie, Isabel and Luke
with huge thanks to our guest editor Zoe Turner and Comma Press

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Volume 08, Chapter 04 | February 2021

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Image by Tom or Judy Moore

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

We’ve had an amazing response to the feedback form (https://forms.gle/NaiKLaM37AffoxkH6) , thank you. If you haven’t filled it out, please take a moment to have your say. We will digest and report in good time but it has already been so helpful to see your ideas and understand the needs and wishes of our writing community.

And now, February! Allow us to unveil these tech-savvy little pigs courtesy of Tom or Judy Moore (https://www.instagram.com/ignatzhoch/) , a multifunctional artist and busy little bee based in Berlin. They’ve exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, ICA London, and Whose Museum. They sing and teach drawing in Berlin, co-curate the Visual Verse Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/visualverseanthology/) and create the comic Everything is Somewhat Repaired, a phenomenal body of work and continual source of inspiration, humour and humanity for us this past year. Read it on Insta (https://www.instagram.com/everythingrepaired/) or, if you subscribe to their Patreon (http://patreon.com/tomorjudy) you can get it and other exclusive content straight to your inbox and you’ll be supporting a talented trans artist.

We are thrilled to launch with a brilliant line-up of LGBTQ+ writers as LGBTQ+ history month gets underway. With these four wonderful lead pieces, and our fabulous image prompt, we honour the historical struggles of LGBTQ+ people. And we also wish to celebrate the full capacity of human love and be reminded to keep our hearts and minds open to those who are most vulnerable in contemporary society.

First up, we welcome Elizabeth Chakrabarty, an interdisciplinary writer exploring themes of race and sexuality. Her debut novel Lessons in Love and Other Crimes will be published by The Indigo Press in April 2021, and is on pre-order here (https://www.theindigopress.com/lessons-in-love) . Her poems have been published here at Visual Verse (https://visualverse.org/writers/elizabeth-chakrabarty/) , and she co-wrote ‘The Fiction of the Essay: of Abstraction, Texts, Communication and Loss’, published in Imagined Spaces (https://uk.bookshop.org/books/imagined-spaces/9780995512344) . Under her full name, Namita Elizabeth Chakrabarty, she has been published in the area of Critical Race Theory (https://www.routledge.com/Critical-Race-Theory-in-England/Chakrabarty-Roberts-Preston/p/book/9780415713078) , her story Eurovision was short-listed for the Asian Writer Short Story Prize, and published in Dividing Lines (http://dahlia-books.kong365.com/en-gb/products/dividing-lines) , and recently her poems
were chosen for the new anthology The Kali Project: Invoking the Goddess Within/Indian Women’s Voices (https://www.bookdepository.com/Kali-Project-Candice-Louisa-Daquin/9781951724061?ref=grid-view&qid=1611168944417&sr=1-1&fbclid=IwAR1EasUA6Y5UOwiZ0767VbKsTEWhHFNsAzKEQZsHRbXLpr-WXpWSyzY1_5M) .

On page 2 we feature Sy Brand, a queer non-binary poet living in Edinburgh, Scotland. They write through the haze of cat-/child-induced sleep deprivation to try and make sense of gender, relationships, and ADHD. Their work has been published in Popshot Quarterly, Capsule Stories, and ZARF Poetry, among others, and you can find some of their ekphrastic writing in the Visual Verse archives (https://visualverse.org/writers/sy-brand/) . You can find them on Twitter @TartanLlama (https://twitter.com/TartanLlama) and their publications at https://sybrand.ink (https://sybrand.ink/) .

Page 3 welcomes Siobhán Carroll to Visual Verse. Siobhán is a writer and performer based in Edinburgh. They live in Leith with 2 cats and a growing number of books. They write poetry, prose and personal essays. You can follow them on Twitter at @siobhanclaude_ (https://twitter.com/siobhanclaude_) or visit their website (https://www.siobhanclaudevandamme.co.uk) .

Eleanor Capaldi (https://emcletters.wordpress.com/) is a writer, director and researcher based in Scotland. Her work has been published by Gutter Magazine, The Interpreter’s House, Mechanics’ Institute Review, the Skinned Knee Collective, and in anthologies, The Edwin Morgan Centenary Collection (Speculative Books), Reel to Rattling Reel (Cranachan Press), and Queering the Map of Glasgow (Knight Errant Press). Short film Glue screened in competition at SQIFF, Roze FilmDagen and QueerVision Film Festival, where it was nominated in the category ‘Best of British’.

You know the drill now writers, it’s over to you. What will you make of our two little pigs? As always, you have until the 15th to write 50-500 words, in one hour. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen, Preti, Lucie, Luke and Isabel.

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Volume 08, Chapter 03 | January 2021

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Image by Michael Easterling

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Happy New Year to you all! This past year has made online communities more important than ever and seeing the Visual Verse writing community strengthen and thrive has been an inspiration. Thank you to all of you for supporting each other by reading, sharing and tweeting. It warms our hearts to see how generous and encouraging you are. Though we can’t be sure what 2021 will hold, we’re honoured that we can provide a space where you can be creative, experiment and express yourself. We’ll be here for you in 2021, no matter what.

We’re beginning this year with a pop of colour courtesy of Michael Easterling. And, a special treat – four wonderful writers from Mirrabooka Writers (https://mirrabookawriters.com/) , a new online writing school founded by VV’s Deputy Editor, Lucie Stevens. Lucie moved back to Australia mid-2020 and she has continued to be an invaluable member of the Visual Verse team while also starting up this new venture. From mid-January, Mirrabooka Writers will offer workshops for novelists, memoirists, children’s and YA writers, poets and beginner writers across all fiction genres. It also has a special creativity workshop to help you become happier and more productive in your writing life. Lucie has kindly offered the VV community a 10% discount on all upcoming courses. Enter the discount code VV121 at the checkout when you enrol. It goes without saying that we cannot recommend this, or Lucie, enough!

Each of our lead writers will be teaching at Mirrabooka Writers in the months ahead and span different genres. On page one, we have a touching story of love and loss by Christine Piper (http://www.christinepiper.com/) . Christine is an Australian writer, editor and teacher. Her debut novel, After Darkness (Allen & Unwin, 2014) won the 2014 The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award and was shortlisted for the 2015 Miles Franklin Literary Award. It is now being studied by Year 12 students in the state of Victoria. She also won the 2014 Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay and the 2014 Guy Morrison Award for literary journalism. Her short stories have been published in several anthologies and journals.

On page two, poet Toby Fitch unpicks some of the anxieties and fears our new year brings. Toby is poetry editor of Overland and a sessional academic in creative writing at the University of Sydney. His most recent book of poems is Where Only the Sky had Hung Before (https://vagabondpress.net/products/toby-fitch-where-only-the-sky-had-hung-before) while his next, Sydney Spleen, is forthcoming with Giramondo in 2021. He lives in Sydney on unceded Gadigal land.

Page three features a tale of reflection by Ashley Kalagian Blunt (http://ashleykalagianblunt.com) , author of the memoir How to Be Australian. Her first book, My Name Is Revenge, was shortlisted for the 2019 Woollahra Digital Literary Awards and the 2018 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award. Her writing appears in Griffith Review, Sydney Review of Books, the Sydney Morning Herald, and more, and she co-hosts James and Ashley Stay at Home (https://jamesandashley.libsyn.com/) , a podcast about writing, creativity and health.

On page four, Term 2 tutor Emily Paull (http://www.emilypaull.com) explores something many of us have become familiar with in 2020 – inaction. Emily is a former bookseller and a future librarian from Perth, Western Australia. Her stories have appeared in Westerly and several of the Margaret River Press anthologies, and she is the author of the short story collection Well-Behaved Women, published 2019. When she’s not writing short stories and historical fiction, she can often be found with her nose in a book.

And so, dear writers, it’s your turn now. What will you make of the first image in our new year? As always, you have until the 15th to write 50-500 words, in one hour. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Wishing you all a safe and happy new year,

Kristen, Preti, Lucie and Luke.

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Volume 08, Chapter 02 | December 2020

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Image by Oscar Ukonu

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Kristen here, publisher, curator and co-founder of our beloved Visual Verse. This final issue for the year 2020 comes with a personal message from me.

This year, I have made some simple but significant changes to how I curate Visual Verse, including a commitment to featuring more contemporary artists. Prior to 2020, I was complacent in my approach to curation, sourcing images primarily from public domain collections, photo libraries and museum archives. Not only did this limit the diversity of artists represented, but it also meant we missed opportunities to be a true reflection on the world around us. The zeitgeisty atmosphere that you all bring with your writing is what makes Visual Verse a truly unique publication. The images need to match you.

My search for current, contemporary work is how I came to discover Oscar Ukonu (https://www.oscarukonu.com/) , the Nigerian artist behind our visual prompt for December. Oscar creates exquisite afrorealist portraits using only a ballpoint pen. He says “exploring afrorealism in my works is a practice of representing, documenting and celebrating the diversified forms of black individuality. With my work, I look at the role of socio-historical influences on contemporary identities, believing identities as socially constructed and constantly changing.” For me, this is a perfect semblance of my own preoccupation with historical images and Oscar’s embodiment of his own history through deeply mindful artworks. I have chosen to feature him now, on the tail end of the protests in Nigeria (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/world/africa/Nigeria-EndSARS-protests.html) against police brutality, to draw attention to the talent and tenacity of artists like Oscar, who continue to work despite the
challenges they face.

Oscar describes his creative process as a practice in time and patience, working approximately 200 to 400 hours on a piece. He says: “I aim to provoke thought and engage my audiences intellectually… through visual dialogues that establish a relationship with the viewer, and encourage their participation to the same extent as my involvement in it.”

Oscar spent 200+ hours on this piece and he encourages you to participate to the same extent. You have one hour. What will you do with this time? What do you see in this image? What do you feel? Where will it take you? What will you remember? How will it inspire you? Be brave, obscure, abstract. The selection of this image is, of course, an act of quiet activism in the spirit of Visual Verse, but it is also simply a beautiful, powerful work. Enjoy it as you wish and bring forth your own words.

To inspire you we have three exceptional writers who give us three completely different and wonderful responses to this image. On page one we welcome the brilliant Jasmine Richards (https://jasminerichards.com/) , who has written over a dozen books for children and teenagers, including Keeper of Myths published by Harper Collins US. Jasmine is the founder of Storymix (https://www.storymix.co.uk/) , a fiction development company that creates inclusive series fiction for publishers. All children, regardless of background, get to be the heroes in these stories. Storymix is actively seeking writers from BME backgrounds to work with and Jasmine uses her unique experiences as author, editor and writing coach to develop new voices and new stories. She really does try not to read the review of her books…

On page two we are thrilled to bring you Jennifer Celestin, a Haitian-American writer, performer, and facilitator. Her writings have been included in Akashicbooks.com (http://www.akashicbooks.com/real-love-by-jennifer-celestin/) , No, Dear Magazine, The Hawai’i Review, la Revue Trois/Sant/Soixante, aaduna (https://aaduna.org/summer2019/poetry/jennifer-celestin/) , and Midnight & Indigo (https://www.midnightandindigo.com/author/jennifer-celestin/) . She received a B.A. from Wesleyan University, an M.A. from NYU, and her M.F.A. in Fiction at CUNY: Queens College. Check her out this Friday, December 4th from 4pm-6pm for a virtual event with other Afro-Latinx artists. (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mind-body-soul-afrofuturist-sacred-sounds-tickets-130421749965)

And on page three we feature one of our regular contributors, Jaya Avendel, a word witch from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, writing family into fantasy through poetry and prose. Her writing has been published here at Visual Verse and by Free Verse Revolution, and Spillwords Press, among others. She is also published in As The World Burns Anthology from Indie Blu(e) Publishing. Her poetry is also forthcoming at Mookychick. She writes at ninchronicles.com (https://ninchronicles.com/) and tweets as @AvendelJaya (https://twitter.com/AvendelJaya) .

So, dear writers, what will you make of this image? As always, you have until the 15th to write 50-500 words, in one hour. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

With love and thanks for another incredible year of writing. You are a remarkable community of creatives.

Kristen

With Preti, Lucie and Luke

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Volume 08, Chapter 01 | November 2020

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Image by John Samuel Pughe / Library of Congress

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Our November issue begins a whole new volume and marks our 7th birthday. Lots to celebrate!

After such a reflective year we are starting to understand just how significant this publication is. Every month for the past seven years, you have written fresh new pieces that reflect exactly what was going on in the world at that very moment. This makes Visual Verse a unique living document of our times. As a literary archive it is as diverse in its styles and themes as it is in its writers. And it is a true collaboration. We have done this together – us and you – and we are so thankful for all of your contributions and support over the years. We are also constantly in awe of the way you support and amplify each other. Our Twitter world is a happy one and that is thanks to you creating a safe and positive space for eachother’s creative output and wellbeing. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Without further ado, let’s get stuck into the November birthday edition. Alongside a spectacularly hectic image by 19th century cartoonist John Samuel Pughe (courtesy of the Library of Congress) we feature three brilliant writers who have never before been published by Visual Verse.

First up is Stu Hennigan, with a poem that feels pretty darn accurate for 2020. Stu is a writer, poet and musician living and working in the north of England. His work has featured in Lune (https://lunejournal.org/) and is forthcoming in the short story anthology The Middle Of A Sentence (http://thecommonbreath.com/onlineshop.html) , published by The Common Breath (http://thecommonbreath.com/) . He’s currently working on a narrative non-fiction work about the extreme poverty he encountered whilst delivering food parcels during the pandemic.

On page 2 we present US writer Lindsay Parnell (https://twitter.com/LMParnell) , whose debut novel Dogwood is out with Linen Press (https://www.linen-press.com/shop/dogwood/) . Her short fiction has appeared in 3AM Magazine, The Honest Ulsterman, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Underground Voices and others. Currently she is working on a short story collection titled Birds with Broken Necks. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Meryl Streep is her president.

And from her home in Singapore, we welcome Damyanti Biswas, whose short fiction has been published, or is forthcoming, in Ambit, Litro, Puerto Del Sol, Griffith Review Australia and Pembroke Magazine among others. Damyanti serves as one of the editors of the Forge Literary Magazine. Her debut novel You Beneath Your Skin (http://mybook.to/YouBeneathYourSkin) was published by Simon & Schuster India in autumn 2019 and has received rave reviews. You can sign up to herwriting tips gazette (https://us12.campaign-archive.com/?u=2a3ccb7a141fae0477c5dbef4&id=d4e577d951&fbclid=IwAR3DiiAjUqyrX2ddcPo9UF0_hrNul_KLCDwvZHgpS8l2QBTRnJz428DRy5g) and follow her tweets atdamyantig (https://twitter.com/damyantig) .

So, you know the score. Submit your own piece by 15th November for a chance to be published in our birthday issue. Submissions must be original/new work between 50-500 words, written specifically in response to the image and within an hour. Please check our submission guidelines (https://visualverse.org/about-visual-verse/) for more info about the kinds of things we will not publish.

And remember, as we approach the holiday season, if you are gifting books please consider buying direct from small presses like Linen Press and The Common Breath (links above) or from Indie retailers and your local bookshops. Small businesses need our support more than ever.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY US!

Preti, Kristen, Lucie and Luke

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Volume 07, Chapter 12 | October 2020

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Image by Jemima Muir

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to October! This month we are going south… the South East of England that is – with our guest curator, the novelist and writing advocate Sharon Duggal. She and her selected writers are responding to this fabulous image by a hugely talented up-and-coming illustrator, Jemima Muir.

Sharon Duggal (http://www.Sharonduggal.com) grew up in north-west Birmingham as part of a large Indian family. Her acclaimed debut novel, The Handsworth Times, was The Morning Star’s fiction Book of the Year 2016 and selected for Brighton City Reads 2017. Her short stories are in several anthologies including The Book of Birmingham and Love Bites. Her second novel, Should We Fall Behind, is to be published on 22 October by Bluemoose Books (http://www.bluemoosebooks.com/ ) .

Craig Jordan-Baker (https://twitter.com/CraigJordanBak1) is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at The University of Brighton. He has published fiction in New Writing, Text, Firefly Magazine, Potluck and in the époque press é-zine (https://www.epoquepress.com/ezine ) . His drama has been widely performed in the UK, including his adaptation of Beowulf and he has had dramatic work commissioned from The National Archives, The Booth Museum of Natural History and the Theatre Royal Brighton. The Nacullians is Craig’s debut novel, out now with époque press.

Alinah Azadeh (https://www.alinahazadeh.com/) is a writer, artist, performer and social activist of British-Iranian descent. She has been creating visual works for museums, galleries and across diverse communities for over 20 years and has had short stories, interviews and articles published. She is currently developing a collective writing project along the south east UK coast based on a speculative fiction story she wrote, We See You Now (https://newwritingsouth.com/we-see-you-now-alinah-azadeh) . She has just finished writing her first novel, In the Skin of a Stranger, which was longlisted for this year’s S.I Leeds Literary Prize.

If that isn’t enough talent and skill, ambition and resilience to get you started this month, we don’t know what would be. We hope you enjoy reading them, supporting their work, their small presses – and watch this space for these dedicated artists to shine – as you get inspired to get writing. Remember our community guidelines – we won’t publish you again if we feel you’ve broken them before – and our submission guidelines of 50-500 words in response to the image, written within one hour. Deadline: 15th September.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…

Preti, Kristen, Lucie and Luke

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Volume 07, Chapter 11 | September 2020

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Image by Helen Marten

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

It’s always important that we break new ground on our site and this month is no different. For the first time we are very proud to bring you an image and a lead piece by the same person: 2016 Turner Prize winning artist Helen Marten (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Marten) , whose debut novel The Boiled in Between is out this month from Prototype (https://prototypepublishing.co.uk/) .

Helen studied at the University of Oxford and Central St. Martins, London. She has presented solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery, London; Fridericianum, Kassel; CCS Bard, Hessel Museum, New York; Kunsthalle Zürich and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, among others. She was included in the 55th and 56th International Venice Biennales and in 2016 won both the Turner Prize and the inaugural Hepworth Prize for Sculpture. Her work can be found in public collections including Tate Collection, London; Guggenheim Museum, New York and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has forthcoming solo exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; and Sadie Coles HQ, London – and we loved The Boiled in Between (https://prototypepublishing.co.uk/product/the-boiled-in-between/) .

On page two we delightedly bring you the work of April Yee (https://twitter.com/aprilyee) . April writes about colonialism, climate change, and other effects of power. Her work is in The Boston Globe, has been longlisted by Live Canon, and is a winner of the Ware Sonnet Prize. She translates from French and Spanish and has reported in more than a dozen countries before moving to London.

And our final lead writer this month is Yasmine Seale (https://twitter.com/yasmineseale) , a writer and translator living in Istanbul. Her essays, poetry, visual art, and translations from Arabic and French have appeared widely. She is currently working on a new translation of The Thousand and One Nights for W. W. Norton.

So, dear writers and readers, at the turn of this most extreme and extraordinary year of 2020, we hope you’ll take heart with us this September. Remember: the image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Preti, Kristen, Lucie and Luke

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Volume 07, Chapter 10 | August 2020

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Image by Andi Sapey and Other.Dance.Art

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to the high holiday month of August, when we lighten your mood and invite you to transform with us into beings that might, if we wish hard enough, grow out of our human limitations and fly.

Today’s image is one of freedom within confinement. It is a collaboration between British photographer Andi Sapey (https://www.andisapey.co.uk/gallery/) and Other.Dance.Art, in which two dance artists explore the restriction of space and time during lockdown. In response to this wonderful image we have some very special lead writers…

On page one, we bring you Otis Mensah (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKKXT6kV3PhtKhsuqThWsH1nq7lsONrcd&feature=share) , an alternative hip-hop and spoken word artist, and Poet Laureate of Sheffield, UK. He has described his work as a means of challenging dominant models of masculinity, which he believes suppress the discussion of emotions, with negative consequences for mental health. As a hip-hop artist, Mensah has performed at the BBC Music Introducing Stage at Glastonbury Festival and his new book of poems, Safe Metamorphosis (https://prototypepublishing.co.uk/product/safe-metamorphosis/) is out now from Prototype Publishing. Follow Otis on Twitter (https://mobile.twitter.com/otismensah) and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/otismensah/) .

On page two, please welcome Maria Fusco (http://mariafusco.net) , a Belfast-born, Glasgow-based writer and Professor of Interdisciplinary Writing at the University of Dundee. She writes fiction, critical and theoretical texts and is published internationally and translated into ten languages. She has won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship (2019) and a Jerwood Creative Catalyst, and is a Hawthornden Fellow. She has also been an invited Writer-in-Residence at Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris and Whitechapel Gallery, London. Her most recent work is: ECZEMA! (2018-19).

Our page three is reserved this month for one of independent publishing’s most versatile voices: Heidi James (https://twitter.com/heidipearljames) . She is the author of So the Doves, Wounding and The Mesmerist’s Daughter. Her new novel, The Sound Mirror (https://bluemoosebooks.com/books/sound-mirror-0) , is published by Bluemoose Books this very month of August. Be sure to check it out.

And finally, be inspired with Arji Manuelpillai (http://www.arji.org ) , a poet, performer and creative facilitator based in London. For over 15 years Arji has worked with community arts projects nationally and internationally. He was named the Jerwood/Arvon mentee for 2019/20. Recently, his poetry has been published by magazines including Ink Sweat and Tears, Strix, The Rialto and The Lighthouse Journal. He has also been shortlisted for the BAME Burning Eye pamphlet prize, The Robert Graves Prize, The Oxford Prize and The Live Canon Prize. Arji is a member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen and London Stanza. Arji’s debut pamphlet Mutton Rolls (http://www.outspokenldn.com/shop/muttonrolls) is published with Out-Spoken Press.

So dear writers, as the summer of 2020 reaches is wide and wild sky, we hope you’ll write and read with us, tweet with us, and stretch your writing arms with us. Remember, the image is the starting point the rest is up to you…

Preti, Kristen, Lucie and Luke

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Volume 07, Chapter 09 | July 2020

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Image by Khadija Saye
courtesy of the artist’s estate

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

In solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and to mark the third anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire which in 2017 claimed the lives of 72 people in London, most of them from Black, Asian and ethnic minority families, Visual Verse brings you an image and lead words by five extraordinary creators.

Our issue this month resonates with the idea of inspiration (from the Latin, spirare, “to breathe”). Inspiration – as breath, as life, as hope – and as a human right. Our world resounds with the phrase ‘I can’t breathe’, uttered by Black people who have suffered institutional brutality, including, in the UK, Jimmy Mubenga in 2014 (his head held down by G4S security guards whilst on a plane) and by Sheku Bayoh in 2015 (who suffered positional asphyxiation by the police: they sprayed CS gas in his face and held him down). ‘I can’t breathe’ were the words of Eric Garner in New York in 2014 as he died from a police chokehold, and George Floyd in Minnesota on May 25, 2020 who died with a police knee in his neck. The phrase also resonates terribly with the reality of the Grenfell Tower fire. ‘We can’t breathe’ were among the last words of nursery teacher Nadia Choucair as she called emergency services from her 22nd floor flat that night. The survivors of Grenfell are still awaiting justic
e, while the official inquiry refuses to recognise the systemic racism of social inequality and institutional response as contributing to the disaster. The death of George Floyd and the anniversary of the fire fell during the lockdown for a pandemic that affects our breathing, our lungs, and is most disproportionately taking the lives of the poorest from Black and Bangladeshi minority communities (in the UK).

What is the role of art and curation here? As memorial, as reckoning. As inspiration.

Our image is from the self-portrait series, Dwelling: in this space we breathe by Khadija Mohammadou Saye with the kind permission of her estate (https://www.estateofkhadijasaye.com/) . Also known as Ya-Haddy Sisi Saye, she was a Gambian-British photographer whose work was exhibited in the Diaspora Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017. She died aged 24, in Grenfell Tower.

The British Library’s exhibition, Khadija Saye: in this space we breathe was due to take place in Spring 2020. It was postponed, and new dates will be announced in due course.

And so to our lead writers, with respect and gratitude for their responses to this most important work…

Kadija Sesay (https://twitter.com/kadijattug) , FRSA, is a literary activist. She is the founder/publisher of SABLE litmag, SABLE litfest, and co-founder of The Mboka Festival of Arts, Culture and Sport in The Gambia. She is the editor of several anthologies of work by writers of African and Asian descent and the Publications Manager for the Inscribe Programme for Peepal Tree Press. She has also mentored several writers and judged several writing competitions. Her poetry collection, Irki (https://www.peepaltreepress.com/books/irki) (which means ‘Homeland’ in the Nubian language) (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry in 2014. She received an Arts Council grant for Research and Development for her second collection, The Modern Pan Africanist’s Journey which includes a poetry and Pan-Africanism app. Kadija has received several awards for her work in the Creative Arts. She is a Fellow of the Kennedy Arts Centre of Performance Arts Management
and a Kluge Fellow. She currently has an AHRC scholarship to research Black British Publishing and Pan-Africanism at University of Brighton. She is a cousin of Sheku Bayoh.

Maame Blue (https://maamebluewrites.com) is a Ghanaian-Londoner splitting her time between Melbourne and London. She is part of Jacaranda’s #Twentyin2020 initiative. (https://www.jacarandabooksartmusic.co.uk/blogs/news/twentyin2020-is-announced-and-its-quite-the-moment) Her debut novel Bad Love (https://www.jacarandabooksartmusic.co.uk/products/bad-love) is available to buy online (https://www.jacarandabooksartmusic.co.uk/products/bad-love) , at Foyles (https://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction-poetry/bad-love,maame-blue-9781913090180) and all good Indie bookshops, and as an Audible audiobook (https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Bad-Love-Audiobook/B084HLGCZY) . Her short stories and creative non-fiction pieces have appeared in Black Ballad, AFREADA, Litro Magazine and The Good Journal. She also has pieces forthcoming in the Royal Literary Fund Magazine and New Australian Fiction 2020, and co-hosts Headscarves and Carry-ons – a podcast about black girls living abroad.

Karthika Naïr (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/150393/remaindering-habits) is the author of several books, including the award-winning Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata (https://www.brooklinebooksmith-shop.com/book/9781939810366) , and principal scriptwriter of Akram Khan’s DESH, Chotto Desh and Until the Lions, a partial adaptation of her own book. Also a dance enabler, Naïr’s closest association has been with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet as executive producer of their works like Babel (Words), Puz/zle and Les Médusés, and as co-founder of Cherkaoui’s company, Eastman. She lives in Paris.

Ruby Cowling (https://rubyorruth.wordpress.com/) grew up in Bradford and lives in London. Her short fiction has won awards including The White Review Short Story Prize and the London Short Story Prize, and her publication credits include Lighthouse, The Lonely Crowd, Wasafiri online, the Galley Beggar Press Singles Club, and numerous print anthologies. Her collection This Paradise (Boiler House Press) was longlisted for the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

Visual Verse is a free, shared space for writers across the world collaborating in art and words. We believe that curating art and writing is an ongoing statement of who we are. We are committed to the work that making genuine, lasting equality for Black lives asks of all of us, not only as allies but as active accomplices (with thanks to The White Pube for this term).

And now dear writers, we hope you are inspired. Give yourself an hour, and 50-500 words. Make work, share it with us by 15 July.

Now, more than ever, the image is the starting point, the rest is up to you.

Kristen, Preti, Lucie and Luke

Connect with us
@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse?lang=en)
@kadijattug (https://twitter.com/kadijattug) / @sablelitmag (https://twitter.com/sablelitmag)
@maamebluewrites (https://twitter.com/maamebluewrites) / @JacarandaBooks (https://twitter.com/JacarandaBooks)
@rubycowling (https://twitter.com/rubycowling) / @bhousepress (https://twitter.com/bhousepress)

Resources
Justice for Grenfell (https://justice4grenfell.org/)

The Grenfell Inquiry and racism Khadija Saye IntoArts Programme (https://intouniversity.org/content/khadija-saye-intoarts-programme)

The White Pube: art statements on Black Lives Matter (https://www.thewhitepube.co.uk/blm)

Black Lives Matter USA (https://blacklivesmatter.com/ )

Black Lives Matter in arts, academia, culture, research, education (UK) (https://beinghumanfestival.org/blm-resources-for-the-humanities/)

Donations and fundraisers

Justice for Sheku Bayoh (https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/justiceforsheku/?utm_source=backer_social&utm_campaign=justiceforsheku&utm_reference=339c027a16d4d9fa1d367a92c36f3228&utm_medium=Facebook&utm_content=post_pledge_page_flat_v1&fbclid=IwAR2hfGzu5RcTD1dnOlTFfBa_EbGAL-9VY5-PHQd65PlMwFJ_BEnBtfGb5oA) : Five years after Sheku Bayoh’s death at the hands of Scottish police, not one officer has been disciplined let alone charged with his murder. This campaign is raising funds to support legal costs for Sheku’s family as they continue to fight for justice.

United Families and Friends Campaign (UFFC) (https://uffcampaign.org) : All funds donated here go towards all family campaigns for those families who are members of UFFC, which is open to all family and friends whose loved ones have been violated and died at the hands of the state.

Injustice – UV (https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/injustice—uv-1) : Injustice was named “The most important British documentary of my professional lifetime” by Peter Bradshaw, Guardian Film Critic. Director, Ken Fero was one of the founders of UFFC. This is a crowdfunder for the second Injustice film, it follows the struggles for justice of families in the UK whose loved ones have been killed by the police.
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Volume 07, Chapter 08 | June 2020

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Image from Getty Open Content Program

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

For most of us, life remains under some kind of lockdown and things feel pretty overwhelming. So, this month we have decided to focus on three good news items close to home.

Firstly, earlier this year our Deputy Editor, Lucie Stevens (http://www.luciestevens.com/) , won a residency at Varuna National Writer’s House (https://www.varuna.com.au/) in Australia. She was able to participate just before the lockdown came into force and now that she is back in Europe, Lucie has co-curated this month’s issue to highlight some of the finest voices of this prestigious residency programme. We are celebrating not just three great writers, but also Lucie who is a truly stellar writer (and VV editor) in her own right.

Our June writers are responding to a collage by an unknown artist, circa 1880, courtesy of Getty’s open content programme. This image was discovered by Judy Moore (https://twitter.com/ignatzhoch) , co-curator of our Daily Visual writing challenge on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/visualverseanthology/) . So our second good news item is that Judy has been releasing a brilliant weekly web-comic, Everything is Somewhat Repaired, which is a trans non-binary memoir. This has been the best thing in our inbox during the pandemic. You can get a pre-release of the comic by subscribing to their Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/tomorjudy) page.

And finally, our state-side Editorial Assistant Luke Smith has accepted a place in the University of Montana’s Fiction MFA program and has been awarded a Truman Capote Scholarship. Luke has been an incredible asset to Visual Verse, volunteering several hours each month to publish your pieces. He will no doubt be a great asset to the MFA programme too and we can’t wait to read a book with his name on the cover.

Lucie, Judy and Luke, this issue is dedicated to you.

And now to our Veruna writers. On page one we feature Audrey Molloy (http://audreymolloy.com/) , an Irish poet based in Sydney. Her debut pamphlet, Satyress, was published in 2020 by Southword Editions. Her work has appeared in international publications including The North, Magma, Mslexia, The Moth and Meanjin. In 2019 she received the Hennessy Award for Emerging Poetry, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award and the An Post Irish Book Award for Irish Poem of the Year.

Vanessa O’Neill (https://www.bundanon.com.au/residents/vanessa-oneill/) is a playwright, performer and arts educator. She received a Fellowship from the University of Melbourne to write a play based upon the Germaine Greer Archive at the University. The play, The Greer Effect, has just been completed. It was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award and received the Eric Dark Fellowship for an outstanding work of non-fiction from Varuna National Writer’s House.

Lyn Yeowart (https://twitter.com/yeowartlyn?lang=en) is a Melbourne-based freelance writer, editor, manuscript assessor and mentor. Her debut novel, The Silent Listener, will be published by Penguin Random House Australia in February 2021. Set in the gothic heart of Australia, it explores themes of family secrets, revenge and the long-term ramifications of violence.

So, as June sees the midpoint of the year, what messages do you fancy sending us? You know the rules: write 50-500 words in response to our image and in the space of an hour, and send it to us by 15th June. We publish up to 100 of the best. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…

Lucie, Preti, Kristen and Luke

Connect with us
@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse?lang=en)
@VarunaWriters (https://twitter.com/VarunaWriters)
@Audrey_Molloy (https://twitter.com/Audrey_Molloy)
@YeowartLyn (https://twitter.com/YeowartLyn)
@ONeillVanessa (https://twitter.com/ONeillVanessa)

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** #DailyVisual
————————————————————
Don’t forget you can join us every day on Instagram for a 15-minute, 5-50 word writing challenge.
Visit Visual Verse Anthology on Instagram now… (https://www.instagram.com/visualverseanthology/)

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Volume 07, Chapter 07 | May 2020

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Image from Getty Open Content Program

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Last month we launched our #dailyvisual project on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/visualverseanthology/) . We offer a new image every day and invite you to write 5-50 words in response (see below for a selection). It is a short, impulsive exercise designed to both cleanse the mind and entice new ideas.

The act of doing a daily call-and-response made us realise that Visual Verse is very much a pulse-taker. It is a record of events that have affected us all over the past seven years, and a collection of words that absorb our shared experiences. In that sense, we have created, together with you, a unique literary and historical artefact. It is our goal over the coming years to ensure that this publication is preserved, whether it be in print or catalogued digitally with the British Library. There is considerable work and cost involved and if you have any ideas that can help please contact our curator and Publisher, Kristen Harrison: (kristen@thecurvedhouse.com).

In the meantime, we continue to experience isolation with varying degrees of acceptance and anxiety. Whether you are trying to write, trying to read, finding it hard or easy, one thing is certain: you are not alone. Our glorious image this month is a mummy portrait (http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/8213/unknown-maker-mummy-portrait-of-a-youth-romano-egyptian-ad-150-200/) dated 150-200 AD, from Getty’s open content program. Since translation is what we are all doing these days, metaphorically speaking, we are very proud to bring you three of the world’s best literary translators, and thinkers about translation; all critically acclaimed writers in their own right.

Our first page is for Kate Briggs, a writer and translator based in Rotterdam, NL, where she teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute. She is the author of the extraordinary This Little Art (https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/this-little-art ) (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), a long essay on the practice of literary translation informed by her own experiences of translating Roland Barthe’s last lecture courses. We love this book. It was a finalist for a Believer Book Award, and a book of the year in the Times Literary Supplement, The White Review and The Paris Review: it is now being translated into five languages. She is working on a new book, an essayistic novel titled The Long Form, forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

On page two, we are very excited to publish Jennifer Croft, author of the moving Homesick (https://www.unnamedpress.com/books/book?title=Homesick) and Serpientes y escaleras and the co-winner, with Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, of The International Booker Prize for Flights.

Our page three features Marilyn Booth who lived in Egypt for a number of years, and by coincidence, these portraits have long-fascinated her. She has translated many works of fiction from the Arabic, most recently Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies (https://www.sandstonepress.com/books/celestial-bodies ) , for which she and Alharthi jointly won the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, and The Penguin’s Song and No Road to Paradise, by Lebanese novelist Hassan Daoud. She is currently translating Hoda Barakat’s Voices of the Lost, winner of the 2019 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and Jokha al-Harthi’s most recent novel, Narinjah: Bitter Orange. Marilyn tells us that many years ago she wrote a Dphil dissertation at St Antony’s College, Oxford, on a young Alexandrian poet exiled from Egypt in 1919. Now, she holds the Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Chair for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, Oriental Institute and Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Her scholarly interests
include gender history, Arabophone intellectual and literary history, historical translation studies, and vernacular writing. Recent scholarly books are Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History in fin-de-siècle Egypt and (as editor and contributor) Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations around the Ottoman Mediterranean. Soon to be completed is Feminist thinking in fin-de-siècle Egypt: The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz.

So, dear readers, May is the month of speaking as if from centuries in the future. Words that might last thousands of years…

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen, Preti, Lucie and Luke

P.S. If you love this series, check out our archive (https://visualverse.org/images/) where we have work from more leading writer/translators including Maureen Freely, Haider Shabaz, Sohini Basak, Jen Calleja and more…

Connect with us
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@sandstonepress (https://twitter.com/sandstonepress)
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** #DailyVisual
————————————————————
Join us every day on Instagram for a 15-minute, 5-50 word writing challenge.
Here is a selection of submissions from the past month.

Washed and refilled
the birdbath today.

Chaffinch arrived.
Took a drink.
Bathed.
Left behind
a rose-coloured feather.

Then crows.
Three of them.
Fighting.
Water level
dropped by half.

Then a pigeon.
Wings lifted for airing.
A tidal splash flooding
the tulips and
emptied the birdbath.
Another day unravelling.

by @miskybr (https://www.instagram.com/miskybr/)

The late afternoon is holding onto the day’s heat. The air smells like rosemary. They share an orange, cold from the fridge, fat segments of sunshine.

by @rach_is_reading (https://www.instagram.com/rach_is_reading/)

Today I opened my eyes, I saw the words I wanted to say shouting in my head, I set them free.

by @hazelmason4544 (https://www.instagram.com/hazelmason4544/)

It’s always the horse that dies
in wars
A noble death
for a noble beast
The men she served
share mournful
meaningful looks
and ride her spotted back one final time
from thundering craters and bloodied wire
to faraway fields and gentle hills
the memory of a sheltering roof
Home.

by @ (https://www.instagram.com/hazelmason4544/) bennybombdrop (https://www.instagram.com/bennybombdrop/)

We may applaud the cooperation; we may rebuke the crime; we often fail to understand the situation.

by @ (https://www.instagram.com/rach_is_reading/) georginaburtenshaw (https://www.instagram.com/georginaburtenshaw/)

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Volume 07, Chapter 06 | April 2020

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Image by Henry & Co.

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

What’s on your mind? Isolation doesn’t have to mean loneliness, as every writer knows. But in these world-strange times, writing takes on even more meaning – and maybe also less. Meanwhile, we try to go on. We have been here for nearly seven years, feeding your inspiration, encouraging your wordy risk-taking, bringing you a community of writers around the world all responding to the same image. So, to keep us all together over the next few weeks and months, our curator Kristen has started a #dailyvisual (https://www.instagram.com/visualverseanthology/?hl=en) challenge over on Instagram. Follow us at @visualverseanthology (https://www.instagram.com/visualverseanthology/?hl=en) to get a new image every morning. Your challenge there is to respond in the comments with 5-50 words written in 15 minutes. A little morning yoga for the brain.

Now, to this month’s prompt. Something uplifting from Henry & Co. who are masters of abstract urban photography.

As always we are shining a spotlight on some of the most extraordinary new voices, small presses and just published books we can find. We are very happy this month to focus on three writers recently published by the newly established Prototype Publishing (https://prototypepublishing.co.uk/) .

We start with Jen Calleja (https://twitter.com/niewview) , a writer and literary translator based in London. Her debut collection of short fiction, I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For, is fresh off the Prototype press. She has published two poetry collections, Serious Justice (Test Centre, 2016) and Hamburger in the Archive (if a leaf falls, 2019). Her latest translation, The Pine Islands by Marion Poschmann, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019.

Our page two is Caleb Klaces, a Birmingham-born author of the poetry collection Bottled Air (Eyewear, 2013), the chapbook All Safe All Well (Flarestack Poets, 2011) and, most recently, Fatherhood (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/11/fatherhood-caleb-klaces-review) , a novel (Prototype, 2019).

Astrid Alben (http://www.astridalben.com) is a poet, editor and translator. She is the author of Ai! Ai! Pianissimo (Arc Publications, 2011) and Plainspeak (https://prototypepublishing.co.uk/product/plainspeak/) (Prototype Publishing, 2019). Her poems, essays and reviews are featured in a wide range of publications, including in the Times Literary Supplement (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/eighteen-seconds-to-impact/) , Poetry Review, Partisan Hotel and BBC Radio 4 Four-Thought (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08fgwyn) . Alben is the editor of three art/science anthologies published by Lars Müller Publications and was awarded a Wellcome Trust Fellowship in 2014 for her work across the arts and sciences with PARS (http://www.parsfoundation.com) .

So, without further ado, it’s over to you. Stay safe, stay home, keep writing.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…
Preti, Kristen, Lucie and Luke

Connect with us
@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse?lang=en)
@prototypepubs @niewview (https://twitter.com/prototypepubs)
@AstridAlben (https://twitter.com/AstridAlben)

Find out more about Prototype Publishing (https://prototypepublishing.co.uk/) and their amazing list.
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Volume 07, Chapter 05 | March 2020

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Image by Ryan McGuire

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Spring has officially sprung and we are so excited about our March offering – a wonderful, whimsical image prompt and a tie-up with the acclaimed Galley Beggar Press (https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/) Short Story Prize, 2020.

This is the fifth year of the prize, judged by Guardian theatre critic Arifa Akbar, writers Todd Ewen and Toby Litt and Sam Jordison and Eloise Millar, co-directors of Galley Beggar Press. From over 1000 entries, just three were shortlisted and we are very proud to present them here this month, writing new work especially for Visual Verse.

Feeling the spring vibes, we proffer some lightness via this quirky little image by photographer Ryan McGuire. Our lead writers have not disappointed in their responses.

First up, enjoy the work of the winner of the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize 2020, Isha Karki (https://twitter.com/IshaKarki11) , who lives and writes in London. Isha is a 2019 Clarion West graduate and a London Writers Awardee. Her work has appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, The Good Journal, 3 of Cups Press, and has placed in the Brick Lane Book Shop Short Story Prize and London Short Story Prize.

On page two, we present Vijay Khurana (http://www.vijaykhurana.com) , whose stories have been shortlisted for the 2019 Bath Short Story Award, the 2019 I’ll Show You Mine sex-writing prize and, of course, this year’s Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize for which he was also longlisted the last year. His creative-critical project A Little Death, featuring parodies of James Joyce and others, is available at beyondcriticism.net (https://beyondcriticism.net/) . In 2014, his children’s chapter book, Regal Beagle, was published in Australia by Random House. He has an MFA from the University of East Anglia and currently lives in Berlin.

And on page 3, we have Susanna Gendall, a New Zealand writer currently based in Paris. Her work has appeared in Sport, JAAM, Takahē, The Spinoff, Landfall, Geometry and Ambit. She has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and her début collection is due to be published next year by Victoria University Press.

Congratulations to these three wonderful writers and to Galley Beggar Press for another successful year unearthing the best talent and celebrating the craft of short-form writing.

So, dear writers, over to you. Remember, we need your 50-500 words in response to the image, written in the space of one hour, submitted via the website (https://visualverse.org/submit/) by 15 March. We publish up to 100 of the best.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…
Preti, Kristen, Lucie and Luke

Connect with us
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@GalleyBeggars (https://twitter.com/galleybeggars)
@IshaKarki11 (https://twitter.com/IshaKarki11)
@vijaykhurana (https://twitter.com/vijaykhurana)

Find out more about the prize and read all the Galley Beggar Press 2020 Prize stories (https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/short-story-prize-tc) .
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Volume 07, Chapter 04 | February 2020

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Image by Omid Armin

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

At last, your February prompt is here. What a ride 2020 has been already. Bushfires, deadly viruses and Brexit (among other things) have welcomed us to this new decade. Still, we soldier on with our art and pens.

As you will have noticed, we are a day late because the Visual Verse team have been very busy bees. Preti is researching and writing her way around Sri Lanka, Kristen is in Australia on family business and Lucie is honing her novel at a writing residency, also in Australia. One lone literary soldier has kept Visual Verse going: our editorial assistant, Luke. Thank you, Luke. If it weren’t for you, nothing would have been published in January. Writers, if you submitted last month and have not been published there is still a chance. We have managed to get 67 wonderful pieces published and will continue with more when the whole team are back on deck. Thank you for your patience.

Meanwhile, it’s time for a new challenge.

Our image for February is brought to you by Iranian photographer Omid Armin. It’s simple and reflective, literally and figuratively.

We are so proud to highlight the talents of one of our regular Visual Verse contributors on page one this month. Ursula Brunetti (https://twitter.com/ursulabrunetti?lang=en) is the winner of the Royal Society Of Literature’s V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize 2019 and is a graduate of the Faber Academy. Her work has been shortlisted for the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition 2019 and has been published by Popshot, Prospect, Fairlight Books and The Willesden Herald. Ursula has written for Visual Verse since our earliest issues and she continues to produce inventive, beautifully crafted pieces. Read some of her previous submissions on her Visual Verse author page (https://visualverse.org/writers/ursula-brunetti/) .

On page two is the indomitable Christian-Wingrove Rogers (http://www.christian-rogers.com/) , storyteller extraordinaire. He tells us that, at an early age, he suffered from an acute form of institutions allergy. Being born in Britain, an institution, he was doomed. So, 35 years ago, in the interests of all concerned, he left Britain to become a traditional travelling storyteller who also happens to be a juggler and a writer. His spoken words are amazing and we are excited to see the evolution of his written words.

Our page three is occupied by London-based student Dani Owens. As some of you know, the Visual Verse team work with students in many contexts – from early years/primary classrooms to higher education and beyond. We often use visual prompts to inspire new thinking and creativity and one of our favourite exercises to use with images is automatic writing. Also known as “stream of consciousness” or “morning pages”, this involves writing continuously, without hesitation, for an allocated amount of time. The image is the starting point, of course, and sometimes we invite students to review their automatic writing and pull out the most meaningful phrase or theme from which to write a more coherent piece. Dani’s piece was written in an hour, with no writing background, and we thought it was deserving of a wider readership.

Finally, on page four we have a petite poem by Leonard Harrison (https://www.wehi.edu.au/people/leonard-c-harrison) , a medical scientist, sculptor and occasional poet. For the past 30 years, Leonard shared his life with fellow scientist and artist Margo Honeyman who taught him to appreciate the intimate relationship between art and science. Now, with Margo’s passing, Leonard is returning to poetry to make sense of things.

So, dear friends, you know the score. The image is the starting point, the text is
up to you. We are excited to see what you come up with for our February issue. Preti, Kristen, Lucie and Luke

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Volume 07, Chapter 03 | January 2020

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Image by Charles Dana Gibson / British Library

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to 2020. We made it! Today is simultaneously the end of an era and a new beginning and it feels like the perfect time to reflect on some of the amazing achievements of Visual Verse and of our writer community.

Visual Verse, first published in November 2013, is now in its seventh volume. We have published over 6700 pieces of original writing in 75 monthly issues. We have featured established writers like Ali Smith, Niven Govinden and Chika Unigwe; exciting contemporary voices including Amrou Al-Khadi, Irenosen Okojie, Paul Ewen, Eley Williams, Carmen Marcus and Enda Walsh and up-and-coming writers like Nisha Ramayya, Elieen McNulty Holmes, Ashley Hickson-Lovence and Sarvat Hasin whose work deserves to be read. We have also featured writers like Rishi Dastidar, Susanna Crossman and Angela Young, who are among a stable of Visual Verse contributors consistently producing work we hugely admire. Alongside our leads we have published you: more than 2500 individual writers from every corner of the globe. Thanks to you, Visual Verse is truly a living, breathing literary organism.

We are equally proud of our curatorial record, with 75 carefully selected image prompts from individual artists like Daniel Frost, Penny Byrne, Marc Schlossman, Hernan Bas and Hannah Coulson; world-class galleries and organisations like NASA, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Bodleian Libraries and M Leuven and partners like Creative Review who published a selection of Visual Verse writers in print. Visual Verse continues to thrive thanks to the energy, creativity and generosity of our writers, readers, artists and partners. Thank you all for an incredible few years.

So let’s begin the year with a visual prompt so bold that it sets the tone for owning 2020. The image is by Charles Dana Gibson courtesy of the British Library archive.

To inspire you even more, we have three powerful lead writers all breaking new ground with their cross-genre work. We are inordinately proud and excited to start the year with a piece by Mary Jean Chan (http://www.maryjeanchan.com/) , a London-based poet, editor and critic from Hong Kong. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University and current guest co-editor of The Poetry Review for Spring 2020. In 2019, Mary Jean was named as one of Jackie Kay’s 10 Best BAME writers in the UK as a part of the British Council’s and the National Centre for Writing’s International Literature Showcase. She came Second in the 2017 National Poetry Competition and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem twice. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2019 and won the Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2018. Her debut collection, Flèche, is published by Faber & Faber and is currently shortlisted for the 2019 Costa Poetry Award. Fingers crossed she wins!

On page two, it’s an honour to publish Noo Saro-Wiwa (https://www.noosarowiwa.com) who was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and raised in England. Her first book, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria was named The Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year, 2012, and selected as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week. It has been translated into French and Italian, and in 2016 it won the Albatros Literature Prize in Italy. Noo has also written book reviews, travel, opinion and analysis articles for The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Prospect magazine, New York Times and City AM, among others.

And, we gave our final page to a writer we have published regularly over our 6 years and three months in the game! With only 48 hours notice, our page 3 lead is by Anglo-French fiction writer and essayist, Susanna Crossman (https://susanna-crossman.squarespace.com/) . She is the winner of the 2019 LoveReading Very Short Story Award and has recent/upcoming work in Neue Rundschau, (2019) S. Fischer (translated into German) alongside John Berger and Anne Carson, We’ll Never Have Paris, Repeater Books (2019), Trauma, Dodo Ink (2020), Berfrois, The Creative Review, 3:AM Journal, The Lonely Crowd, Litro and more… She was nominated for Best of The Net (2018) for her non-fiction essays, her fiction has been short-listed for awards such as the Bristol Prize and Glimmertrain. Susanna just completed her debut novel, Dark Island and is represented by Craig Literary, NY. When she’s not writing, she works internationally as a clinical arts-therapist and lecturer.

What more could you ask for? Now that the holiday season is coming to an end, it’s time to sharpen your pencils, dear writers… The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Happy New Year!

Preti, Kristen, Lucie and Luke

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@crossmansusanna (https://twitter.com/crossmansusanna)

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Volume 07, Chapter 02 | December 2019

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Image by Mae Mu

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to the last issue of 2019 – a year in which so much has happened upon our planet. Never far from our minds is the reality of our changing climate and the questions around it, and our future. It has been an inspiration to watch, over the course of this year, as young people rise up and confront an issue that has long been denied, silenced and ignored. As a small homage to this mighty movement, we are proud to provide a platform from which you – our amazing, global writing community – can use your art to have your say.

This month’s image is an antidote to the winter setting in for us Northern hemisphere folk. It comes to us via Mae Mu who specialises in food photography and still life.

On page 1, we have New Zealand writer Paul Ewen (https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/paul-ewen) whose books include London Pub Reviews (Shoes With Rockets) and Francis Plug: How To Be A Public Author (Galley Beggar Press) which was listed for awards including the UK Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize. His second novel Francis Plug: Writer in Residence (Galley Beggar Press) was shortlisted for the 2019 Bollinger Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Paul’s writing has featured in the NZ Listener, Dazed & Confused, Five Dials, and until recently, he was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Greenwich, London.

Next is Shobha Rao (https://twitter.com/@ShobhaRaoWrites) , author of the short story collection An Unrestored Woman and the novel, Girls Burn Brighter. She is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, and her story “Kavitha and Mustafa” was chosen by T.C. Boyle for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2015. Girls Burn Brighter has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a finalist for the California Book Award. She lives in San Francisco.

On page 3, we present Rosamund Taylor (http://www.rosamundtaylor.com/) , who won the Mairtín Crawford Award for poetry at the Belfast Book Festival in 2017. In 2019, she was a recipient of a Words Ireland mentorship and placed third for the Ginkgo Prize for Eco Poetry. Her work has recently appeared in Agenda, Banshee, Channel, Magma, Poetry Ireland Review, and on LambdaLiterary.Org.

And finally, Tom Denbigh (https://twitter.com/@tom_denbigh) , resident of Bristol and owner of “an obscene number of books”. Tom is the first Bristol Pride Poet Laureate and a BBC 1 Extra Emerging Artist winner. He has a PhD on plant roots and crumbling soil and works on climate change policy. In his debut collection “…and then she ate him” Denbigh holds up a distorted mirror to the world to portray the bizarre and brilliant in the everyday. The book is out now with Burning Eye Books (https://burningeye.bigcartel.com/product/and-then-she-ate-him-by-tom-denbigh) and in all good bookshops.

So, dear writers, here is your last chance for the year – get your writing boots on and wade through the fake snow in your mind. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…

Happy December, wherever in this crazy world you are.

Preti, Kristen, Lucie and Luke

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Volume 07, Chapter 1 | November 2019

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Image by RUDE London.

Dear writers, readers and friends,

VISUAL VERSE IS SIX!

Yes we have made it through our teething and toddler years and now we are in big school. Our labour of love project has reached the grand old age of SIX and we are proud, humble, grateful and downright amazed. We couldn’t have made it without all our readers, writers, leads, supporters and some very special guest curators who took over and brought new voices to us.

THANK YOU!

And we must also thank our amazing team, based in the UK, Germany, USA, and sometimes Australia, who work around babies, books, dogs, higher education courses, day jobs and night jobs to bring the site to you each month and publish and tweet your work. We are proud to be a free resource for writers and readers all over the world.

For our sixth birthday edition, we’re bringing you a piece of graphic art by the tenacious, insanely talented duo that is RUDE London (https://www.thisisrude.com/) . Their work is big and loud and bold, setting the tone for this auspicious birthday issue. In response, we open with a line-up of some of the most exciting, avant-garde writers working today – all equally brilliant, equally unique.

Our page one piece comes from Chika Unigwe (https://twitter.com/chikaunigwe) , a Nigerian writer whose work is trend breaking. Her novels include Night Dancer and On Black Sisters Streets. She has written about climate change for the Guardian, feminism for the White Review and was shortlisted for the Caine Prize in African writing. Her latest book is a collection of short stories, Better Never Than Late (https://cassavarepublic.biz/product/cassava-shorts/?v=3a52f3c22ed6) , out now from Cassava Republic.

Our second page is live from Linda Mannheim (https://www.lindamannheim.com/) , the author of three books of fiction: Risk, Above Sugar Hill and This Way to Departures, just out from Influx Press. Her work has appeared in magazines in the US, UK, South Africa, and Canada including Granta, 3:AM Magazine and Catapult Story. Eimear McBride said that Linda’s stories ‘provoke and abide like a slap’. Originally from New York, Linda divides her time between London and Berlin and is working on Barbed Wire Fever, a literary project that explores what it means to seek and provide refuge.

On page three, we bring you work from Glen James Brown (https://twitter.com/glen_j_brown?lang=en) , whose debut novel Ironopolis (https://www.parthianbooks.com/products/ironopolis) – about the collapse of industry and social housing in Teesside, and its impact on community, culture and folklore – was called ‘nothing short of a triumph’ by the Guardian. It was also shortlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for political fiction, as well as longlisted for the Portico Prize. He comes from County Durham, but lives and writes in sunny Manchester.

And to really jump off the deep end, we complete our launch with a piece by Yara Rodrigues Fowler (https://yararodriguesfowler.com/) , a British Brazilian novelist from South London. Her first novel, Stubborn Archivist, was published in 2019 in the UK and USA. Yara was named one of The Observer’s nine hottest-tipped debut novelists of 2019 and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. She is also a trustee of Latin American Women’s Aid, an organisation that runs the only two refuges in Europe, for and by Latin American women. She’s writing her second novel now, for which she received the John C Lawrence Award from the Society of Authors towards research in Brazil.

So, dear writers and readers, it’s time for some birthday indulgence – treat yourself with some high-quality reading and then sharpen your pencils… the image is the starting point, the rest is up to you,

Love,
Preti, Kristen, Lucie and Luke

Connect with us
@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse?lang=en)
@chikaunigwe (https://twitter.com/chikaunigwe?lang=en)
@lindamannheim (https://twitter.com/LindaMannheim)
@Glen_J_Brown (https://twitter.com/glen_j_brown?lang=en)
@yazzarf (https://twitter.com/yazzarf)

Volume 06, Chapter 12 | October 2019

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Image by Valérie Mannaerts/M Museum Leuven/Alexandra Colmenares.

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Never have our bodies, minds and countries felt so under pressure and fragmented. Yet strangely, art that serves to reflect on that can be strangely healing, and indeed, community building. At Visual Verse we are all about community. So this month we bring you our very special edition of ‘recommend a writer’, where we have asked some of our dear lead contributors to call on a fellow writer they think we should publish. Our co-founders, Preti and Kristen, have put two forward as well.

Our community of wordsmiths is enriched by the creators of our visual prompts. This issue of Visual Verse is published in collaboration with M-Museum Leuven (https://www.mleuven.be/nl/content/home) in Belgium, who are hosting the 51st conference of the International Visual Literacy Association later this month. They have provided the arresting image for October – a work by Valérie Mannaerts (https://www.maniera.be/creators/12/valerie-mannaerts) , photographed by Alexandra Colmenares.

Our writer responses kick off with Sabeena Akhtar (https://twitter.com/pocobookreader?lang=en) , who Preti believes is ‘a writer and activist of rare talent and commitment.’ Sabeena is the editor of the anthology, Cut From The Same Cloth (https://unbound.com/books/cut-from-the-same-cloth/) , forthcoming from Unbound, a contributor to the 404 Ink title, We Shall Fight Until We Win (https://www.404ink.com/store/we-shall-fight-until-we-win) and the Saqi Books title, Smashing It (https://saqibooks.com/books/the-westbourne-press/smashing-it/) . She is the Festival Coordinator of Bare Lit (http://barelitfestival.com/) , and a co-founder of the Primadonna (https://www.primadonnafestival.com/) festival and Bare Lit Kids. She is co-writing a forthcoming children’s book on Islamophobia published by Hachette, and working on her debut novel.

Our page 2 writer – poet Holly Singlehurst (https://twitter.com/HJSinglehurst?lang=en) – was recommended by critically acclaimed poet Rishi Dastidar, one of our longest and most regular contributors. Rishi says: ‘Holly is a poet you might not have heard of yet – but you will. She tells us what it is like to be alive in the world right now, in ways that startle and reveal’. Holly graduated from Birmingham University with a Master’s in Creative Writing in 2016. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Bridport Prize, and was commended in the 2016 National Poetry Competition for her poem ‘Hiroshima, 1961’. Her poetry has appeared on And Other Poems (https://andotherpoems.com/) and her short fiction has been published in Banshee Magazine.

Niven Govinden, author of the 2019 Gordon Burn Prize shortlisted This Brutal House, recommended ‘the genius Stuart Evers (https://twitter.com/StuartEvers?lang=en) ,’ whose debut, Ten Stories About Smoking, won the London Book Award in 2011, and his highly acclaimed novel, If This is Home (https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/stuart-evers/if-this-is-home/9781447207634) , followed in 2012. Your Father Sends His Love (https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/stuart-evers/your-father-sends-his-love/9781447280583) was shortlisted for the 2016 Edge Hill Short Story Prize and a new novel will be published in 2020. In 2017, Evers won the Eccles British Library Writer’s Award – one of Europe’s richest prizes for a work in progress.

Finally, Kristen spotted the ‘fiercely imaginative and quirky’ work of Eileen McNulty-Holmes (https://twitter.com/eileenamholmes?lang=en) at a recent visual writing workshop, and immediately wanted to published them at Visual Verse. Eileen is an award-winning writer, award-nominated editor, an aspiring witch and a (semi-) professional plant person. They have been writing for money, attention, and “exposure” for the past 10 years. Their work has appeared in the likes of Femsplain (https://femsplain.com/) , DADDY Magazine (http://daddy.land/) , For Every Year and IRIS, as well as in multidisciplinary shows at galleries including Lage Egal and Mindscape Universe. Their stories often take place at the fringes of reality, in enclosed spaces or in the midst of terrible life decisions.

So as you sharpen your pencils, why not follow our lead and recommend us to a writer/friend? The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…

Kristen, Preti, Lucie and Luke

Connect with us
@visual_verse (https://thecurvedhouse.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=34f4a503c2c926849e17dcf6f&id=02acdc9fd3&e=c32c18dbf0)
@pocobookreader (https://twitter.com/pocobookreader)
@HJSinglehurst (https://twitter.com/HJSinglehurst)
@StuartEvers (https://twitter.com/stuartevers?lang=en)
@eileenamholmes (https://twitter.com/eileenamholmes?lang=en)
Start Timer (https://vclock.com/timer/#countdown=01:00:00&enabled=0&seconds=3600&title=Visual+Verse%3A+One+image.+One+Hour.+50-500+Words.+)
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Volume 06, Chapter 11 | September 2019

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Image by Joelle Chmiel

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to September, and as the seasons turn we offer you a fitting visual by Joelle Chmiel, who captures both a sense of stillness and of bustle at a transitional time of year.

This month’s issue is guest-curated by our own Luke Larkin, who also edits Unstamatic (https://www.unstamatic.info/) , an online magazine of small prose and poetry. The artist and lead writers for this month are all tapped from Unstamatic’s family of contributors.

Joelle Chmiel (https://www.artlimited.net/m79d5144a%20or%20https:/lensculture.com/joelle-chmiel) was born in 1982 in Zürich, Switzerland, where she graduated medical and dental school, before working as a physician in maxillofacial surgery and dentistry. Since 2018, she dedicates herself full-time to photography and was winner of the StreetProjections 2018 contest from PhotoWerkBerlin, and second-place winner of Monochrome Awards 2018.

Carol McMahon’s bittersweet poem kicks off this month’s writing. Carol is a teacher whose work has been published in various journals (The Wild Word (https://thewildword.com/poetry-carol-mcmahon/) , Painted Bride Quarterly (http://pbqmag.org/carol-mcmahon-profit-margin/) , Mom Egg Review, Stone Canoe, Poet Lore) and has a chapbook, On Any Given Day, published by FootHills Press (2006). McMahon received an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop and when she is not with 11-year-olds spends her time either running or rowing.

Page two hosts Jen Schneider, who is an educator, attorney, and writer. Her work appears in The Coil, The Write Launch, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Popular Culture Studies Journal, Unstamatic, otoliths, Zingara Poetry Review, 42 Stories Anthology (forthcoming), Voices on the Move (forthcoming), One Sentence Stories, and other literary and scholarly journals.

Michelle Brooks’ poetry appears on page three. Michelle has published a collection of poetry, Make Yourself Small, (Backwaters Press), and a novella, Dead Girl, Live Boy, (Storylandia Press). Her poetry collection, Pretty in A Hard Way, will be published by Finishing Line Press in September 2019. Her work has appeared in the Iowa Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. A native Texan, she has spent much of her adult life in Detroit, her favorite city.

And rounding us out, Scott Russell Duncan, a.k.a. Scott Duncan-Fernandez. Scott recently completed The Ramona Diary of SRD, a memoir of growing up Native/Chicano-Anglo and a fantastical tour reclaiming the myths of Spanish California. Scott’s fiction involves the mythic, the surreal, the abstract, in other words, the weird. Scott received his MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California where he now lives and writes. He is an assistant editor at Somos en escrito. In 2016 he won San Francisco Litquake’s Short Story Contest. His piece “Mexican American Psycho is in Your Dreams” won first place in the 2019 Solstice Literary Magazine Annual Literary Contest. See more about his work and publications on Scott’s website (http://scottrussellduncan.com) .

So, take a peek through these windows and tell us what you find. You know the rules: 50-500 words, one hour. Subs close on 15 September. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Luke, Kristen, Lucie and Preti

Connect with us
@visual_verse (https://thecurvedhouse.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=34f4a503c2c926849e17dcf6f&id=02acdc9fd3&e=c32c18dbf0)
@unstamaticmag (https://twitter.com/unstamaticmag)

PS. When you’ve finished your Visual Verse submission for this month, head over to Unstamatic to read more great writing, enjoy more great art and submit your work. https://www.unstamatic.info/

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Volume 06, Chapter 10 | August 2019

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Image by Jakob Owens

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to August. In a time of great weirdness – in the climate, in politics and all of the rest – this is the month to stretch beyond the borders of language and reality towards some other future. And here it is – we bestow upon you this little piggy, along with a bumper summer selection of writing from the finest poets, fictionists and translators we could gather.

Our wonderful, surreal image prompt is brought to you by photographer and filmmaker Jakob Owens, who you can follow on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/jakobowens/?hl=en) .

This month’s writing lifts off with a wonderful piece by Michael Donkor (https://twitter.com/MichaelDonkor) , who studied English at Wadham College, Oxford, undertook a Masters in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway and now teaches English Literature to secondary school students. The Observer named him as one of 2018’s best debut authors for his first novel Hold (4th Estate) and this year he was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize.

On page 2 we feature Lucie McKnight Hardy (https://twitter.com/LMcKnightHardy) who grew up in West Wales and is a Welsh speaker. Her work has featured, or is forthcoming, in various places online and in print, including The Lonely Crowd, The Shadow Booth, Best British Short Stories 2019, and as a limited edition chapbook from Nightjar Press. Her debut novel, Water Shall Refuse Them, was shortlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition 2017 and longlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award 2018 and is published this July by Dead Ink Books (https://deadinkbooks.com/) .

Next up, we are delighted to bring you Jess Thayil (https://twitter.com/JessThayil) , whose poems have featured in Magma Poetry, The Stinging Fly, Ink Sweat And Tears, Black Bough Poetry, AbstractMagazineTV, Potomac Review and Whale Road Review. She’s also engaged in self-taught abstract and mixed media art practice.

On page 4, we’re thrilled to welcome writer and translator Lucy Jones, who is British born and has lived in Berlin since 1998. Lucy studied German, film and applied linguistics and did several jobs before becoming a translator, including freelance fashion photography. Returning to her roots in literature, in 2008 she founded Transfiction (http://www.transfiction.eu/about-us/) , a collective of translators in Berlin. She also hosts a reading event called The Fiction Canteen (https://fictioncanteen.blog/) for writers and translators in Berlin.

And finally we have Durre Shawar (http://durreshahwar.com) , a writer, editor, and co-founder of ‘Where I’m Coming From’, an open mic event that platforms underrepresented writers in Wales (next event is on August 13 (https://www.facebook.com/whereimcomingfrom/) ). Durre has been published in various magazines and anthologies including Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class (Dead Ink Books), We Shall Fight Until We Win (404 Ink), Cheval 10 – Terry Hetherington Young Writers Award (Parthian Books). Her work explores themes of identity, intersectionality and mental health. Durre has worked and written for National Theatre Wales, British Council, Metro, National Museum Cardiff and Wales Arts Review. She is a regular speaker and performer at events and festivals and was part of the Hay Festival Writers at Work scheme, as well as BBC Writersroom Wales.

So, dear readers if you’re feeling political, personal, hungry or like swimming in a sandy-bottomed sea, we hope you enjoy our amazing lead selection. May it inspire you to get writing now. You know the rules: 50-500 words, one hour. Subs close on 15 August.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…

Preti, Kristen, Lucie and Luke

@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse)
@MichaelDonkor (https://twitter.com/MichaelDonkor)
@LMcKnightHardy (https://twitter.com/LMcKnightHardy)
@BacktoJones (https://twitter.com/BacktoJones)
@JessThayil (https://twitter.com/JessThayil)
@Durre_Shahwar (https://twitter.com/Durre_Shahwar)

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Volume 06, Chapter 09 | July 2019

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Image by Franck V.

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Our offering for the month of July is a games writing special. We were asked to participate in FXP Festival (https://fxpfestival.com/) , a coding event for young people taking place in Cambridge this month, and this got us thinking about digital narratives and the relationship between storytelling and technology. Narrative games are about the creation of an entire world, and often a non-linear one, so where does the storyteller’s job begin and end? With so much being dependent on the user and the interactions between users, can a narrative designer ever control the story they want to tell? Do they even want to tell a specific story, or are they motivated by facilitating others to create their own stories?

So as we ponder these questions, we could not resist this image. It intrigues us and creeps us out in equal measure. It comes to us from Frank V., a photographer currently living in Japan who, amazingly, uses only a smartphone to capture his images. In response, we invited a group of writers and artists who work in and around games.

Phil Harris, our lead this month, is currently working as a Narrative Designer, for Deep Silver Fishlabs in Hamburg, a games company working on numerous console titles. Previously, he’s worked on many games, and a couple of TV Projects, from different genres. As well as teaching about Narrative and Design at various locations across the UK, Phil is also one of the key members of the VR Writers Room, discussing the use of Virtual Reality across a number of different types of multi-media products. We have had the pleasure of sharing a stage with Phil and his discussion around narrative design kept us all enthralled.

Zoë Jellicoe (http://www.zoejellicoe.com/) is an editor, writer and occasional translator living between London and Berlin. She is the editor of Critical Hits, a Kickstarted (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/518947824/critical-hits-an-indie-gaming-anthology) collection of original essays from the finest independent video game journalists and developers. You can read more of her writing at zoejellicoe.com and via geneva__diva (https://twitter.com/geneva__diva?lang=en) .

Courtney Byrne (https://twitter.com/aCourtneyByrne) is a 22 year old Irish writer, currently working as a writing intern at games company Wooga (https://www.wooga.com/) , in Berlin. She is a contributor to Totally Dublin and Franc Magazine, writes short stories and poetry, and is currently editing her first novel, all while juggling her studies.

Frank Lassak lives and works in Berlin, where he runs his atelier Efacts Photography (http://www.efactsphoto.com/news.html) since 2009. His works focus on staged cinematic scenes, narrative photography and portraits of actors and actresses. Frank became internationally known with his body of works circling around the movies of David Lynch (Welcome to Twin Peaks, 2017, True Velvet, 2011), and his conceptual series Youborn (2014) and Mixotarians (2015). Frank came to our attention through his project Dream Control – Where Freedom Ends (http://www.efactsphoto.com/dreamcontrol.html#.XRpOTpMzbUI) that we recommend you check out.

Now, if that isn’t enough to keep you busy, we created a set of visual writing activities for the FXP Festival and while they are intended for students, they are also generally fun and provocative enough to bring new words out of you, too. Feel free to download from Curved House Kids (https://curvedhousekids.com/free-creative-writing-resources-for-teens/) (the education arm of our mothership).

So dear writers, get your game on. You’ve got until 15th July.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen, Preti, Lucie and Luke

Connect:

@visual_verse (https://www.facebook.com/efactsphoto)
@ (https://twitter.com/craig_carry) geneva_diva (https://twitter.com/geneva__diva?lang=en)
@aCourtneyByrne (https://twitter.com/aCourtneyByrne)
@ (https://twitter.com/geneva__diva?lang=en) efactsphoto (https://twitter.com/geneva__diva?lang=en)
@FXPFestival (https://twitter.com/FXPfestival)

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Volume 06, Chapter 08 | June 2019

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Image by Craig Carry

Dear writers, readers and friends,

It is June and, with light minds and grieving hearts, this issue is dedicated to Judith Kerr, author of the classic children’s books Mog, The Tiger Who Came to Tea and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. Our first lead writer, Sita Brahmachari, calls her piece “Spirit Guide to Childhood”. Kerr was a spirit guide for so many of us, sparking an early love of reading and helping us become the writers we are, and her life was an example of everything we want to protect today: freedom of speech, refugee rights, migrant rights, children’s literacy. Kerr was German-Jewish; in 1933, she left Germany with her family because her father was critical of the Nazis. They later burned his books. The family travelled through Europe and arrived in Britain in 1936, where Kerr lived as a naturalised citizen for the rest of her life. She died on the 22nd of May, aged 95.

To celebrate the life and work of Judith Kerr, we have enlisted a group of wonderful children’s writers for the month of June. Their pieces are in response to an image by Irish artist Craig Carry (http://craigcarry.net/) , who not only creates beautiful screenprints from his hometown, Cork, but also runs a superb music website, Fractured Air (https://fracturedair.com/) .

We kick off with Sita Brahmachari (https://twitter.com/SitaBrahmachari) whose creative projects with diverse communities are at the heart of her writing. She has been Writer in Residence for The Book Trust and Islington Centre for Refugees and Migrants; her debut novel for young people Artichoke Hearts, won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and her subsequent novels (Macmillan Children’s Books) have been nominated for the Carnegie and many other major awards. Novels include Jasmine Skies, Tender Earth, Red Leaves and Kite Spirit. For Barrington Stoke she has written Worry Angels, Brace Mouth False Teeth, Car Wash Wish and Zebra Crossing Soul Song. She has contributed stories and poetry to a number of anthologies with a human rights focus and is currently under commission to Orion books for two novels the first of which, Where The River Runs Gold, is to be published in July 2019.

Next up we are thrilled to have an original, heartwrenching contribution from Jasmine Richards (http://www.jasminerichards.com) , an author of fifteen books for children from Harper Collins. She often finds herself writing about missing fathers or fathers missing out. When Jasmine is not writing she is collaborating with writers and illustrators to create inclusive fiction for publishers through her production company Storymix (http://www.storymix.co.uk) . So, if you are a creative from an underrepresented background, who is interested in making great books for all children, get in touch with Jasmine.

Louie Stowell (https://twitter.com/Louiestowell) , featured on page 3, started her career writing carefully-researched children’s books about space, Ancient Egypt, politics and science but eventually lapsed into just making stuff up. She likes writing about dragons, wizards, vampires, fairies, monsters and parallel worlds. Louie lives in London with her wife Karen, her dog Buffy and a creepy puppet that is probably cursed. Her first novel, The Dragon in the Library (https://nosycrow.com/product/the-dragon-in-the-library/) , is out on June 6th with Nosy Crow. Get hold of it here (https://nosycrow.com/product/the-dragon-in-the-library/) .

And to complete the June launch, we present the wonderful, inspiring Juliette Saumande (http://juliettesaumande.blogspot.com/) , a French writer and translator living in Ireland. Juliet spends most of her time writing, reading, reviewing and recommending children’s books to one and all. Her most recent title is My Little Album of Dublin, illustrated by Tarsila Krüse and published by The O’Brien Press. When she gets a minute, she blogs (http://juliettesaumande.blogspot.ie) about all the fun things children’s books inspire her to try on her and other people’s kids (in an arty way!).

So dear writers, do not mourn – there is life after life, in words we remember and words we have yet to imagine. Send us yours before the 15th May.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Love,

Preti, Kristen, Lucie, Ritika and Luke.

Connect:

@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse)
@craig_carry (https://twitter.com/craig_carry)
@SitaBrahmachari (https://twitter.com/SitaBrahmachari)
@ (https://twitter.com/JRichardsAuthor) JRichardsAuthor (https://twitter.com/JRichardsAuthor)
@Louiestowell (https://twitter.com/Louiestowell)

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Volume 06, Chapter 07 | May 2019

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Image by R. Coad/New Zealand Archive

Dear writers, readers and friends,

May Day, Labour Day, Workers’ Day: in many countries around the world today is a public holiday. It is also a day of both rest and unrest. Here in Berlin, where Visual Verse was born, protesters are marching the streets for fairness. Their voices rally against a fast-moving gentrification that Berlin has long resisted and while the chants are for a better future, there is also something nostalgic about it. It feels as though a memory, longing for home and ‘a more simple time’ never seem to leave us no matter who or where we are. The future speaks with the voices of the past.

For this new issue it therefore felt right to bring you a prompt from the past. Our image is curated by The Curved House’s very own Alice Connew, also a photographer (https://www.aliceconnew.com/) , who unearthed this vignette by R. Coad from the New Zealand Archives. The image is accompanied by three magnificent pieces of writing – some of the best we have featured. Read these, and then read everything they have written.

Our first lead is by Rebecca Tamás, a poet currently based in York, where she works as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University. Rebecca is the winner of the 2016 Manchester Poetry Prize, and is a Fenton Arts Trust Emerging Writer awardee. She is the editor, with Sarah Shin, of Spells: Occult Poetry for the 21st Century, published by Ignota Books. Her first collection of poetry, ‘WITCH’ (http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/2019/01/witch/) , a Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation and a Paris Review Staff Pick, came out from Penned in the Margins this year.

On page 2, we present Christodoulos Makris. He has published several books, pamphlets, artists’ books and other poetry objects. His 2015 book The Architecture of Chance (Wurm Press) was a poetry book of the year at RTÉ Arena and 3:AM Magazine. One of Poetry Ireland’s ‘Rising Generation’ poets, he has presented his work widely across media and borders, and is currently Writer-in-Residence at National University of Ireland Maynooth, with other recent residencies and commissions including StAnza Festival (Scotland), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and European Capital of Culture. He is the poetry editor at gorse journal and associated imprint gorse editions, and co-director of Dublin’s multidisciplinary performance series Phonica. His most recent book is this is no longer entertainment (https://www.dostoyevskywannabe.com/this_is_no_longer_entertainment_/Original) , a book-length documentary poem just out from Manchester’s Dostoyevsky Wannabe press April 2019.

And on page 3, one of the most brilliant short story writers working today: David Hayden. He was born in Ireland and lives in England. His writing has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Granta online, Zoetrope All-Story, The Dublin Review and PN Review, and in the Faber New Irish Writing Anthology, Being Various, edited by Lucy Caldwell. His first book was Darker with the Lights On. And here’s Egress (http://magazine.nytyrant.com/egress-david-hayden/) , an extra short story up for your delectation on NY Tyrant.

So, you know the drill. Send us your 50-500 words, written in response to our image and in the space of one hour, by the 15th of May. We will publish the 100 pieces we love the most. And tweet when we can. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…

Kristen, Lucie, Preti, Rithika and Luke

Connect:
@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse)
@RebTamas (https://twitter.com/@RebTamas)
@seventydys (https://twitter.com/@seventydys)
@c_makris (https://twitter.com/@c_makris)

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Volume 06, Chapter 06 | April 2019

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Volume 06, Chapter 06 of Visual Verse is now open for submissions.

Image by Martin Reisch

Submit your writing > (https://visualverse.org/submit/)

Dear readers, writers and friends,

April is the cruelest month – they say – although we don’t think so here at Visual Verse. We have some fine lead writing and an enigmatic image to get your creativity springing. Maybe even, we think, this ‘person in field’ is in a kind of conversation with March’s astronaut. It’s all getting very meta these days and that’s one of the best things about receiving your submissions – they create a conversation about art, writing and just letting yourself try that makes for an enthralling read every single month. Thank you, writers!

This month, our image is by Martin Reisch, a photographer based in Montreal who has a penchant for wonderfully quirky aerial shots.

Our lead Amy Sackville (http://amysackville.co.uk/) is a writer of fiction and a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Kent. Her most recent novel, Painter to the King (http://grantabooks.com/painter-to-the-king-3) , about the painter Diego Velázquez and the court of Philip IV of Spain, was published by Granta Books in 2018. She lives in London and occasionally Canterbury.

Haroun Khan is a South London writer and has recently released his debut novel The Study Circle. Drawing upon his own experiences growing up on a council estate, this is a study of urban Muslim youth living life at the intersection of race, religious and social tumult; we’ve read it and we think it’s relevant, sharp and often very funny – check out Haroun’s piece about it here https://deadinkbooks.com/my-political-novel-by-haroun-khan/.

Finally, we’re very pleased to showcase the words of Ashley Hickson-Lovence who was born in 1991 and grew up in Hackney, London. He is a former football referee and secondary school English teacher and is currently completing his PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. His debut novel The 392 will be released with OWN IT! (https://ownit.london/shop/the-392-by-ashley-hickson-lovence/) on the 25th of April 2019 – you read him here first!

So dear writers, as we head ever onwards into 2019, sharpen your pencils… the image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Preti, Kristen, Lucie, Rithika and Luke

Connect
@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse)
@AmySackville (https://twitter.com/amysackville?lang=en)
@hakattak (https://twitter.com/hakattak)
@AHicksonLovence (https://twitter.com/@AHicksonLovence)

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Volume 06, Chapter 05 | March 2019

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Image by NASA

Dear readers, writers and friends,

March arrives and with it new horizons. We are propelling you into space with this incredible image from NASA and a line-up of truly special writers.

This month’s leads transport us from space to the places many never go, inside one of the most difficult environments the UK can imagine. These never-before-published writers have devised these pieces in workshops conducted inside one of the UK’s high security prisons.

Half of the writers are students at Cambridge University, and half are men who have been incarcerated, some for many years. They are all participants in Writing Together, part of a programme called Learning Together (https://www.cctl.cam.ac.uk/tlif/learning-together/details) , which is run by the Institute of Criminology in Cambridge.

The group has been working together for a while, learning the basics of fiction, poetry and script writing; but this was the first time they had written to an image, within a set amount of time and word limit, and asked to hand that work in. It was typed up on the outside and now, here it is.

These writers are published anonymously but each is celebrated for their individual creativity and unique response to this image.

So writers – with stars in your eyes; with the memory of your childhood wish to walk on the moon; with a sense of connection or of isolation; with a yearning for freedom or missing a loved one – go forth. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Preti, Kristen, Lucie, Rithika and Luke
@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse)

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Volume 06, Chapter 04 | February 2019

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Image by Norbu Gyachung

Greetings dear readers and writers,

As you know, we at Visual Verse span many continents, come from many countries and reach out to you wherever you are. We are citizens of the world, and our site reflects that. While others build walls and diminish democracies, we will continue to use our platform as an antidote to boundaries of language, hierarchies of power and divisive and constructed categories of identity. We will celebrate all of you, however you choose to define yourselves. And most especially, we will support and promote your creativity, resilience and the courage it takes to use words and put new work into the world.

That, dear friends, is why we have chosen this month’s image and these inspiring writers. Our visual prompt for February was captured by photographer Norbu Gyachung. We won’t say more, the story is up to you, but we will tell you that Norbu started his life as a refugee in Tibet and is currently based in France.
We encourage you to explore his portfolio (https://unsplash.com/@norbuw) , much of which depicts the strength and passion of Paris and its people, embodied in many different ways.

Our lead, Daniel Trilling (https://twitter.com/trillingual?lang=en) , is a journalist who lives in London. He spent several years reporting on the experiences of people who come to Europe in search of asylum, and is the author of Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe (Picador, 2018). He also writes occasional, more abstract pieces which you can read at tinyletter.com/trillingual.

On page two, we bring you Ariel Francisco (https://arielfrancisco.com/) , author of A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship (Burrow Press, 2020) and All My Heroes Are Broke (C&R Press, 2017). A poet and translator born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets, The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.

Our third lead piece ‘Ortolan’ is by Tom Bolton (https://tombolton.co.uk) , a writer, researcher and photographer who lives in Streatham. He is the author of four books: London’s Lost Rivers: A Walker’s Guide (https://tombolton.co.uk/londons-lost-rivers-a-walkers-guide/) (Strange Attractor, 2011), Vanished City: London’s Lost Neighbourhoods (https://tombolton.co.uk/vanished-city-2/) (Strange Attractor, 2013), Camden Town: Dreams of Another London (https://www.bl.uk/shop/camden-town/p-1151) (British Library Publications, 2017) and Low Country: Brexit on the Essex Coast (http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/2018/10/low-country-brexit-on-the-essex-coast/) (Penned in the Margins, 2018). He works in urban design and policy, and has a PhD from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, on London’s railway terminals. He leads walks and gives talks, and has written for publications including Caught By The River, The Wellcome Collection website, the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian. He also
writes on theatre and music for his own website and for The Quietus (https://thequietus.com/) .

And sending you off into your own words is Naomi Paxton (http://www.naomipaxton.co.uk/) . Naomi has a portfolio career as a researcher, writer, public engager, curator, performer, magician and award-winning comedian. She trained as a performer at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now Royal Conservatoire of Scotland). Her publications include The Methuen Drama Book of Suffrage Plays (Bloomsbury, 2013), Stage Rights! The Actresses’ Franchise League, Activism and Politics 1908-1958 (Manchester University Press, 2018) and The Methuen Drama Book of Suffrage Plays: Taking the Stage (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Don’t forget the VV rules: we ask for 50–500 words written in the space of an hour. Our deadline is 15 February, and we will publish up to 100 of the best submissions over the course of the month. We only publish one piece per writer. Please don’t submit the same piece multiple times. If you’re concerned that your submission hasn’t reached us, drop us a line at visualverse@thecurvedhouse.com (mailto:visualverse@thecurvedhouse.com?subject=Submission%20query) and we’ll get back to you asap. We don’t send you a heads-up if we do/don’t feature you – but we might tweet! So do follow us (https://twitter.com/@visual_verse) – watch out for your tweet and keep supporting each other. You can read the Submission Guidelines in full here (https://visualverse.org/about-visual-verse/) .

Now – sharpen your pencils dear writers. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…

Preti, Kristen, Lucie, Rithika and Luke

@teabolton (https://twitter.com/teabolton?lang=en)
@NaomiPaxton (https://twitter.com/NaomiPaxton?lang=en)
@trillingual (https://twitter.com/trillingual?lang=en)
@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse)

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Volume 06, Chapter 03 | January 2019

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Image by Matt Boyce

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to 2019! Yesterday, we launched our January issue in the quiet aftermath of new year celebrations. Your visual inspiration is an image by comic artist and illustrator Matt Boyce (http://mattboyce.com/mattboyce/) that fits the general ambience of the moment, at least for us. This is the first time we have featured an image with any kind of words incorporated and we are excited to see what you come up with.

We are delighted to welcome The Whole Kahani (http://www.thewholekahani.com/) , a group of female voices from South Asia (who are all now based in the UK) to our lead slots. Their new collection, May We Borrow Your Country, with an introduction by our editor, Preti Taneja, will be published by Linen Press and launched at Waterstones Gower Street on January 26th, 2019. Before you come along to that, we bring you a taster of their work…

Leading us into the new year is Kavita A. Jindal, co-founder of The Whole Kahani and author of the poetry collection Raincheck Renewed (Chameleon Press). The manuscript for her debut novel won the Brighthorse Novel Prize 2018. Kavita’s short stories, poems and essays have appeared in anthologies and literary journals in the UK and around the world and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Zee TV and European radio stations. She serves as Senior Editor at Asia Literary Review.

Our second lead is Reshma Ruia, a co-founder of The Whole Kahani, and fiction editor at Jaggery Lit Magazine. Her first novel, Something Black in the Lentil Soup, was described in The Sunday Times as “a gem of straight faced comedy”. Her second novel, A Mouthful of Silence was shortlisted for the 2014 SI Leeds literary prize. Reshma’s poetry and short stories have appeared in various British and international journals and anthologies as well as broadcast on Radio 4. Born in India but brought up in Italy and now living in Manchester, her writing reflects the preoccupations of those who possess a multiple sense of belonging.

Mona Dash is the author of Untamed Heart (Tara India Research Press 2016), and two collections of poetry, Dawn-Drops (Writer’s Workshop 2001) and A certain way (Skylark Publications 2017). She has a Masters in Creative Writing (with distinction) from the London Metropolitan University. Her short story collection ‘Let us look elsewhere’ was shortlisted for the SI Leeds Literary Prize 2018. Her memoir, A Roll of The Dice: a story of love, loss and genetics will be published by Linen Press in 2019. Originally from India, she lives in London.

Radhika Kapur’s work as a writer/Creative Director in advertising has won awards at Cannes, One Show, Asia Pacific Adfest and Clio; she also writes short fiction and scripts. Her writing has appeared in the Feminist Review, Poem International and The Pioneer. She won third place in the Euroscript Screenwriting Competition (2015) and was longlisted for BBC Script Room (2017) and the London Short Story Prize (2016). She has recently completed an MA in Screenwriting from Birkbeck, University of London.

Born in Bombay, Shibani Lal moved to the UK in 2000. She was runner-up in the Asian Writer prize and was recently longlisted for the Bristol Prize and Cambridge Short-Story Prize. Shibani has worked in the City for over a decade; she’s also an open-water swimmer and recently swam across the Bosphorous from Asia to Europe.

Deblina Chakrabarty is a freelance writer from Bombay who relocated to London seven years ago. She’s written for various publications including the Times of India and DNA and is primarily interested in the chasm between genders, cultures, cities and lovers that form open terrain for curious examination. By day she flirts on the fringes of storytelling by working for international distribution at a major Hollywood studio.

Nadia Kabir Barb is the author of the short story collection, Truth or Dare. Her work has been published in Wasafiri, The Missing Slate, Open Road Review and Six Seasons Review, and she was the winner of the Audio Arcadia short story competition. She has worked in the health and development sector in both Bangladesh and the UK.

So with a new year and all the uncertainty it brings, you can be sure of one thing – Visual Verse will keep supporting new voices, celebrating successes, and inspiring you with avant-garde art. And, thanks to our Twitter habit, we will continue to bring your submissions into conversation with each others’ across the world.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Happy New Year.

Kristen, Preti and Lucie
with Editorial Assistants Luke and Rithika

Volume 06, Chapter 02 | December 2018

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Image by Dong Chensheng

Dear writers, readers and friends,

The end is nigh … for 2018 at least.

To wrap the year, we bring you this curious character in red by Chinese artist Dong Chensheng and lead pieces by the founders and contributors of BLYNKT Magazine (http://www.blynkt.com/) . BLYNKT is an online publication which explores one theme deeply each issue through a range of creative non-fiction, essays, art, interviews, prose and poetry. Issue 4 “New Beginnings” will be available in early 2019 and BLYNKT is accepting submissions (http://www.blynkt.com/submissions.html) until December 15th, 2018. Stay in the loop with BLYNKT via Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/BLYNKT/) , Twitter (https://twitter.com/blynkt) and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/blynkt/) .

Our first lead piece, which explores the value of family legacy, is by Carly Dee, a writer from London who is the co-founder and co-editor of BLYNKT Magazine. Carly writes prose, poetry and creative non-fiction which has been featured in Corner Club Press, Firewords Quarterly and The Avalon Literary Review, among others. She is currently working on a film-script in Berlin with her BLYNKT partner and co-founder Q. Lei, as well as a non-fiction and spoken word project which will be available in 2019.

Q. Lei has penned for us a short story that will make you nosocomephobic if you aren’t already. Lei received her PhD in East Asian Studies in the discipline of Philosophy of Science from Princeton University. She is currently working as an independent filmmaker and writer between Shenzhen and Berlin. She has conducted various research projects on the topic of science and society at the University of Tokyo, Freie Universität and Princeton University. Her creative writing has been published in Litro Magazine, the Centum Press Anthologies and The Speaker, among others. She is currently working on her second documentary on the history and development of Shenzhen – the “Silicon Valley of China”. You can find her latest updates and adventures on her blog (https://www.inbetweenalbum.com/) and on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/qleifilm/) .

Next up, we have a piece about elements, eyes and ‘i’s by Malik Ameer Crumpler (http://malikameer.com/) . Malik Ameer is a poet, rapper, music producer and editor who’s released several albums, glitch art films, five poetry books and one book of raps. He was guest-editor of Paris Lit Up (http://parislitup.com/paris-lit-up-4-magazine/) issues 4 and 5. He’s editor-at-large of The Opiate (https://theopiatemagazine.com/) , co-founder of Those That This (https://thosethatthis.com/) and Visceral Brooklyn. Malik has an MFA in Creative Writing from LIU, Brooklyn. He co-hosted Transatlantic Poetry 2017-2018 (https://www.transatlanticpoetry.com/) , curates/hosts Poets Live (https://poetslive.org/) and The Wordists. He is the M.C. for Hip Hop group Madison Washington (http://defpresse.com/artists/madison-washington/) on Def Pressé and a non-fiction staff writer for Itchysilk (http://www.itchysilk.com/) . Beneath The Underground: Collected Raps 2000- 2018
(http://www.lulu.com/shop/http://www.lulu.com/shop/malik-crumpler/beneath-the-underground-collected-raps-2000-2018/paperback/product-23879473.html) is Malik’s new book and ((((FACTS))))) (https://defpresse.bandcamp.com/album/facts) is Madison Washington’s new album.

Our fourth piece is a tender love letter written in paint by Lavinia Abbott (https://twitter.com/laviniasabbott) . Lavinia is a London-based independent filmmaker with over fifteen years’ experience in theatre and film. After graduating from Nottingham University with a degree in German and Politics, she attended drama school in Paris and New York and appeared in several plays before she turned to writing and directing for film and theatre. Her first short film What Happened to Manfred (shot in Berlin) recently won the Award for Best Student Film at the Around Films International Film Festival in Berlin. She has since written and directed three more short films in West Africa and in the UK. Lavinia is passionate about social and political issues and will typically make these the focal point of her work.

Wrapping up our lead pieces for the year is a poignant and reflective poem by Benjamin Lawrance Miller. Benjamin teaches composition and creative writing at Queensborough Community College (CUNY). He grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia, and he has an MFA in Writing from the School of Critical Studies at CalArts.

Finally, thank you to all of you who submitted to our birthday issue last month. We had an overwhelming response
– over 100 submissions arrived in just two days and they kept on coming! Luckily, our editorial assistants – Luke and Rithika – were on hand to help us publish these wonderful birthday presents.

And so, beloved members of the VV community, we wish you all the best for the final chapter of the year and look forward to seeing what 2019 brings. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen, Preti, Lucie, Luke and Rithika
(Welcome to the team, Rithika!)

Volume 06, Chapter 01 | Writing Competition Results

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Image by Hannah Coulson

Dear writers, readers and friends,

This month, we switched things up and asked you to submit a piece of writing in just 24 hours for a chance to be selected as one of our lead writers. We received over 100 submissions and from these we could pick just three. It was intense, to say the least! With the help of our stellar judges – Bernardine Evaristo, Sam Jordison, Andrew Motion, Eloise Millar and Philippa Sitters – we managed to get 100 down to a longlist of eight, then pick the final three. We would like to thank all of those who submitted such a spectacular array of work and congratulate both the winners and the long- and shortlisted writers:

Winners
Christopher John Eggett – It was decided to fold up my town
Renee Fisher – Twisted Bridges
Suzanne Ushie – Envy

Shortlist
Rishi Dastidar – Spectacle
Emmanuella Dekonor – In the Pink Wash of British Accra
Sharon Jones – Rememberings
Frank McHugh – Elculo
Andrew Strickland – F-Words

Longlist
Valerie Bence – Shades of Pink and a Lighthouse
Alexandra Davis – Is This a Diaorama?
Pat Edwards – Cut Out
Elizabeth Gibson – Leaving Manchester
Motl Lazarus – Misdirections
Hiromi Suzuki – The Quintet of the Holiday Inn Cafe
Jordan Trethewey – Collage Town
Carole Webster – I Opened You Gently Like Paper and Your Skin Made Sense to Me

About the Winners
Our headliner, Renee Fisher, grew up in New Zealand and the UK, studied English Literature and Visual Arts (ideal combo for Visual Verse) and has spent the last few years living in Moscow and Riga, teaching English to children and adults. She now lives in Prague with her partner and baby daughter. Of her writing, Renee said, ‘It has mostly been confined to diaries – a furtive and relentlessly private pursuit – and it’s only recently that I’ve begun to shape it into stories and poems, though they still borrow heavily from my diary habit. I’ll forever be in thrall to first person narratives; journals, travelogues, letters, notes scribbled on scraps of paper, confessions and dreams.’ We are thrilled that the judges have chosen writing from someone who is only just starting to put her work into the world.

Our page two lead is Christopher John Eggett, a writer and poet from Cambridgeshire. He will send you poetry every Friday in his literary newsletter Etch To Their Own (https://medium.com/etch-to-their-own) , where he scratches away at literature’s subtext. Chris is working on a full length collection of poetic essays including Essay on Falling {insert poem here} (https://softcartel.com/2018/08/06/essay-on-falling-insert-poem-here-what-we-can-see-from-here-by-christopher-john-eggett/) , and occasionally writes short stories about accidentally having a lobster for a boyfriend (https://burninghousepress.com/2018/03/30/the-boyfriend-pinch-by-christopher-john-eggett/) . His work has appeared in Euonia Review (https://eunoiareview.wordpress.com/2018/07/07/you-are-good-for-poetry/) , The City Quill (https://medium.com/cjeggett/poetry-featured-in-the-city-quill-455ab0a7c688) and Furtive Dalliance and can be found upcoming in Bone & Ink and Human Repair Kit. He tweets as @CJEggett
(https://twitter.com/CjEggett) and you can read more about him on his website https://cjeggett.co.uk/

And on page three we are delighted to publish Suzanne Ushie, who was born and raised in Calabar, Nigeria. In 2012, she was awarded an international scholarship to undertake the MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, where she made Distinction. Her work has appeared in OZY, Saraba, Fiction Fix, Conte Online, Lunch Ticket, Brittle Paper, Gambit: Newer African Writing and elsewhere. She has received support from Hedgebrook, Writers Omi at Ledig House, Ox-Bow School of Arts and The Whiting Foundation. She lives in Lagos, Nigeria.

About the Judging
The long-longlist was made from a day of reading through over 100 submissions, getting that down to a longlist, and then a shortlist of eight. The shortlist went to our judges over the weekend, and we made sure they were judged blind, without bylines. When we got the results in, most of the judges had overlaps in what they chose, with slight variation. With a very scientific points system, we tallied up the winners. And if we had published four pieces, or five, our two very close runners up would have been in there – In the Pink Wash of British Accra by Emmanuella Dekonor and F-Words by Andrew Strickland – you can read them on the site now.

Our judges were extremely impressed by the quality of the writing. Philippa Sitters from DGA literary agency said:

“These submissions were so accomplished, I find it hard to believe they were turned around within an hour. They’re a display of genuine talent and it was incredibly fun to read such an array of pieces inspired by the single visual. Congratulations to all those who entered.”

Sam Jordison from Galley Beggar Press said:

“I was impressed by these submissions. More than that, I enjoyed them. There are serious ideas and intentions behind them all, but the thing that most struck me was how good it is to see writers having fun with the language and ideas. There are creative sparks flying around their words… The three Galley Beggar choices exemplified that spirit of adventure. They felt fresh and exploratory. They were also written with wit and humour and grace – and because of that the emotional punches they packed were all the stronger.”

All of your writing this month is in response to a wonderful, quirky collage by London-based Scottish artist Hannah Coulson (https://www.hannahcoulson.co.uk/) , an illustrator who loves experimenting with shapes and colours. When she’s not busily illustrating, Hannah teaches at the Royal College of Art in London. She made this work without any intention and we love that it has come full circle on Visual Verse, where we ask you to respond without any intention.

So, dear writers, with so much excellence still to publish, we’re so glad to be five and thank you very much for being part of the amazing community that is Visual Verse.

Happy Birthday! The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen, Preti, Lucie
(And welcome to our newest team member, volunteer Editorial Assistant, Luke!)

Volume 06, Chapter 01 | November 2018

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Image by Hannah Coulson

Today, we turn 5.

Visual Verse was launched in 2013 by Kristen Harrison, Pete Lewis and Preti Taneja – three friends with modest plans. We hoped only to provide an online space where writers and artists could collaborate freely. Thanks to the passion and enthusiasm of writers around the world, Visual Verse has far exceeded all expectations.

Over the past 5 years we have published 60 issues in 5 volumes. We have received almost 8,000 submissions and published 5,500 pieces by 1716 individual writers. And, according to Google Analytics, we have been read by people in every part of the globe except the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. What are those Norwegians doing?

None of this would have been possible without you – our writers and artists – who have made this publication the beautiful, positive, diverse, boundary-pushing celebration of creative collaboration that it is.

And none of this would be possible without the support of those working behind the scenes. Thank you to our Deputy Editor Lucie Stevens whose tireless work keeps Visual Verse running month to month; thank you to our special guest curators and co-editors Eley Williams, Richard Georges, Carmen Marcus and So Mayer who have injected fresh creativity and brought amazing new writers; and finally, a huge thank you to our patrons Bernardine Evaristo, Cathy Galvin, Mark Garry, Andrew Motion, Marc Schlossman and Ali Smith for their ongoing support.

Today we have a very special surprise for you to celebrate our 5th birthday edition. Instead of publishing a new issue with one image and a selection of lead pieces, we are instead giving you – our amazing community of talented and dedicated writers – the opportunity to be one of our three lead writers this month.

All submissions received before 12pm GMT tomorrow (2nd November) will be longlisted for one of our lead spots. A shortlist of eight pieces will be chosen and from these, our judging panel will select the top three.

The Judges

Bernardine Evaristo
Award-winning writer of novels, verse and criticism and founder of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize.

Sam Jordison and Eloise Millar
From the superlative independent publisher, Galley Beggar Press.

Andrew Motion
Poet Laureate 2000-2010, Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns’ Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA.

Philippa Sitters
Literary agent at leading agency DGA.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you. Go forth.

Your faithful founders: Kristen Harrison, Pete Lewis and Preti Taneja.

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Volume 05, Chapter 12 | October 2018

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Image by Mark Basarab

Dear writers, readers and friends,

This month we bring you the final issue in Volume 5 of Visual Verse. To celebrate, we have handed the editorial over to one of our dearest friends, So Mayer – a writer, curator and activist. Her recent books include Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2015) and (O) (Arc, 2015), and recent projects include the touring programme Revolt, She Said: Women and Film After ’68 (http://www.clubdesfemmes.com/revolt-she-said/) with queer feminist film collective Club des Femmes, and Raising our Game (https://www.raisingfilms.com/resources/raising-our-game-report/) , a report addressing exclusion in the film industry with campaigners Raising Films. Current writing projects include Disturbing Words (https://tinyletter.com/sophiemayer/) , a tinyletter about language, and a poetry chapbook , due from Litmus (https://www.litmuspublishing.co.uk) this autumn.

So’s selected writers are all radical thinkers and multi-talented artists. We are very excited to have them inspire us this October, responding to a stellar image (sorry, couldn’t resist) by Vancouver photographer Mark Basarab (http://www.markbasarab.com/) .

Warning: this work is dark and blazing – perfect for the times we live in.

Jason Barker is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, comix artist, and occasional stand-up comedian. He has been a co-producer of Transfabulous and a programmer for BFI Flare, the London LGBT Film Festival, where his first feature film A Deal With the Universe (http://adealwiththeuniverse.com/index.html) , a documentary about his pregnancy, had its world premiere. He is the Education Lead for Gendered Intelligence, and facilitator for GI West in Bristol.

Sarah Crewe is a working class feminist poet from Liverpool. Her first full poetry collection, floss, is upcoming from Aquifer Books (http://glasfrynproject.org.uk/w/category/aquifer-press/) this winter. Her work has featured in Tenebrae, Litmus, Cumulus, zarf and Datableed. Her most recent pamphlet was weimar after dark: fourteen poems on fassbinder’s berlin alexanderplatz (contact Sarah on Twitter to order).

Sachiko Murakami (Canada) is the author of three collections of poetry: The Invisibility Exhibit (Talonbooks 2008), Rebuild (Talonbooks 2011), and Get Me Out of Here (Talonbooks 2015). She has been a literary worker for numerous presses, journals, and organizations, and most recently was the 2017 Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto. Her projects include Project Rebuild (http://www.projectrebuild.ca/) , HENKŌ (http://powellstreethenko.ca/) , WIHTBOAM (http://www.whenihavethebodyofaman.com/) and FIGURE (http://www.figureoracle.com/) .

Anna Coatman is a writer and editor from Leeds, now based in London. In the past she has worked at I.B. Tauris, RA Magazine and Sight & Sound, and is currently Senior Commissioning Editor for BFI, Film & Media at Bloomsbury. She was one of the founding editors of 3 of Cups Press and has contributed to publications including frieze, TLS, LRB and The White Review. She is currently working on a project concerning women and social realism, and will be chairing a panel discussion titled ‘Whose Story?: Working Class Women on Screen (https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/Online/default.asp?doWork::WScontent::loadArticle=Load&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::article_id=3C59E017-BF84-40D4-B379-AA6A43060C85&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::context_id=688F7842-DE4B-4183-9CF3-05F7778DAC4C) ’ on 9 October at BFI Southbank in London.

Jules Koostachin is a band member of Attawapiskat First Nation, Moshkekowok territory, and she currently resides in Vancouver. She is a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, with a research focus on Indigenous documentary. Her television series AskiBOYZ (2016) is currently airing on Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. In the fall of 2018, Jules’ latest short film OChiSkwaCho premieres at ImagineNative, and she publishes her first book of poetry Unearthing Secrets, Gathering Truths (Kegedonce Press, 2018). Her short films PLACEnta and NiiSoTeWak screen at the 12th Native Spirit (https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/12th-native-spirit-indigenous-film-festival-2018-canadakent-placenta-niisotewak-with-jules-tickets-50317019560) Film Festival in London on 18 Oct.

And now, dear writers, October is yours. Do your best – keep reading, get inspired and send us your 50-500 words written in the space of one hour, by 15 October. We will publish up to 100 of the best of them. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

So, Preti, Kristen and Lucie

Volume 05, Chapter 11 | September 2018

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Image by Penny Byrne

Dear writers, readers and friends,

September! How we love this month. To celebrate the turning of the seasons, we’ve handed the curation of Visual Verse over to writer and performance poet Carmen Marcus. Together with Carmen, we are proud to bring you one of our finest images alongside one of the finest selections of form-breaking prose we’ve had the pleasure to publish.

Our featured image this month is by Australian artist Penny Byrne (https://pennybyrneartist.com/home) . This piece, called Fukushima Symphony, is the epitome of what we love about Byrne’s work: it’s aesthetically seductive (even a little quaint) while being politically charged and thought-provoking. We hope it inspires the best of your words.

Carmen Marcus (http://Carmenellen2013.wordpress.com) , our guest curator and lead writer, is from Saltburn in North Yorkshire. Her debut novel How Saints Die is published with Vintage in 2018. It won New Writing North’s Northern Promise Award and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. She is an advocate for working class voices and set up the No Writer Left Behind (http://www.nowriterleftbehind.wordpress.com) website to share the journeys of under-represented writers. She has written and performed poetry for The Royal Festival Hall, Durham Book Festival and BBC Radio. She’s currently working on her second novel and her poetry project The Book of Godless Verse, funded by Arts Council England. She strives to live up to the words of her first critic and primary school teacher: ‘minus one house-point, weird’.

Carmen’s selection of writers begins with Kathy Hoyle (http://www.kathyhoyleblog.wordpress.com) , a recent Creative Writing graduate from The Open University. She writes short prose fiction, flash fiction and creative non-fiction. She has been both long- and short-listed in various competitions and her work has appeared in several online lit mags such as Ellipseszine and Spelkfiction. In 2017 she was highly commended for Spread The Word’s inaugural Life Writing prize for her piece ‘Scab’. She is currently working on a novel Kingfisher Blue, a coming of age story, set against the backdrop of the 1984 miner’s strike. She says she will work for chocolate…

Next is Iain Rowan (https://www.iainrowan.com) , a writer who lives in the north-east of England. In 2017 he was shortlisted for the Bath Novel Award, and in 2018 he won a Northern Writers’ Award. Iain is also Director of the Sunderland Festival of Creative Writing, which we urge you all to check out.

Our fourth piece comes from Lisette Auton, a disabled writer, activist, spoken word performer, theatre-maker and creative practitioner. She is a Creative Future Literary Award winner for poetry and her children’s novel has gained her a place on Penguin RHUK’s #WriteNowLive programme. Friend Lisette on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/lisette.grout) to find out about her wordy adventures, particularly since she specialises in working with people whose voices are not fully represented in the mainstream.

Douglas Bruton (http://douglasrdb.blogspot.com) throws words together. Sometimes they make sense and sometimes they even make stories. He sends those thrown-together words ‘out there’ and every now and then that makes sense, too. He has been published in many nice places, including Northwords Now, New Writing Scotland, The Delinquent, The Vestal Review, Interpreter’s House, Flash Magazine, The Irish Literary Review, Fiction Attic Press, and in an Edinburgh anthology by Freight Books and most recently by The Fiction Desk. His first novel for grown ups will be published in December 2018.

Astra Bloom (https://twitter.com/AstraBloom) writes poetry fiction and creative non fiction for all ages. She has been shortlisted by Bridport prize, she won Bare Fiction poetry prize, was runner up and Sussex winner in the Brighton Prize, was shortlisted by Live Canon Poetry and has been published by Magma poetry magazine and Under The Radar journal. She’s recently been commended by Brittle star and longlisted by Mslexia International Novel award for two novels. Astra has a short story forthcoming in A Wild and Precious Life, an anthology on the theme of recovery from mental and physical illness and addiction, which featured on the For Books Sake site as their Weekend read. She is one of the 16 new writers selected by Kit De Waal for the Common People anthology of working class writing and her novel has been selected by Penguin Random House for their Write Now Live initiative.

So dear readers, there we have it – a selection of some of the best voices in the game to inspire and delight you. Send us your 50 to 500 words, written in the space of an hour in response to the image. We publish one piece per writer and only around 100; submission deadline is 15^th September.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…

Carmen, Preti, Kristen and Lucie

Volume 05, Chapter 10 | August 2018

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Image by Jon Tyson

Dear writers, readers and friends,

The August edition is alive, one day late this month due to travel commitments. We hope the extra day has simply given you time to build your enthusiasm.

For some reason all three of our lead writers have names beginning with ‘S’ this month. Maybe it’s because we’re based in the northern hemisphere and the summer is going to our heads. Or maybe it’s a nod to a strange and sublime image, meant to literally swirl your creativity into ever more intricate formations and bamboozle the words out of you. This captivating visual is courtesy of Jon Tyson whose fabulously gritty photographic work you will find here (https://unsplash.com/@jontyson) .

Our lead writer is Sam Guglani (https://twitter.com/@samirguglani) , a writer and Consultant Oncologist in Cheltenham who specialises in the management of lung and brain tumours. He has Masters degrees in Ethics (Keele, 2009) and Creative Writing (Oxford, 2014). He writes poetry, a column for The Lancet titled The Notes, and his novel Histories is published by riverrun (Quercus Books, 2017). He is Director of Medicine Unboxed, a project that engages health professionals and the public in conversation around medicine, illuminated by the arts, and his piece is intergalactically good.

Next up we have Samuel Fisher (https://twitter.com/@fishersamuk) , author of one of our debut novels of the year, The Chameleon. He also wears many hats – running Burley Fisher books in East London, where many, many writers find a warm welcome, support for their events and an excellent selection of books. And, he is also a publisher – of the recently minted Peninsula Press, bringing you thought-provoking essays in beautiful book form – a true example of the issues and objects of our times. His piece, to hint at its inspiration, is a thing of beauty.

Finally we are very excited to bring you a piece by Sarvat Hasin (https://twitter.com/@sarvathasin) . She was born in London and grew up in Karachi. She is the author of the novel This Wide Night (Penguin India, 2017) which was longlisted for the DSC prize for South Asian literature and the short story collection You Can’t Go Home Again (Penguin India, 2018). She is the fiction editor of the Stockholm Review.

So, dear writers, standards are high. Multitasking is the new job for life and we are here to remind you to write for love not glory – although we want that for you too.

And we are now looking forward to reading you! (Don’t forget the RULES: 50-500 words, written in response to the image in the space of an hour. Get it to us by 15 August, and we will publish the best 100 pieces.) The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Preti, Lucie and Kristen

Volume 05, Chapter 09 | July 2018

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Image by Namroud Gorguis
Guest Editor: Richard Georges

Dear writers, readers and friends,

We do get around. Words circle and come back. Lives and geographies and time fold and touch. We talk and we talk and we talk. Back in May, our editor was delighted to take part in a panel for Bare Lit (http://barelitfestival.com/) , the UK’s literary festival featuring writers of colour working in every genre you can think of. Over chats about mythology and monsters, Preti met poet Richard Georges, who is from the British Virgin Islands. They got talking about colonial territories, and Preti invited him to curate Visual Verse for July. Richard is the author of the poetry collections Make Us All Islands (Shearsman Books) and Giant (Platypus Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prelude, Smartish Pace, The Poetry Review, wildness, Wasafiri, decomP, The Rusty Toque, Reservoir, L’Ephemere, The White Review and elsewhere.

About his Visual Verse selection, Richard says, ‘I am delighted to compile work for Visual Verse solicited exclusively from some of the most spellbinding poets I know who also happen to be citizens of colonial spaces. Ana Portnoy Brimmer from Puerto Rico (an unincorporated territory of the United States), Arturo Desimone from Aruba (a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands), and Chris Astwood from Bermuda, Erika Jeffers from Montserrat, and myself from the British Virgin Islands (all British Overseas Territories).’ We are delighted to have Richard’s own work in our lead spot, followed by this brilliant selection.

Ana Portnoy Brimmer is a Puerto Rican poet whose work has been published or is forthcoming in Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, Puerto Rico en mi Corazón, Kweli Journal, Poets Reading The News, Project Censored, Centro Journal, Moko, and elsewhere. For more on her work, visit her website (http://anaportnoybrimmer.com/ ) .

Arturo Desimone (http://arturoblogito.wordpress.com) is an Arubian-Argentinian writer and visual artist. His articles, poetry, and short fiction have previously appeared in CounterPunch, Círculo de Poesía, Moko, Drunken Boat, Acentos Review, and New Orleans Review. His translations have appeared in Blue Lyra Review and Adirondack Review.

Chris Astwood (http://www.chrisastwood.com/) is a Bermudian poet currently residing in the UK and completing a PhD in creative and critical writing at the University of East Anglia. His writing has recently appeared in sx Salon and Caribbean Quarterly. A pamphlet of linked poems entitled JANE DOE is forthcoming from Gatehouse Press.

And finally, Erika Jeffers (https://www.erikajeffers.com/) – a poet and book reviewer whose writing has appeared in Kweli, Callaloo, sx salon, Wasafiri, Adrienne, and Moko; she’s also a reader for Frontier Poetry. Currently based in Brooklyn, she’s at work on her first full-length poetry collection.

All of them have responded to an image so full of stories, potential, surveillance, entropy and nostalgia – captured by Namroud Gorguis via Unsplash. And so to the long month of July, with all of its potential. Let’s make these worlds of words speak to each other. Looking forward to your submissions dear writers – the image is the starting point, the text is up to you. _x005F _x005F

Richard Georges (Guest Editor)
with Preti, Lucie and Kristen

Volume 05, Chapter 08 | June 2018

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Image by Sharon McCutcheon

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Behold your June visual prompt, in all its shimmering glory. This one comes to us from photographer Sharon McCutcheon (https://unsplash.com/@sharonmccutcheon) via Unsplash. We are so impressed by the quality and commitment our writers bring to Visual Verse that, for this month, we are showcasing and celebrating you. We are publishing, in our lead spots, three regular contributors to the site: Liz Young, Michael Caines and Helen Laycock. Each of them has an extensive collection with us, and their work caught our eye. By inviting them to lead, we’ve discovered just how prolific you all are – self publishing, working for literary magazines, and submitting work to many different places while writing in different genres and winning prizes too. It’s incredible to publish your work each month and just goes to show, you never know who your neighbours are on the site, who is reading your work, and where that might take you next.

Before introducing our regulars, we are thrilled to announce our headliner Julia Webb, a Norwich-based poetry editor for “Lighthouse (http://www.gatehousepress.com/lighthouse/) “, a journal for new writing which we love (and which you should buy, read and submit to). Julia also works as a poetry mentor, creative writing tutor and she blogs about writing (http://visual-poetics.blogspot.com/) . In 2011 she won the Poetry Society’s Stanza competition. Her first collection “Bird Sisters” was published by Nine Arches Press in 2016. Her second collection “Threat” is due for publication by Nine Arches Press early in 2019. You can read more about Julia and her first collection on the Literary Consultancy’s Showcase (https://literaryconsultancy.co.uk/showcase/julia-webb/) or at Nine Arches Press (http://ninearchespress.blogspot.com/2016/05/featured-poems-julia-webb.html) or read some recent poems here (https://proletarianpoetry.com/tag/julia-webb/) and here
(https://atriumpoetry.com/tag/julia-webb/) .

So now to our wonderful regular contributors. We kick off with Liz Young (https://www.facebook.com/lizyoungwriter) on page 2, a self-publishing whizz who lives in Sussex where she writes anything from flash fiction to poetry to novels – wherever her imagination takes her. She was first persuaded to submit to Visual Verse by poet Vanessa Gebbie, whose poetry was featured in a local Arts Festival. Liz also uses another photographic prompt each week to write 100 words of flash fiction on her blog (http://lizy-writes.blogspot.co.uk/) . Her debut novel A Volcanic Race (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Volcanic-Race-novel-Living-Rock/dp/1979086575/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517654749&sr=1-1&keywords=a+volcanic+race) is getting amazing reviews from readers who are eagerly awaiting the forthcoming sequel.

On page 3 is Michael Caines, who works at the Times Literary Supplement (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/) and is co-editor of the recently founded independent literary magazine, Brixton Review of Books (https://twitter.com/BrixtonBooks) . He is the author of Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century (https://global.oup.com/ukhe/product/shakespeare-and-the-eighteenth-century-9780199642373?cc=gb〈=en&) and a founder member of the Liars League (http://liarsleague.typepad.com/) .

Helen Laycock (https://www.facebook.com/helenlaycockauthor/) is our final lead this month, and one of our most dedicated regulars at Visual Verse. Her poetry has appeared in Popshot, The Caterpillar, Full Moon and Foxglove (Three Drops Press) and Poems for Grenfell (Onslaught). Since winning the David St. John Writing Award for Novice Poetry in 2006, her work has been acknowledged in many competitions. She has also had humorous poetry published on Jonathan Pinnock’s website Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis. Helen also writes flash fiction, short stories and plays. She has compiled three short story collections and eight works of children’s fiction which you can discover here (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Helen-Laycock/e/B006PGFVL6) .

So, let us see what you make of this image, one that is oozing with inspiration. The image is the starting point, the rest is up to you.

Kristen, Preti, Lucie and Rose

Find us on Twitter @visual_verse (https://twitter.com/@visual_verse)

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Volume 05, Chapter 07 | May 2018

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Image by Mary Cassatt

Welcome dear writers to the 1st of May,

Our image this month might be classic, but our writers are raw brilliance. That’s how we like it here at VV.

Painted by American artist Mary Cassatt in 1893, The Child’s Bath depicts an ordinary moment in domestic life. But its quietness is misleading. Through her work, Cassatt gave voice and presence to women, offering a female perspective that had long been dismissed as inferior. Described as the embodiment of the ‘New Woman’, Cassatt played a crucial role in advocating for equality, particularly in relation to education.

We’re always on the look out for the best, most radical and boundary breaking work. So we’re very proud to publish work by Inara Verzemnieks, the author of the astonishing and moving Among the Living and the Dead, published this month by Pushkin Press (https://www.pushkinpress.com/discover-the-breathtaking-among-the-living-and-the-dead) . Inara teaches creative non-fiction at the University of Iowa, and writes regularly for the New York Times and the Atlantic, among other publications. She has won a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa. Her piece got us in the guts, then twisted them.

Next we bring you essayist and poet Will Harris (https://willjharris.com/) . He is the author of a chapbook, All this is implied, and a groundbreaking essay, Mixed-Race Superman which will be published this month by the very new and exciting Peninsula Press.

Following this, we have a piece by Scherezade Siobhan. An award-winning writer and psychologist, she’s a community catalyst who founded and runs The Talking Compass (http://www.thetalkingcompass.com) —  a therapeutic space dedicated to providing counseling services and decolonizing mental health care. She is the author of Bone Tongue (Thought Catalog Books, 2015), Father, Husband (Salopress, 2016) and The Bluest Kali (Lithic Press, 2018). She says she can be found squeeing about militant bunnies @zaharaesque on twitter/FB/IG as well as www.zaharaesque.com (http://www.zaharaesque.com/) . She invites you to send her chocolate and puppies  via  nihilistwaffles@gmail.com (mailto:nihilistwaffles@gmail.com) .

To crown it all, a new piece by Rakhshan Rizwan. Rakhshan was born in Lahore, Pakistan and moved to Germany where she studied Literature and New Media. She is currently a PhD candidate at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her poems have appeared in Blue Lyra Review, The Missing Slate, Postcolonial Text and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Judith Khan Memorial Poetry Prize (2015). Her debut poetry collection, Paisley, has been shortlisted in the “Best Poetry Pamphlet” category at the 2018 Sabateur Awards.

So – happy reading, writing and submitting. May is the month to settle in to the new season and we can’t wait to read your words. The image is the starting point, the rest is up to you!

Love,
Kristen, Preti, Lucie and Rose

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Volume 05, Chapter 06 | April 2018

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Image by Anthony Intraversato

Dear writers, readers and friends,

April is a month often associated with beginnings. Now that equinox has past, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are looking forward to a new season – one of light, warmth and colour. When we emerge from our caves after a long winter, will we see the world in new ways? This month’s visual prompt by Anthony Intraversato (https://www.instagram.com/anthonyintraversato/) brings to mind the insight that differing vantage points can create.

With so much going on in the world, we thought it only right to begin April with a choice selection of work arising from diverse pathways in the literary landscape, writers who between them traverse music, translation, travel, poetry, creative non-fiction and fiction
– a celebration of the multiplicity of writing identities represented in Visual Verse and a marker of how art brings us together in all our astonishing difference of form and voice.

Our lead writer Jeffrey Boakye (https://unseenflirtspoetry.wordpress.com/) is an author, teacher and father currently living in East London with his wife and two sons. His first book Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials, and the Meaning of Grime was published in 2017 by Influx Press. His upcoming book Black, Listed is due for publication in 2019. Jeffrey has a particular interest in education, race and popular culture. This is his first contribution to Visual Verse.

Our second lead, Abeer Y. Hoque (http://olivewitch.com/wordpress/) , is a Nigerian born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer we met in India. She likes velvet, tequila and the corpse pose. Her books include a travel photography and poetry monograph (The Long Way Home, 2013), a linked collection of stories, poems and photographs (The Lovers and the Leavers, 2015) and a memoir (Olive Witch, 2017).

Delaina Haslam (http://dhaslamtranslation.com/index.html) is a translator of French and Spanish; she is also an editor and writer and is based in Sheffield. She has worked for publications including InMadrid magazine and le cool London, and about translation for Glasgow Review of Books, the Poetry Translation Centre, and Yorkshire Translators and Interpreters. She has been the invited translator at Poetry Translation Centre workshops, had a submission accepted for Newcastle University’s Poettrios Experiment and has performed collaborative translation at Sheffield’s Wordlife open mic night. She is writing a memoir about baby loss, for which she won the Off the Shelf Festival Novel Slam in 2016.

Finally, we’d like to introduce our new Editorial Assistant, Rose Warner Miles. Rose is from the US and has a Bachelor degree in English Literature & Psychology from Williams College. She grew up in New York, where she interned at Poets House and worked at the American Museum of Natural History. She is a poet, a wanderer, an intersectional feminist and an unapologetically devoted fan of cheesy TV teen soaps. We’re thrilled to add her enthusiasm and poetic nous to the team.

And so dear writers with April arriving, it’s no joke – the image is the starting point, the rest is up to you.

Kristen, Preti, Lucie and Rose

Find us on Twitter

@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/@visual_verse)
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Volume 05, Chapter 05 | March 2018

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Image by Curated by Fiona Kearney, Lewis Glucksman Gallery

Dear writers, readers and friends,

What a wicked sense of humour those Irish have. Fiona Kearney, Director of Lewis Glucksman Gallery in Cork and our guest-curator this month, has bestowed upon us this surreal gift. These macabre little gnashers were exhibited at the Glucksman in a show called Grin and Bear It: Cruel Humour in Art and Life and presented as a re-creation of elements of Wake Games that used to be played with the corpse in Ireland.

The only match for this image is the playwright Enda Walsh whose work is fierce, deep, dark and very funny. His razor-sharp dialogue has a way of bewildering you with its absurdity while moving you with its humanity. It is a dream come true to publish him here after stalking all of his plays. The latest, an adaptation of Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers (https://www.giaf.ie/tours/grief-is-the-thing-with-feathers) , opens in Galway this month and stars Irish hottie Cillian Murphy who is arguably at his best when in an Enda Walsh play. It is produced by Complicité, doesn’t get better than that.

Emer Martin (https://www.instagram.com/emerobergo/?hl=en) sends us her words from a cottage in the west of Ireland. She grew up in the UK with Irish parents and read English Literature and Italian at Manchester University before working in national news journalism. In 2016, Emer left London and her job to ‘rewild’ and write. She’s now writing her first novel, The Road To The River.

Next up, we are thrilled to publish Isabel Waidner, the author of Gaudy Bauble (https://dostoyevskywannabe.com/original/gaudy_bauble) (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2017), which is shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize in the UK. Isabel is also the editor of Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (https://www.dostoyevskywannabe.com/experiments/liberating_the_canon) (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018), which includes work by Visual Verse contributors. Definitely worth a read.

Finally, wondrous new words by Kusi Okamura, founder and editor of The Wild Word (http://www.thewildword.com) magazine. All she’ll tell us is this: she lives in Berlin with her family. But you know, there’s so much more… start by checking out the Wild Word and their recently published fiction and poetry anthologies (https://thewildword.com/buy-our-anthologies/) .
So there it is, writers. Don’t forget the new rules: submit before 15th February. Also please only submit your piece once, and be patient. Any pieces that are submitted multiple times will not be considered for publication.

As always, enjoy the challenge. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen, Preti and Lucie

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Volume 05, Chapter 04 | February 2018

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Image by Daniel Frost

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Here ye: we are shakin’ things up and making some changes to how we accept and publish submissions. These changes are intended to improve the process for you, our beloved writers, and help us to manage the growth of Visual Verse (something that continues to amaze us).
————————————————————

New Submission Guidelines:

Henceforth we will release a new image on the 1st of each calendar month (as we do now) and accept submissions up until the 15th of the month. We will publish up to 100 submissions over the course of the month, no more. The other rules remain the same: 50-500 words, written within an hour, in response to the image. The writing must be new and original. Read more about our publishing policy (https://visualverse.org/about-visual-verse/) on the website.

We are excited to see how these changes pan out over the coming months. Both the deadline and the cap on submissions mean that we can focus on publishing the best of what comes in and ensure that these pieces are showcased on the site while the issue is still live. Please let us know if you have any feedback, either now or in the future when the new rules are underway. Email us at visualverse@thecurvedhouse.com (mailto:mailto: visualverse@thecurvedhouse.com) anytime.
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And now, without further ado, we present this wonderful, whimsical painting by Daniel Frost, an artist and illustrator whose work we have admired for so many years. Do your eyes a favour and follow his Instagram: @danielfrostillustration (https://www.instagram.com/danielfrostillustration) .

Our lead response comes from Megan Hunter, a hugely talented writer who is fast building an impressive body of work. Megan was born in Manchester in 1984, and studied English Literature at Sussex and Cambridge. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and she was a finalist for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Her first book, The End We Start From, was published in 2017 in the UK, US, and Canada, and has been translated into seven languages. It was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the 2017 Books Are My Bag Readers Awards and is longlisted for the Aspen Words Prize.

Megan has a long-standing relationship with Visual Verse. She says:

I started writing pieces for Visual Verse a few years ago, before I’d had anything published. I was working in an office and the visual prompts were an ideal creative stimulus during my lunch hour! I found the process of responding to an image, particularly within a one hour time frame, gave a freedom to my work that was so important when figuring out what I wanted to write, and is still so useful now. I think Visual Verse was probably the first time I’d ever seen my name ‘in print’ online, and it’s a real honour to now be writing the lead piece.

We’re pretty chuffed about that.

On page 2 we feature Maisie Chan, a published writer from Birmingham who now lives in Glasgow. She was recently commissioned to write stories for the Human Values Foundation and has also been published in the Penguin decibel Anthology The Map of Me. Maisie won the BBC Writersroom Competition BBC Bites and was a finalist in the 2015 Creative Futures Literary Awards. During 2016-2017, she was chosen for the Megaphone – an Arts Council/Publisher’s Association project to mentor and develop BAME writers writing their first novel for children or teens. Maisie has taught creative writing to children and adults and was an Arvon tutor in 2009. She is working on her first novel for teens about a fifteen-year-old British Chinese girl whose grandfather has early-onset Alzheimers.

Our next writer, Melissa Fu, grew up in Northern New Mexico and currently lives in Cambridgeshire, UK. Her work appears in many journals including The Lonely Crowd, International Literature Showcase, Skin Deep, and The Nottingham Review. In 2017, she was the regional winner of Words and Women’s Prose Competition and one of four Apprentices with the London-based Word Factory.

And on page 4 we have Yen Ooi, one of our favourite publishing people and a regular Visual Verse contributor. Dirty diapers, science fiction, and CreateThinkDo (http://createthinkdo.com/) is about all Yen has time for nowadays, but she did manage to pen this little piece and connect our February issue to another dimension…
There it is, writers. Submit before 15th February and as always, enjoy the challenge. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen, Preti and Lucie

Find us on Twitter

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Volume 05, Chapter 03 | January 2018

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Image by Candice Seplow

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to a brand new year. We have survived New Years Eve in Berlin, dodging the amateur fireworks that take over the streets here (not a health and safety regulation in sight) and finding ourselves full of hope and determination for the coming year. What better way to start 2018 than with a little puff of smoke from photographer Candice Seplow – may it ignite your writing spirit.

We are proud to bring you three wonderful voices to celebrate the new year issue. These writers are brave, poetic and uncompromising, so fasten your seatbelts and get ready for some Visual Verse gold.

First up we have the excellent Niven Govinden, author of four novels including All The Days And Nights, a beautiful examination of something we are obsessed with at VV: humans, art and how to write about them. The others are Black Bread White Beer, Graffiti My Soul, and the stylish, youth rush, New Years Eve appropriate We Are The New Romantics. Niven tweets at @niven_govinden (https://twitter.com/niven_govinden) , go find him.

Tomoé Hill is a senior editor at the wonderful online magazine Minor Literature[s]. Her thought provoking essays and other writing can be found there, and at Numéro Cinq, 3:AM, New Orleans Review, RIC Journal, The City Story, and an excerpt from a memoir in progress is forthcoming at Lunch Review. Follow her @CuriosoTheGreat (https://twitter.com/CuriosoTheGreat) .

And on page 3 we have Divya Ghelani who grew up in Leicestershire and holds an MA in Creative Writing and an MPhil in Literary Studies. Her novel-in-progress has been longlisted and shortlisted for four literary awards. She was a 2016 Word Factory Apprentice and has published stories in Litro: India and the BareLit Anthology to name a few. She lives between Berlin and the UK. Visit her at divyaghelani.com (http://www.divyaghelani.com) or follow @DivyaGhelani (https://twitter.com/DivyaGhelani) . She’s a risk-taker with a sense of humour fitting to start the year.

So, dear readers you know the score. Sharpen your wit and your pencils: the image is the starting point, the text is up to you. Happy New Year!

Kristen and Preti
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Volume 05, Chapter 02 | December 2017

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Image by Samuel Zeller

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to our final issue for 2017. This month we are bringing it all back to where Visual Verse began: Berlin. It was here, in this magical city, where Visual Verse was born in 2013. A spark of an idea from Kristen was fuelled by a beautiful design by Pete Lewis (also a Berlin resident at the time) and is now a raging fireball of amazingness thanks to the editorial leadership of Preti Taneja, her guest editors Eley Williams and George Spender and our deputy editor Lucie Stevens.

As Visual Verse has evolved, so too has Berlin’s writing talent, and this December we bring the best of this talent to you. We showcase Berlin’s diversity: from rollerskating, hotpant-wearing, rrrriot girl art to gothic cyborg tales, imagination and worldclass talent really are in abundance here. This month’s image is a photograph taken in a Berlin shop window and comes to us from Samuel Zeller (https://www.samuelzeller.ch/) . As is customary with our images, we will not reveal further details or give any context, but one thing is for sure about this one: no one will be indifferent to it. Love it or hate it, we know this image will evoke strong reactions.

Our lead piece by Jane Flett (http://janeflett.com/) is a mighty start to our December issue. Jane is a resident of Berlin where she makes up stories, plays cello, and rollerskates down Tempelhof runway in hotpants. She’s been published in over 70 literary journals and translated into Polish, Croatian and Japanese. Jane features in the 2012 Best British Poetry anthology and was voted Berlin’s best English-language writer in 2015 by Indieberlin. Should you wish to tap Jane’s writerly wisdom she sometimes runs courses in creative writing with The Reader Berlin (http://thereaderberlin.com/) but be warned: they sell out fast.

Rollerskating writers? Well, our next piece is from Sharon Mertins (http://nomadicgraphomania.com) , who says she spends her time in Berlin floating around in her thoughts, playing with fire and linking strands of thought together to turn them into elaborate tales. Her work has been published in Leopardskin and Limes, The Wild Word, Jersey Devil Press and Café Irreal.

And on page 3 we have our very own Lucie Stevens (http://www.luciestevens.com/) who is not only deputy editor extraordinaire of Visual Verse but also a writer, editor and maker of small projects. Lucie was awarded an ASA Emerging Writer’s Mentorship and a NSW Writers’ Centre Varuna Fellowship for her first novel, and her work has been performed by the Australian National Youth Theatre Company. When she’s not writing stories about children in formidable circumstances, Lucie helps make books about space with Curved House Kids.

Up next is Dan Ayres (https://www.clippings.me/danayres) , another Berlin-based writer, this time with a penchant for writing fantasy and short stories about the freaky side of technology. He has been published in Open Pen and The Wild Word and he was longlisted for the annual competition at The Reader Berlin. When dancing, he is devoid of bones.

We are utterly delighted to bring you the work of Isha Ro on page 5, a Jamaican writer living in Berlin. Isha writes creepy stories and funny stories and both of these involve an inordinate amount of murder. You can read more of her work at The Prosateur (http://www.theprosateur.com) .

And finally we complete this issue with fresh new words by Olivia Parkes (http://www.oliviaparkes.com) , a British-American painter and writer currently based in Berlin. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Zyzzyva, The New Haven Review, Gone Lawn, Blue Five Notebook, and American Chordata, among others.

For those of you in Berlin, or looking to visit or move here, keep an eye on The Reader Berlin (http://thereaderberlin.com/) for English-language writing events and courses and also check out SAND Journal (http://sandjournal.com/) , Fiction Canteen (http://www.transfiction.eu/the-fiction-canteen/) , The Wild Word (https://thewildword.com/) and Dead Ladies Show (https://www.facebook.com/thedeadladiesshow/) . These are a few of our favourite Berlin things.

So writers, you know the score: the image is the starting point, the text is up to you. Go forth.

Kristen and Preti

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Volume 05, Chapter 01 | November 2017

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Image by Alicia Bock courtesy of Stocksy (https://www.stocksy.com/ALICIABOCK)

Curated in collaboration with Creative Review’s Storytelling issue (https://www.creativereview.co.uk/the-storytelling-issue-oct-nov-2017/)

Dear writers, readers and friends,

HAPPY FOURTH BIRTHDAY.
Welcome to the very special fourth birthday edition of Visual Verse. We, your loyal publishers, are so very proud. We cannot believe that this project, begun on a creative whim in 2013, has flourished to become the avant-garde online citadel of your ongoing construction. It has survived our day jobs for four years and sometimes we think we have survived because of Visual Verse. Thank you all.

Over the past four years we have commissioned big names and supported emerging ones, we’ve published over 4000 pieces while you’ve been writing your own collections, stories and novels – and getting published and winning prizes yourselves. We’ve celebrated it all with our weird and wonderful tweets (over 4000 of those, a fitting number for our fourth year) and with various events, workshops and partnerships that have seen Visual Verse come alive in gallery spaces, within artists’ projects, as part of performance pieces, and now… in print.

We are so excited to celebrate our birthday issue with a collaboration with Creative Review (https://www.creativereview.co.uk/) , a magazine that regularly inspires us with features about the best of the best in the book design world, as well as the best of the best across the whole spectrum of art and design. Thanks to their lovely Deputy Editor, Mark Sinclair, we have been able to play a small role in helping their latest issue come together. Their October/November issue is a storytelling special in which they ask: could a picture be a starting point? What kind of responses might a single image evoke? They asked their readers to select an image to be featured on the cover and reader Stuart McFerrers suggested the image you see above, by artist Alicia Bock (http://www.aliciabock.com/) via the Stocksy photo library (https://www.stocksy.com/ALICIABOCK) . We helped commission writers to respond to the image by asking a handful of VV contributors whose work always makes us
smile – for reasons of style, substance and sheer visual verve – to respond. They are published in the print issue of Creative Review magazine, and as our supporting leads on Visual Verse. In no particular order they are Susanna Crossman, Drew Milne, Rishi Dastidar, Hazel Mason, Clare Archibald, Elizabeth Gibson and Angela Young. Grab hold of a copy of Creative Review to support us, the writers and the power of creative collaboration.

https://www.creativereview.co.uk/the-storytelling-issue-oct-nov-2017/

As you know we also support small presses, and often publish lead writers who come from the UK’s leading independent publishers including Fitzcarraldo, Comma, Peepal Tree, And Other Stories and Galley Beggar Press. So it’s only right our lead piece this month is written by the ultimate small press champion Neil Griffiths. Not only is he the author of two previous novels – Betrayal in Naples (Penguin), winner of the Authors’ Club Best First Novel, and Saving Caravaggio (Penguin), shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year with a new novel – he also has a new book out by Dodo Ink, As a God Might Be, published last month. Neil also co-founded the Republic of Consciousness Prize (http://www.republicofconsciousness.com/) for Small Presses and is an all-round wonder and gift. Follow him at @neilgriffiths (http://www.twitter.com/neilgriffiths) .

We couldn’t do what we do without our patrons, one of whom – Cathy Galvin – is co-founder of The Word Factory. She’s also the brains behind the wonderful C (http://www.thewordfactory.tv/site/events/) itizens: The New Story (http://www.thewordfactory.tv/site/citizen-festival/) festival taking place in London from 10-12 November and featuring an amazing line up (including more than a few VV-ers) – so get down there, and get into it.

As the new Visual Verse year begins, here are our birthday wishes: that you keep writing, keep submitting, keep reading, keep tweeting – help us make it to five. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Birthday love,
Preti and Kristen

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Volume 04, Chapter 12 | October 2017

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Image by Leio McLaren

Dear Readers,

October: the month of transition. Memories of summer will be lingering for some, while for others it is about to arrive. For us, October marks the twelfth and final issue in Volume 4 of Visual Verse, so we are both reflecting and looking forward at the same time. Thinking about this, we are pleased to bring you a brand new visual prompt from Leio McLaren, a photographer based in Sydney, Australia who has a beautiful way of capturing new horizons.

In response, we are thrilled to bring you the writing of Cynan Jones who was born in 1975 near Aberaeron, Wales where he now lives and works. He is the author of five short novels, The Long Dry (Parthian, 2006), Everything I Found on the Beach (Parthian, 2011), Bird, Blood, Snow (Seren, 2012), The Dig (Granta, 2014), and most recently Cove (Granta, 2016). He has been longlisted and shortlisted for numerous prizes and won a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award 2007, a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize 2014 and the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize 2015. He is shortlisted for the National Short Story Award, 2017 for his story, The Edge of the Shoal, which judges called a “lyrically, poetically written account, lit with poignancy.” You can
listen to it on the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05gy8f1 ) . The winner will be announced on Tuesday 3^rd October. Goodluck Cynan!

Next up is newcomer Gonzalo C. Garcia who was born in Santiago and spent his first years in Chile’s Colchagua Valley region, before moving to Switzerland and eventually to the University of Kent, where he studied for a PhD under Scarlett Thomas. His debut novel We Are The End, comes out October 19^th from Galley Beggar Press, and is nominated for this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award, which is up for public vote (https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/first-book-award) here (https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/first-book-award) , should you wish to cast yours. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Warwick.

Sending you off is Dolores Walshe a poet, playwright and fiction writer who comes to us garlanded in awards. Most recently, Dolores won the highly competitive
Berlin Writing Prize (http://thereaderberlin.com/home/competition/) which is organised by our friends at The Reader Berlin in partnership with the Circus Hotel and SAND Journal (http://sandjournal.com/) . Part of the prize is a one month writing residency in Berlin in Jan/Feb 2018. This year she was also shortlisted for the RTE Francis MacManus Short Story Award 2017 which she has won second place in twice (2015, 2009), and shortlisted and commended in the Anthony Cronin International Poetry Award 2017. Her stories have been broadcast by RTE Radio One (that’s in Ireland for our international readers) – and the list goes on – you can read more about her and her brilliant work, here (https://www.munsterlit.ie/Southword/Issues/29/walshe_dolores.html) .

So – whether you feel like the tide is rising or you’re feeling washed up, we are here to inspire you. Writing is survival. The image is the starting point, dear writers – the text is up to you.

Preti and Kristen

—

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Gonzalo C. Garcia @Gonzo_Garcia (https://twitter.com/mj_sprackland)

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Volume 04, Chapter 11 | September 2017

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Image by Alberto Garduño

George Spender is currently guest editor for Visual Verse. George is the senior editor of Oberon Books (https://www.oberonbooks.com/) , an independent publisher in London specialising in theatre and performance.

Dear writers, readers and friends,

It’s been three months since I began my guest spot with Visual Verse, and I’m keen to end on a high. I’ve had enormous fun in commissioning some of my favourite writers, and want to thank everyone who’s taken part for going outside their comfort zones and scaring their brains into writing something.

This month’s image, El sarape rojo, is by Mexican artist Alberto Garduño, probably painted around 1918. There’s a cinematic quality and a dry, piercing mischief to this image that should inspire some great responses.

Leading the September issue, we have the inimitable David Quantick. David is an Emmy-winning television writer, author, radiobroadcaster and journalist who’s written for over fifty different publications, from the Daily Telegraph to The Dandy. He and I met at the launch of a collection of absurdist writing by the gone-but-not-forgotten-and-more-people-should-know-about-him playwright N.F. Simpson, and published the marvellous writing manual How To Write Everything. He should be supreme inspiration to writers everywhere that there’s no such thing as writer’s block. As well as his off the wall contributions to Smash Hits, he’s written some of the best television of the past few decades, including Veep, The Thick Of It, Brass Eye and Harry Hill’s TV Burp.

That same night I met David, I also met Martha Sprackland (http://marthasprackland.co.uk/) , then assistant poetry editor for Faber & Faber. Twice a winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, she was also the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and was longlisted for the inaugural Jerwood–Compton Poetry Fellowships in 2017. Her work has appeared in Poetry Review, LRB, Five Dials, New Humanist, Magma, Poetry London and many other places, and has been anthologised in the Salt Book of Younger Poets, Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam, Best Friends Forever, Vanguard, Birdbook, and the Best British Poetry series. Her debut pamphlet, Glass As Broken Glass, was published by Rack Press in January 2017, and she is currently working on a full-length collection. A non-fiction book on sharks is forthcoming with Little Toller Books in 2018.

Finally, we have Dan O’Brien (http://danobrien.org/) , an internationally produced and published playwright and poet. He and I met after his extraordinary play ‘The Body of an American’ played at the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill. His many awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama and Performance Art, the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, the Horton Foote Prize for Best New American Play, the PEN Center USA Award for Drama, and, for poetry, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Originally from Scarsdale, New York, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

All that’s left to say is thank you, farewell, and remember – the image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

George
—

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Volume 04, Chapter 10 | August 2017

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Image by Kassiël Gerrits/CODA Museum

George Spender is currently guest editor for Visual Verse. George is the senior editor of Oberon Books (https://www.oberonbooks.com/) , an independent publisher in London specialising in theatre and performance. This issue is introduced by Visual Verse curator and co-founder, Kristen Harrison.

Dear writers, readers and friends,

This month, I (Kristen) have staged my own little Shakespearean coup. I have overthrown both our guest editor George and our supreme editor-in-chief, Preti Taneja (http://www.preti-taneja.co.uk/) , to commission our lead writer myself. Fear not, for my reasons are pure and good. Our very own Preti has been posited on page one as our lead writer for August at my behest, and after much persuading! August sees the publication of Preti’s first full-length novel, We That Are Young (https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/paperback-shop/we-that-are-young) , a remarkable retelling of King Lear set against the rise of nationalism in contemporary India. Her publisher, Galley Beggar Press, call it “superb” while Andrew Motion has said the book is “Utterly engrossing, very smart, very moving… Subtle, ambitious and highly original”. Last month it was tipped by Justine Jordan, literary editor of the Guardian, as one of her Booker longlist predictions for 2017
(https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/jul/26/the-man-booker-prize-2017-longlist-who-should-be-on-it) . Preti has given a huge amount to Visual Verse since we launched, publishing literally thousands of submissions month-by-month, and developing a vibrant, talented community of writers. We would be nothing without her so to force her hand from editor to writer was a no-brainer. This is the only way for us, her Visual Verse family, to celebrate her debut. You can read the first chapter (https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/extract-we-that-are-young-taneja) of We That Are Young on the lovely Galley Beggar website and you can also order one of 500 limited edition copies (https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/shop-1/ehisxs910lbr9bpmdvl044yhkaofz7) , otherwise keep an eye out for it in all good bookshops from August 10.

So, here we unveil your glorious visual prompt by Dutch artist Kassiël Gerrits (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kassi%C3%ABl_Gerrits) . It has two of my favourite aesthetic characteristics: the texture of a hand-printed work and perfect symmetry. Bliss. Preti kicks us off with a beautifully formed Three Lessons and she is followed by an exciting trio of writers commissioned by George.

On page 2 we present Livia Franchini (http://www.unitedagents.co.uk/livia-franchini) , a bilingual writer and literary translator from Tuscany, Italy. Her work has been featured, or is forthcoming, in Hotel, La Errante, The Quietus, 3AM: Magazine, LESTE and The White Review, among others. Her new English translation of Natalia Ginzburg’s The Road to the City is supported by the Italian Cultural Institute and is forthcoming with Twins Editions in 2017. Her Italian translations of Eileen Gunn and James Tiptree Jr. are forthcoming with Nero Edizioni in 2017. In 2016 she co-founded CORDA, a journal about friendship in the time of new borders. She is one of the writers-in-residence for the European project CELA, which will see her work translated into six different languages. Livia lives in London, and is currently working on her first novel. She is represented by Zoe Ross at United Agents. Find Livia on Twitter @livfranchini (https://twitter.com/@livfranchini) .

Next up we have Phil Porter (https://twitter.com/philipporter) , an award-winning playwright whose works include Blink (Soho Theatre), Vice Versa (Royal Shakespeare Company), The Man With The Hammer (Plymouth Theatre Royal) and The Christmas Truce (RSC). His play The Cracks In My Skin, for Manchester Royal Exchange, won the Bruntwood Award and Stealing Sweets And Punching People was produced by Theatre 503/Off-Broadway. In addition to his own works, Porter has edited and adapted a number of plays including Molière’s The Miser, Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters (RSC, with Sean Foley), Shakespeare’s The Tempest (RSC/Little Angel) and Janos Hay’s The Stonewatcher (National Theatre). Phil Tweets at @PhilipPorter (https://twitter.com/@PhilipPorter) .

And last but by no means least, Peter Doggett (http://www.peterdoggett.org/) , a magazine journalist and editor who spent two decades interviewing hundreds of musicians, authors and other public figures before becoming a full-time author ten years ago. In 2000, Penguin Books published his pioneering history of the collision between rock and country music, Are You Ready for the Country, which was later commemorated by a double-CD set issued by Warner Music. In his 2009 book, You Never Give Me Your Money, he traced the seeds of the Beatles’ split, and then followed the desperate and ultimately vain efforts of the four ex-members to deal with the fall-out, and escape its legacy. He is also the author of You Never Give Me Your Money and F**k: An Irreverent History of the F-Word, published under his mischievous pseudonym, Rufus Lodge, for the HarperCollins imprint, The Friday Project. Peter lives in London with the artist and illustrator (and professional counsellor), Rachel
Baylis. Find him on Twitter @Peter_Doggett (https://twitter.com/@Peter_Doggett) .

So writers, where will this bold and abstract prompt take you? You know the score, the image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Enjoy,
Kristen Harrison (Curator and Overthrower)
George Spender (Guest Editor)

—

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Volume 04, Chapter 09 | July 2017

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Image by Rupert Jessop

We are excited to welcome George Spender to the helm as guest editor of the next three issues of Visual Verse. George is the senior editor of Oberon Books (https://www.oberonbooks.com/) , an independent publisher in London specialising in theatre and performance.

Dear writers, readers and friends,

It’s July, and that means it’s rehearsal time for the biggest arts festival in the world. Thousands of writers, directors and performers are preparing to swarm to Scotland for the Edinburgh festival, hoping that their show will achieve critical acclaim, transfer to a major theatre, or if they’re really lucky, just about break even. Official figures for the 2016 festival list 50,266 performances of 3,269 shows taking place in 294 venues, so we are expecting big things in 2017. To mark the release of the festival programme in July, we have created a playwright special. We start with a visual prompt from photographer Rupert Jessop (http://www.rupertjessop.com/) whose fabulously whimsical scenes are full of drama and narrative. In response to the image we have four remarkable playwrights, taking us into a new genre of writing for Visual Verse.

Our lead writer is playwright and poet Glyn Maxwell (http://glynmaxwell.com/) . Glyn has long been regarded as one of Britain’s major poets, but is also an accomplished playwright, with several of his plays having been staged in the UK and USA, including Liberty, which premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe. His adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, The Beggar’s Opera, Cyrano De Bergerac and Wind in the Willows were staged at Chester’s new theatre Storyhouse. In 2012 Glyn published the acclaimed On Poetry, which considered the art through the eyes of four imaginary students. The imaginative, ‘sequel’ Drinks With Dead Poets: The Autumn Term, was published in 2016, with a paperback edition out later this year.

Our second playwright is Rita Kalnejais (https://www.oberonbooks.com/rita-kalnejais.html) . Originally from Australia, Rita worked as an actor before turning to writing. Rita was a resident playwright at Sydney Theatre Company in 2011/12. Her play for Soho theatre in London, First Love Is The Revolution premiered in 2015, and followed the story of a teenage urban fox falling in love with a teenage urban boy. The Evening Standard described it as ‘a cult hit in the making’. Her phenomenal play This Beautiful Future (http://www.theyardtheatre.co.uk/2017/04/writer-rita-kalnejais-on-this-beautiful-future/) , which premiered at the Yard Theatre in Hackney in 2017, is a love story set in World War Two. French farm girl Elodie and German soldier Otto are experiencing love for the first time, while outside, the world around them is exploding. Rita has a truly original mind, and her poetic dialogue crackles. Critic Andrew Haydon as the ‘best thing on in London at the moment bar none.’

Our third playwright is Texan-born, Chicago-based playwright Reginald Edmund (https://pwcenter.org/profile/reginald-edmund) . Reginald was the Artistic Director for the Silver House Theatre in Houston as well as the founder and producer for the Silver House Playwrights Festival and the Houston Urban Theatre Series. He is the founder of Black Lives, Black Words (http://www.blacklivesblackwords.org/) , a theatrical phenomenon that started out in a basement in Chicago, that now takes place all over the world. Reginald curates performances of short plays responding to the Black Lives Matter movement on both sides of the Atlantic, asking ‘Do Black Lives matter today?’ A collection of the plays was published in 2017. Themes of race, gender, and empowerment, as well as a wicked sense of humour, define Reginald’s work.

Our final playwright is Caitlin McEwan (https://twitter.com/caitlinmcew) . Originally from Edinburgh but now based in London, her play Monsters was awarded a special commendation in the Soho Young Writers Award 2016. Her play, Harry (http://www.underbellyedinburgh.co.uk/whats-on/harry) , a dark comedy about friendship, fandom, and Harry Styles, was performed in April 2017 at Theatre N16 in Balham and will play at Edinburgh’s Underbelly venue through August. Her play Thick Skin was selected for the 2017 National Student Drama Festival.

So writers, bring us the drama, in poetry, prose, dialogue or whatever style takes you. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Enjoy,
George Spender

—

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Caitlin McEwan @caitlinmcew (https://twitter.com/caitlinmcew)

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Volume 04, Chapter 08 | June 2017

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Image courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries

Dear writers, readers and friends,

This month we seen US Comedian Kathy Griffin fired from jobs and berated across the news and social media for an image of her with a beheaded Donald Trump. It was meant to be funny and perhaps if it were less bloody she could have got away with it. But it was particularly gruesome. Kathy’s saga is an example of how no two people ever perceive a single image in the same way. Kathy’s frame of perception, her life experiences, mean she sees it as funny. For others it is a symbol of hate, inciting a murder. For those who dislike blood and guts it’s just a bit gross. While our life experiences inform how we see, we writers can step away from our life experience and see through the eyes of characters and narraters to bring alternate views, perhaps even broadening our own minds in the process. So, who is seeing who in this month’s image? This intriguing Mermaid from the collection of the Bodleian Libraries (http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/) , Oxford University, is something you can
inspect from behind glass or, perhaps, turn the gaze back upon yourself, or us.

Our lead writer for June is a talent whose work we so admire, not just for his writing but also his instinct to bring art into every living moment, inviting participation and observation. Nigerian-born Inua Ellams (http://www.inuaellams.com/) is a cross art form practitioner, a poet, playwright & performer, graphic artist & designer and founder of the Midnight Run (http://www.themnr.com/) — an international, arts-filled, night-time, playful, urban, walking experience. He is a Complete Works poet alumni and a designer at White Space Creative Agency. Across his work, Identity, Displacement & Destiny are reoccurring themes in which he also tries to mix the old with the new: traditional African storytelling with contemporary poetry, pencil with pixel, texture with vector images. His poetry is published by Flipped Eye, Akashic, Nine Arches and several plays by Oberon.

Kathleen Heil (http://kathleenheil.net) graces us on page 2 with a beautifully controlled and moving piece. Kathleen is a writer, dancer, and translator. Her poems, stories, essays and translations most recently appear in The New Yorker, Five Points, FENCE, The Brooklyn Rail, Beloit Poetry Journal, Two Lines, SAND, and other journals. As a dancer, Heil has worked with various artists in the U.S. and Europe and performed her own choreography in New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Madrid, and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Sturgis Foundation, among others, she lives in Berlin. For those in Berlin, Kathleen has two workshops coming up – one on Rhythm and Phrasing (https://www.facebook.com/events/166433013891430/) and one on Style and Translation (https://www.facebook.com/events/247453242401643/) .

On page 3 we feature new writing from Erin O’Loughlin, a writer, translator and accidental wanderer. Originally from Australia, she has lived all over the world including Japan, South Africa and Italy. When she’s not busy living all her reincarnations at once (at least, that’s what it feels like some days) she is the associate editor for The Wild Word (http://thewildword.com/) magazine.

We have spent many afternoons reading The (http://thewildword.com/) Wild Word (http://thewildword.com/) where we found Deirdre Mulrooney (https://deirdre-mulrooney.squarespace.com/) , an emerging Irish artist living and working in Berlin. Raised working class in a small nation dominated by Catholicism and men, she now lives as a teacher, a mother and an artist discovering the joy of playing with taboos and visions of female identity that would, until all too recently, have seen her locked away. Her current work is a fantastical and brazenly irreverent take on femininity, sexuality, religion and power. See it in all its glory in her forthcoming exhibition, Bloody Milk River at Gallerie Baeren (https://deirdre-mulrooney.squarespace.com/new-cover-page/) in Neukölln, Berlin, from June 23rd.

Well? Who’s seeing who this month? The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Enjoy,
Kristen and Preti

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Volume 04, Chapter 07 | May 2017

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Image by Alejandro Alvarez

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Behold the glorious hues of our May image. We have been craving colour: bold, bright, saturated colour. Perhaps it’s because the weather is having trouble making up its mind. Perhaps it’s a plea to the sun Gods to deliver us heat and optimism. Whatever it is, this image by Alejandro Alvarez has sated us, and has inspired three wonderful new pieces of writing.

We kick off the May issue with the award-winning poet and short story writer, Anthony Anaxagorou (https://twitter.com/anthony1983) , whose literary prowess extends to publishing and to poetry education. Anthony has published several volumes of poems and essays, a spoken word EP and a collection of short stories and we are thrilled to be among the many publications to have published his work. Anthony also founded Out-Spoken in 2012 and Out-Spoken Press in 2013 and was a judge for the BBC’s 2016 Young Writers Awards. Visit his (very stylish) website to find out more (http://anthonyanaxagorou.com/) .

Painter turned poet, Jera Sulamari, offers us this hommage to the artist Shaffic Aboud, who died in 2004. Jera is the daughter of Lebanese parents, who has recently arrived in London via Paris and is beginning to express the memories of home via spaces she visits in contemporary cities.

And finally, by some magical twist of fate, we are extremely lucky to have a brand new piece of writing by Chris Townsend (https://twitter.com/@marmeladrome) , essayist, columnist and editor who has been published in The Paris Review, LA Review of Books and Berfrois, among others. Chris completed a doctorate in English literature at Cambridge University before moving to Berlin, where he is now based. Find out more on his blog (https://christownsendwriting.wordpress.com/) .

So, dear writers, what words will you paint with this burst of blue? The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Enjoy,
Kristen and Preti

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Volume 04, Chapter 06 | April 2017

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Image by Oliver Burston (aka Spooky Pooka)
Overall winner of the 2017 Wellcome Image Awards.

Dear writers, readers and friends,

It is April, and it is around this time each year that the Visual Verse team come together to hatch new plans. We drink, we eat and we talk about how much your writing inspires us to keep going, and to do more. This year our chats are focussed on how we will create the first printed anthology of Visual Verse and what shape it will take. And, of course, how we will fund it properly to ensure it’s the best it can be. We hope to announce these plans before the summer so stay tuned.

In the meantime, we are thrilled to have our first collaboration with the Wellcome Trust, whose work we so admire. This month we present the winner of the annual Wellcome Image Awards as your writing prompt. These awards showcase science imaging in the form of photography, illustration, data visualization and any other visual media. The technologies and ideas used to visualize organisms, disease, bacteria and scientific data are becoming more sophisticated each day, and are having a huge impact on how we understand our world. And, in the case of the winning image, how we understand individual experience of illness. Illustrator Oliver Burston (aka Spooky Pooka) (http://www.spookypooka.com/) has won the award with this haunting image embodying the physical and emotional impact of Crohn’s disease, a condition he lives with. Visit the Wellcome Image website (http://www.wellcomeimageawards.org/) to find out more.

In response to this image, our first two pieces this month are rather special. They were written as a series by friends Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, who co-run the website SomethingRhymed.com, which celebrates female literary friendship. They are also the authors of A Secret Sisterhood: The Hidden Friendships of Austen, Brontё, Eliot and Woolf, which will be published, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood, in June 2017. Emma’s novel Owl Song at Dawn was recently named BookHugger Book of the Year, Emily is a winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize and they both teach at New York University, London. So much amazingness.

Our third lead is by Amanthi Harris (http://www.amanthiharris.com) , a writer and artist who studied at Central St Martins and Bristol University. She won the Gatehouse Press New Fictions Prize 2016 with her novella Lantern Evening which is published by Gatehouse Press. Her short stories have been published by Serpent’s Tail and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as Afternoon Readings. She is part of the V22 Artist Collective and works in 3D and drawing. She runs StoryHug (http://www.storyhug.com) an Arts Council England funded art and storytelling project.

And, to cast you off, we present new words by James Clammer (https://twitter.com/JamesClammer) , a writer based in Sussex, England. His novel for young adults, Why I Went Back, has been longlisted for the Branford Boase Award, and his short stories have been published by Galley Beggar Press. He writes, nightly, in a winterproofed shed at the foot of a cliff.

So there, dear writers, is your spring selection (for those in the northern hemisphere) or autumn inspiration (for those south of the equator). Before we let you go we also want to thank Lucie Stevens (http://www.luciestevens.com/) , our guest editor, who does such an immense job of helping us to bring your work to the site each month (while also writing her own novels). Thank you Lucie.

Enjoy, be inspired and don’t forget: the image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Love, Kristen and Preti

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Volume 04, Chapter 05 | March 2017

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Image by Tertia Van Rensburg

Dear Writers,

Well, it is spring in our parts of the world (Cambridge and Berlin). That means it’s March so we are bringing you the freshest shoots of the best new art, fiction and poetry to be picked from the bushes as they green. And in contrast, an image with an almost wintery aesthetic – well these are strange times of mixed seasons and feelings – and our job is only to inspire you.

Our image this month is most mysterious, even a little spooky. It is brought to you by a South African photographer, Tertia Van Rensburg, who is equally mysterious and yet has a most epic Pinterest collection here (https://de.pinterest.com/arttantaluz/) .

In response, we are very pleased to bring you a writer, and formerly guest-Editor, of our own Visual Verse, Eley Williams. As well as introducing you to her first book of short stories, Attrib. and Other Stories, which is out this month from Influx Press, she is co-editor of fiction at 3:AM magazine with prose in Ambit, Night & Day, Structo and The White Review. Her collection Attrib. (Influx 2017) was chosen by Ali Smith for the First Light ‘best of debut fiction’ slot at this year’s Cambridge Literary Festival, UK – come if you can, on Saturday 23 April at 1pm. Eley also has a small book of poetry ‘Frit’ forthcoming from Sad Press and her tweets are short works of literary loveliness all by themselves: @GiantRatSumatra (https://twitter.com/@GiantRatSumatra)

Next up is Charlie Fox, author of This Young Monster, from Fitzcarraldo Editions, which was published in February – just a week ago, in fact. It has been called, ‘A performance as original and audacious as any of the characters within – it crackles off the page, roaring and clawing its way into the world, powered by a brilliant vagabond electricity,’ by the wonderful Chloe Aridjis, author of Book of Clouds. Charlie was born in 1991, he lives in London and his work has appeared in many publications including frieze, Cabinet, Sight & Sound, ArtReview, The Wire and The White Review. Catch more from him @Ghostwoodfox (https://twitter.com/Ghostwoodfox)

And finally, we are absolutely thrilled to publish Mahtem Shiferraw on Visual Verse. She is a poet and visual artist from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Her poetry collection, Fuchsia, won the Sillerman Prize for African Poets, and her work has been published in various literary magazines. This is writing to make your skin shiver, it is so good.

Enjoy dear writers, and get ready for your own creative rush – then send us your 50-500 words, and we will get publishing soon.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen and Preti

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Volume 04, Chapter 04 | February 2017

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Image by National Museum of Denmark

Dear writers, readers and friends,

With the world in a state of protest and flux, turning upside down and inside out, endurance and tenacity are needed. This month we have unearthed a remarkable image from the National Museum of Denmark (http://en.natmus.dk/) that reminds us that we can always surprise ourselves, if we try hard enough. We might feel we are being twisted into impossible positions, we might need to escape, but we can always achieve more than we think. Whatever your response to the current climate you can rely on us to give you an image and words that will inspire and challenge you. Look at this image, look again, then write.

Our lead piece this month comes from the extraordinary writer and activist Hannah Silva (http://hannahsilva.co.uk/) , a poet, playwright and performer known for her innovative explorations of form, language and voice. Her debut poetry collection Forms of Protest (Penned in the Margins) was Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes. She won the Tinniswood Award for Best Radio Drama Script with her verse play ‘Marathon Tales’ (BBC Radio 3) and has been shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.

We always love celebrating our regular contributors’ successes and our second lead this month comes from Sohini Basak. She has poems and short stories in journals including Visual Verse, 3:AM Magazine, Out of Print, Missing Slate, Ambit, Helter Skelter, Ofi Press, Paris Lit Up, as well as in print anthologies of Emma Press and Poetrywala. The big news is that her debut poetry collection We Live in the Newness of Small Differences has won the inaugural Beverly Series manuscript prize and will be out from Eyewear Publishing in early 2018. She has also recently received a Toto Funds the Arts award for her poetry. She currently lives and works in Delhi.

And for balance we are pleased to bring you the words of Haider Shahbaz, a Pakistani writer and translator. His work has appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jadaliyya, and elsewhere. He is currently the Charles Pick Fellow in Writing at University of East Anglia.

So there you have it – a fine selection to start this short month, and now you know the drill. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Let us shout loudly with our words, and turn this world the right way around.

Preti and Kristen

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Volume 04, Chapter 03 | January 2017

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Image by Manon Bellet

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to 2017. This past year has been another wonderful one for Visual Verse. Thanks to you, our writers, we’ve grown in submissions and followers and the inbox is bursting every week. It is such a pleasure to see you continue to return each month and deliver new words. And it is such a pleasure to have a platform from which we can shine a spotlight on fantastic writers, published and unpublished. In 2016 we’ve been proud to feature a Goldsmith’s Prize winner, a Booker longlistee, debut writers and those who have collections forthcoming next year. Some of you have taken work inspired by Visual Verse to the next level – it’s found its way into poetry collections and into live performances as well as onto your own websites. We are thrilled by all of this and can’t wait to see what next year will bring.

One thing you may not realise, too, is how much your writing inspires the artists we feature here on Visual Verse. It is a unique experience for them to see how so many people, with wildly diverse perspectives and styles, respond to their work. This dialogue between artist and writer is the seed from which Visual Verse was grown and it is one of the things that makes us most proud.

So without further ado, we are delighted to bestow upon you our first visual prompt for 2017. This magnificent image comes from Manon Bellet (http://www.manonbellet.com/) , a French artist currently based in New Orleans, US. Bellet’s work looks at the intersections of nature conservation and art preservation, an unconventional pairing, and tries to challenge our perceptions of our environment. This image is from her series Sous Surface and is one of those images that presents something different each time you view it. What will you make of this one?

Our lead writers for January 2017 are a celebration of our connections beyond the geographical. We begin with the elegiac, romantic Emmanuelle Pagano translated from the French by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis. Pagano’s fragmentary musings on love and desire, Trysting (http://www.andotherstories.org/author/emmanuelle-pagano/) was published in 2016 by & Other Stories. She lives and works on the Ardèche plateau. She has written more than a dozen works of fiction, has won the EU Prize for Literature and her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She regularly collaborates with artists working in other disciplines such as dance, cinema, photography, illustration, fine art and music. A perfect start to our year. Translator Sophie Lewis (https://twitter.com/sophietimes) is a freelance editor and translator from French and Portuguese. Among the writers she has translated into English are Stendhal, Jules Verne, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano, Marcel
Aymé, Andrée Maalouf, João Gilberto Noll, Pierre Gripari and Emilie de Turckheim. Jennifer Higgins (https://twitter.com/JennyTranslates) is an editor and translator from French and Italian. She has translated several works of fiction, including Emmanuelle Pagano’s Trysting, and has written a book about English translations of French poetry.

Our second lead is poet Rachel Plummer (http://www.rachelplummer.co.uk) who lives in Edinburgh with her partner and two young children. She has had poems in magazines including Mslexia, The Stinging Fly and Agenda. She is a recipient of the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award for poetry. She has had poems placed in numerous competitions, including the Flambard Prize, Penfro, and the Troubadour Prize.

For our third lead we bring you the robust writings of Agri Ismaïl, who is based in Sweden and Iraq. His work has appeared in The White Review, Guernica, Litro and 3:AM Magazine amongst other places, traversing and transcending all kinds of borders.

And last but not least, our up and coming spot goes to Cage Williams, a poet, writer and musician based in London. He studied literature at Goldsmiths College and he writes on subjects ranging from jazz and the New York School poets to Shakespeare. Find more writing by Cage Williams here (http://literateur.com/four-poems-by-cage-williams/) .

So we go on… boats against the current… pulling into the future. Let us create another year’s worth of beautiful art and words. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Preti and Kristen

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Volume 04, Chapter 02 | December 2016

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Image by Julien Menier

Dear writers, readers and friends,

What a month it has been for this precious world. It is easy to feel helpless, but we have work to do. As writers and publishers it is our job to create the stories that will help to make sense of it all. It is our job to create the poetry that gives us meaning when meaning isn’t clear.

This month’s image came to us almost by accident and feels perfect for this confusing time. It seems to say: what is real, and what is not? Is it a fictional scene from a mystical film, or is it a very real moment between man and nature? The image is by Belgian photographer, Julien Menier (aka Lost Wanderer (http://julienmenier.photoshelter.com/index) ), who roams the world with little more than a bicycle, camera and tent, making photos that only a solitary wanderer can make. His work is full of empathy and that, dear friends, is just what we need right now.

Our headliner this month is Paris-based Adam Biles (https://twitter.com/adambiles) , author of Feeding Time (Galley Beggar Press) which was published in October this year. We’ve read this book and we can report that it’s a hilarious romp through… an old people’s home. A rare view into a space fiction doesn’t usually go. Here the inmates live in the past and the staff is trying to escape in any way they can. And with its Boys Own Adventure style, time slips and graphic (novel) insertions, there isn’t much else like this in bookshops now. Reviews have been outrageous and ecstatic, with the Guardian noting its ‘core of sadness’ and ‘glorious comic verve’, and praising Adam as a ‘megawatt talent.’ ‘Hurrah,’ as Dot, the lead character of Feeding Time might say.

We’re continuing the theme of empathy and social justice with work from Louisa Adjoa Parker (https://twitter.com/LouisaAdjoa) , a British writer of Ghanaian and English heritage who has lived in the rural West Country since she was thirteen. Louisa started writing to talk about the racism and domestic violence she experienced as a child and young woman. Her first poetry collection, Salt-sweat and Tears was published by Cinnamon Press in 2007. Cinnamon also published her poetry pamphlet Blinking in the Light in 2015. Louisa’s work has appeared in a range of publications, including The Forward Prize collection 2008, Envoi, Wasafiri and many more. She has also written articles for Gal-dem magazine. Louisa has been shortlisted by the Bridport Prize and Live Canon Competition, highly commended by the Forward Prize, and longlisted by the Mslexia Novel Competition. She is currently working on a first short story collection, novel and second full-length poetry collection, with
mentors Jan Fortune and Jacob Ross.

Our next piece comes from Khairani Barokka (http://khairanibarokka.com/) a writer, poet, artist, and PhD researcher in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University, London. Before this, she was a New York University Tisch Departmental Fellow and Indonesia’s first Writer-In-Residence at Vermont Studio Center. Okka is the writer/performer/producer of Eve and Mary Are Having Coffee, Indonesia’s only Edinburgh Fringe representative in 2014; co-editor of HEAT: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology (Buku Fixi, 2016); co-editor of Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches, 2017); writer-illustrator of Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis, 2016); and author of debut poetry collection Rope (Nine Arches, 2017). In 2014, UNFPA recognised her as an Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change for arts practice and research.

And our final gift of the season is by Amrou Al-Kadhi (http://www.amroualkadhi.com) , a writer, performer and a filmmaker. Amrou set up the musical comedy drag troupe Denim (http://www.denim-uk.com) whilst a student at Cambridge, which is now in its 6th year and touring around the country. This included a set with Florence and the Machine at Glastonbury the year that she headlined. Amrou is also a queer filmmaker, interested in using and subverting traditional film tropes to tell queer narratives in a way that is accessible. His first short Nightstand was executive produced by Stephen Fry and distributed by Peccadillo Pictures, and he currently has two features in development. Amrou is the co-writer and star of a comedy series about a second generation Egyptian drag queen in London, Nefertiti, currently in development with Big Talk Productions. Amrou is represented as a writer/performer/filmmaker by United Agents.

So dear writers, that is it for another temporal year. We wish you all seasons greetings, and looking forward to lots of early presents for you and us, an inbox full of your brilliant words. What more could we want?

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Love,
Kristen and Preti

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Volume 04, Chapter 01 | November 2016

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Image by Hernan Bas

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Happy Birthday! Visual Verse is three years old this month and we are thrilled to continue to grow this very special publication. We now have well over 1000 writers and readers getting this newsletter each month and we receive up to 150 submissions with each new issue. Over the last three years we have published writers from around the world – New Zealand to Scotland and Argentina to Japan. Some have been nominees (and even winners) of Bookers, Goldsmiths and Polari prizes. Some have gone on to publish debut novels and short story collections. We have championed big names and up-and-coming ones, from small presses and none – and every month we find our inbox stuffed full of the best, the freshest, the most exciting and radical writing from around the world. Today we celebrate Visual Verse as a platform for new writing, no matter where it comes from, and we celebrate you. Our writers who have made Visual Verse what it is.

A birthday for Visual Verse means the start of a brand new volume. Volume 04, Chapter 01 features Miami-born artist Hernan Bas (http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/artists/hernan-bas) , the candle on our cake. His work is often inspired by stories, full of literary intrigue and tinged with nihilistic romanticism and old world imagery; he says his influences include Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysman. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and at the 53rd Venice Biennale. His work is part of the permanent collections of New York’s Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art among others.

Hernan’s works are stories that unfold and Visual Verse is nothing if not an act of translation: the world and all its art transformed into words. This month we decided to go even more meta and lead with some fantastic writers who are also actual translators. For where would literature be without these multilingual multi-talents?

The icing our cake is a lead piece by Maureen Freely, the author of three works of non fiction and seven novels, including, most recently, Sailing through Byzantium, an elegy to the art of thinking in many languages. She is also the translator of five books by the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, and a number of memoirs, biographies, rising stars and 20th century classics. Her translation with Alexander Dawe of The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, was awarded the Modern Languages Association Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work in 2014. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent and the Sunday Times for three decades, writing on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing. As President of English PEN, she champions free expression worldwide. As the former chair of the Translators Association, she also works with campaigns aiming to promote world
literature in English translation. It’s wonderful to celebrate Visual Verse with her.

Our cake’s first layer comes from Cecilia Rossi, originally from Buenos Aires, who holds an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University and a PhD in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia, where she now works as a Lecturer in Literature and Translation and convenes the MA in Literary Translation. Her original poetry has appeared in several journals including Poetry Wales and New Welsh Review. In 2010, her translations of Alejandra Pizarnik’s Selected Poems were published by Waterloo Press. In 2013 she won a British Academy Small Grant to undertake research into the Pizarnik Papers at Princeton University Library. Her latest translations of Pizarnik’s prose texts and excerpts from her journals appeared in Music and Literature No. 6.

The ganache is by Saskia Vogel (http://www.saskiavogel.com) , who has written on the themes of gender, power, and sexuality for publications such as Granta, The White Review, The Offing, Sight & Sound, and The Quietus. Her translations include work by leading female authors, such as Katrine Marcal, Karolina Ramqvist and the modernist eroticist Rut Hillarp.

And the final layer is by Jeffrey M. Angles, who has spent his life traveling back and forth between Japan, where he lived for many years, and the US, where he is a professor of Japanese literature and translation at Western Michigan University. He is the award-winning translator of dozens of Japan’s most important modern Japanese authors and poets. He believes strongly in the role of translators as social activists, and much of his career has focused on the translation of socially engaged, feminist, or queer writers into English. He writes poetry in both English and Japanese, and his collection of Japanese-language poetry Watashi no hizuke henkō sen (My International Date Line) was published by Shichōsha in 2016.

As an extra slice, if you want to hear more about the art of translating fiction, tune in to BBC Radio 3 on 24th November at 10pm when Preti will be picking some of the latest brilliant new books recently translated into English, and discussing them live.

Enjoy the flavours, dear writers, then get inspired, and send us presents we can share.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen and Preti

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Volume 03, Chapter 12 | October 2016

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Image by Werner Stürenburg

Dear Writers,

Lately, we’ve been thinking a lot about personas and the power they have to liberate. Sometimes personas mask a terrifying reality (Donald Trump, Jimmy Saville etc) but sometimes they unmask amazing talent. For artists and writers an alter-ego, or a nom d’plume, can be the single most effective way to draw out new ideas, new thinking and new potential. This month’s image prompt is by the German painter, Werner Stürenburg, who signed his paintings with “Joe”, his nickname. Stürenburg trained as a mathematician and says he never intended to be an artist, but he couldn’t help it: “I didn’t like that. But I had to realize that there is no escape from myself.” We can’t help but wonder how many talented Joes are hiding away inside ordinary people. If you know someone who’s hiding a Joe, ask them to try their hand at writing for us this month – pen names welcome.

Speaking of talented Joes: we are beyond thrilled to lead with a piece from Wyl Menmuir (https://twitter.com/wylmenmuir) , whose bestselling debut novel, The Many (Salt Publishing) was long-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize. We had our money on him! Wyl has also been published in A Space to Write, a book exploring authors’ creative writing practices, in nature and academic journals, and he writes regularly for a range of national magazines and blogs. He lives in Cornwall, lectures in creative writing and is also currently writer in residence at Richard Lander School in Truro.

Phoebe Tsang (http://www.TarotbyPhoebe.com) is a British-Canadian poet, librettist, short story writer and violinist. The author of Contents of a Mermaid’s Purse (Tightrope Books), Phoebe’s poetry and fiction has been published internationally in numerous journals and anthologies such as the Literary Review of Canada, Asia Literary Review and Room Magazine, and anthologies including Desde Hong Kong (Chameleon Press, Hong Kong), I Found It At The Movies (Guernica Editions), MESS: The Hospital Anthology (Tightrope Books). Her multidisciplinary performance practice integrates composed and improvised music with original poetry. A professional Tarot Consultant, Tsang employs the ancient, divinatory system of the Marseille Tarot to structure her performances, much as John Cage employed the I Ching. The resulting work is a product of chance – each performance differs in form and content, depending on the cards drawn. A former member of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, she lives in
Toronto, Canada.

Another writer we are delighted to bring you is Cat Woodward (https://twitter.com/CatherineWoodw2) , a feminist lyric poet studying for a PhD at UEA. Her poetry has been published in Lighthouse, Brittle Star, The Interpreter’s House and Ink, Sweat & Tears, and her PhD thesis explores robot voices and the robot as lyric poetics. We think her work is out of this world.

Finally, check out this wonderful piece from R.A Villaneuva (https://twitter.com/caesura) whose debut collection, Reliquaria (U. Nebraska Press, 2014), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. New writing appears in Poetry, Guernica, Prac Crit and The Forward Book of Poetry 2017, The American Poetry Review, and widely elsewhere. A founding editor of Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art (http://tonguejournal.org) , he lives in Brooklyn and London.

So writers, it’s over to you and/or your alter-egos. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Enjoy!

Preti and Kristen

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Volume 03, Chapter 11 | September 2016

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Image by Bruce Connew

A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!

So cries Richard III in Shakespeare’s play. This month, then, we bring you a horse, and expect a kingdom of writing in return. Our image is taken from Body of Work (http://www.bruceconnew.com/projects/body-of-work) , an incredible series (and limited edition book (http://www.bruceconnew.com/books/body-of-work) ) by New Zealand photographer Bruce Connew. The series stirs many questions and anxieties about how we humans interfere with, and manipulate, nature. This particular image is both vulnerable and defiant. We are on tenterhooks as we await your own interpretations, dear writers.

Our first piece this month comes from a writer who has known battle. Harry Parker (http://twitter.com/harrybparker) grew up in Wiltshire. He was educated at Falmouth College of Art and University College London. He joined the British Army when he was 23 and served in Iraq in 2007 and Afghanistan in 2009 as a Captain. He is now a writer and artist and lives in London. His debut novel, Anatomy of a Soldier was published by Faber and Faber in 2016 and is on the shortlist of this year’s Gordon Burn Prize (http://gordonburnprize.com/shortlist/harry-parker/) .

Next we have work by the brilliant Erik Kennedy, whose poems have appeared in (or are forthcoming in) places like 3:AM Magazine, The Literateur, and Oxford Poetry in the UK, Ladowich, Prelude, and PUBLIC POOL in the US, and Landfall and Sport in New Zealand. He is the poetry editor for Queen Mob’s Teahouse. He lives in Christchurch, New Zealand, but you can find him on twitter @thetearooms (http://www.twitter.com/thetearooms) . He’s gone one further than the usual, and incorporated our rules into his own. The poem we’re publishing is now also one of a series called Factitions. Each poem must 1) involve a statistic or figure, 2) mention a proper-noun place, and 3) reflect on mortality in some way. Meta!

On page three we bring new writing by Rachel Long (http://www.writesrachell.com) who was shortlisted for Young Poet Laureate for London in 2014. Her poems have featured in Magma, The Honest Ulsterman, and The London Magazine. She is alumni of the Jerwood/Arvon Mentorship scheme 2015-16, where she was mentored for one year by Caroline Bird. She is Assistant Tutor on the Barbican Young Poets_x005F programme, and leads Octavia, poetry collective of Women of Colour at Southbank Centre._x005F _x005F Find her on Twitter at @rachelnalong (https://twitter.com/rachelnalong) .

Last, but no means least, artist and writer Fiona Mason (http://www.twitter.com/fi_mason) . Fiona writes poetry and prose and is currently working on a memoir that explores memory and grief through an account of a last day. She divides her time between the mountains of Andalusia and the wide open spaces of North Essex.

So dear writers, as summer in the Northern Hemisphere gives way to Autumn and the reverse happens the South, we ask you to look, read, enjoy, and then submit your own writing. Don’t forget, we ask for 50-500 words – anything shorter or longer will not be considered.

Charge forth: the image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen and Preti

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Volume 03, Chapter 10 | August 2016

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Image by Megan Archer

Dear writers, readers and friends,

This month we present a glorious, bright, pop-tastic collage by Berlin-based New Zealand artist Megan Archer (http://www.meganjarcher.com/) . This is a very special image because we have no idea how you will all respond. With most Visual Verse images we can roughly predict the kinds of themes that might emerge, and the mood the issue may take, but in this case we just don’t know where your writing will lead us. For that reason we are particularly excited to see the August issue take shape as you submit your writing.

We are thrilled to kick off with a lead piece by Sampurna Chattarji (http://sampurnachattarji.wordpress.com/) a poet, novelist, translator and children’s author. Her fourteen books include the novels Rupture and Land of the Well (both from HarperCollins); the poetry collection Absent Muses (Poetrywala, 2010); and a book of short stories about Bombay/Mumbai, Dirty Love (Penguin 2013). Sampurna also edited Sweeping the Front Yard, an anthology of poetry and prose by women writing in English, Malayalam, Telugu and Urdu and she has read at festivals all over India and the UK, including Hay-on-Wye and Ledbury Poetry Festival.

Next up, new writing from Laila Sumpton, a London-based poet who regularly performs her work at arts venues across the country and facilitates poetry workshops at museums, galleries, hospitals, schools and charities. She is a member of the Keats House Poets and co-directs refugee and migrant poetry collective Bards Without Borders. Laila is working on her first collection and her poetry often explores human rights issues and family memories.

And our third lead piece is from Colin Herd (http://www.colinherd.com) , a poet and Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. Books include too ok (BlazeVOX, 2011), Glovebox (Knives, Forks and Spoons, 2013) and Oberwilding with SJ Fowler (Austrian Cultural Forum, 2015). He is part of the team that runs Outside-in / Inside-out (http://outsidepoetryfestival.wordpress.com) , a new poetry festival launching in Glasgow in October 2016.

So writers, what will you make of Megan’s brilliant image? What will you find ebbing above and below that bluest ocean?

Away you go…

Preti and Kristen

PS. For those in Berlin, you can see more of Megan’s work at Fellini Gallery (Mittenwalder Str. 6
10961 Berlin, Germany) until 28th September, 2016.

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Volume 03, Chapter 09 | July 2016

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Image by Oscar Keys

Hello dear Readers,

What a month. A real-life House of Cards is playing out in British politics while that wild Trump-a-thon rages on across the seas. Our hearts are heavy for the lives lost in the Orlando bombings and now, in Turkey, we mourn the 42 people who lost their lives in the Ataturk airport bombing. It is hard not to feel helpless but, as Michele Hanson, writing in the Guardian, reminds us: In a world of fear and loathing, we need art more than ever (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jun/27/art-education-creativity-transforming-lives) . We have our words, dear writers, and now is the time to use them.

For the July issue we give you a beautiful image by photographer Oscar Keys. We came across this image some months ago (thank you to the Twitter friend who recommended this one, we can’t find the Tweet but you know who you are) and it has stuck with us ever since. Now seems like the right time to deliver an image that is both soft and ambient, and ominous and threatening. We expect some dark responses, but we also hope some of you will find a playfulness in this image too.

Each month we strive to bring you a wide range of lead writers who represent the freshest voices out there, and this month is no exception. First up is Irenosen Okojie, writer and Arts Project Manager. Her debut novel Butterfly Fish has just won a Betty Trask Award, given to young writers of “outstanding literary merit”, according to the prize, and she is now hard at work on a new collection of short stories called Speak Gigantular, which will be published later this year. Her piece will hopefully tide us over until then! You can also read more from her on the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/profile/irenosen-okojie ) website.

Shaista Tayabali, who we publish on page 2, is one of our Twitter finds who we came across while scouring the internet for interesting takes on life and living. Coincidentally, she lives in Cambridge, is a poet and writer and since graduating with an MA in Creative Writing from Anglia Ruskin University, she has been working to complete her first book, a memoir. Shaista has been blogging for several years (http://www.lupusinflight.com) and contributes frequently to the world of ethics and humanities in medicine; her work has appeared in Hektoen International, IJUDH, a journal of global healthcare, and various poetry magazines online. She brings us a deeply moving poem for Jo Cox, the amazing British MP who was tragically murdered in London last month.

Our Page 3 we are excited to publish a wonderful piece by Theodoros Chiotis, who writes poetry and code poetry in Greek and English. Theo is the editor and translator of the anthology Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis (Penned in the Margins, 2015). His work has appeared in print and online magazines and anthologies in Greece, UK, Australia, Germany, Croatia amongst others. He lives and works in Athens.

As Visual Verse makes its way through the chaos via Cambridge (UK) and Berlin (Germany) we are proud to publish your submissions from all over the world. If nothing else, we can stand together and celebrate our collective achievement in creating an anthology that is a beacon of hope for international collaboration, diversity, inclusion, humanity, art and so much more.

Write on, dear friends, write on.

Preti and Kristen

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Volume 03, Chapter 08 | June 2016

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Image by Jean Cooke

Dear Writers,

As you know we love a collaboration at Visual Verse and this month, via our brilliant designer Mr Pete Lewis (http://www.mrpetelewis.com/) and Back to Front studio (http://backtofront.london/) , we are connecting with Camden Art Collection in London to bring you your new writing prompt. In June, Camden Council will launch a new portal bringing their phenomenal collection to a public audience. We are thrilled to be able to share an image from this collection exclusively with you.

This painting is by Jean Cooke, an artist we love, who once said: “Everything that happens when I open my eyes [each morning] is a surprise. It’s like dying and coming alive again every day.” You’ll be able to view this image, along with other works from Camden’s extensive collection, at Swiss Cottage Library over the coming month. Keep an eye on our Twitter feed for info about the exhibition.

Giving voice to this beautiful piece is Mike McCormack (http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/solar-bones-by-mike-mccormack-review-portrait-of-a-universe-in-dereliction-1.2637871) , an award-winning novelist and short story writer from Mayo. His new novel, Solar Bones (his first for a decade) was published last month by Tramp Press (http://www.tramppress.com/) and has already garnered exceptional reviews. The Literary Review called it “hauntingly sad, but also frequently very funny – Proust reconfigured by Flann O’Brien”. His previous work includes Notes from a Coma (2005), which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award, and Forensic Songs (2012). In 1996, he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and in 2007 he was awarded a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. He’s been called “the Iain Banks of Ireland” but we think he’s unique in himself!

Our page 2 spot is for Caleb Parkin (https://couldbethemoon.co.uk/where/) , a poet, performer, facilitator and educator, based in Bristol and working with organisations across broad sectors. Having worked for some time in media production, science publishing and education, he now holds a Post-Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes and is Membership Secretary of Lapidus: The Writing for Wellbeing Organisation. He often writes about animals, machines and technology (among many other things) – and has been published online and in print.

And on page 3, we are absolutely thrilled to publish M. NourbeSe Philip (http://www.nourbese.com/) , an unembedded poet, essayist, novelist, playwright and former lawyer who lives in the space-time of the City of Toronto. Her lyrical, politically charged writing (and tweets!) are a revelation in what language can do. Philip is a Guggenheim Fellow (USA) and the recipient of many awards including the Casa de las Americas prize (Cuba). Among her best known published works are: She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks, Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence, and Harriet’s Daughter, a young adult novel. Philip’s most recent work is Zong!, a genre-breaking poem, which engages with ideas of the law, history and memory as they relate to the transatlantic slave trade.

So dear writers, what will you make of the June image and the intensity of this particular female gaze? The image is the starting point, the rest is up to you.

Enjoy!

Preti and Kristen

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Volume 03, Chapter 07 | May 2016

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Image by Alain Manesson Malett

This month we present an image will surely prompt some challenging responses. Taken from a 17th Century text, it is an illustration by French artist Alain Manesson Malett of two women in Syria. The image invites questions about identity, perception and the assumptions we make about those who are different from ourselves. And being over 400 years old, this image also reminds us that our quest to understand eachother, to accept and to be accepted is nothing new.

For our lead writers we have a truly itinerant and international line up for you this month, celebrating the fluidity of borders and the dissolving of identity. We begin with a virtuoso piece by Commonwealth Short Story Prize nominated author, Mahesh Rao (http://www.maheshrao.info/) . Mahesh will be in London for the Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival, talking about lost lives in short fiction with Preti on May 17th, and closing the festival on May 18th with a discussion of his two recent, critically-acclaimed books in conversation with Sameer Rahim, Literary Editor of Prospect magazine. As if that weren’t enough, his debut novel, ‘The Smoke Is Rising’, won the Tata First Book Award for fiction and was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and the Crossword Prize – and you read him here first.

Then, heading to the north of England, Jag brings us a debut piece about forbidden love. Jag is self-described as queer, genderqueer, northern, disabled and neurodiverse. Despite very little formal education, Jag is emerging as a promising young British writer. Now with an agent and with the editing of a first novel underway, we look forward to reading more.

Finally, from the UK to Australia via India and back – our third offering this month is by Ryn Cowcroft. Ryn won the John Kinsella Poetry Prize and her poems have appeared in The Best Australian Poems anthology, The Australian Review, and other publications. She is currently working on a collection and we are delighted to publish her before she gets even busier.

We invite you to look carefully at this image, inside and outside the frame, and study the detail. This is a complex visual that we hope inspires a kind of writing that you may not have thought was in you.

Over to you, dear writers – enjoy.

Kristen and Preti

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Volume 03, Chapter 06 | April 2016

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Image by Michael Salu

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Two Sunday’s ago we ventured to Galander bar in Berlin’s Kreuzberg to join The Reader Berlin (https://www.facebook.com/The-Reader-Berlin-206584212747648/) for their monthly Sunday Salon. Hosted by our favourite Berlin literary goddess, Victoria Gosling, this salon featured a very special guest – particularly for those of us who indulge in the aesthetic of books. Former Creative Director at Granta, and now multi-disciplinary artist, Michael Salu (http://www.michaelsalu.com/) presented two original readings and this beautiful image that we feature for the April issue. Lost in the layers and torn from the inside, what will you make of it, dear writers?

In response to this image, we feature three winners of The Reader’s writing competition that took place that night. We lead with The Talk by Anna Geary-Meyer. Originally from Boston, Anna is an emerging writer of poetry and creative non-fiction who now lives in Berlin. She is interested in psychology, creativity, spirituality, and philosophy. Her impressive winning piece morphs the characteristics of poetry and prose so beautifully that we hardly notice we’re eavesdropping.

First runner-up Lucy Locket delivers a perfectly formed, rhythmic poem that, for us, feels like both an unveiling and a re-veiling. Lucy is a chef at Martha’s restaurant in Berlin and curates conceptual food events under the name MASTICATE, together with her partner, interior architect Jacinta Lawani.

And finally, it’s a numbers game for the mysterious Francesco Fano, who took us to 39 and then slipped back into the Berlin night.

These three pieces truly reflect the Visual Verse agenda: to encourage and celebrate writing from instinct. These were written in just 25 minutes, at 10pm at night, in a low-lit bar, probably under the influence of delicious cocktails and in response to a single, provocative image. Perhaps we should all put down our morning pages and go noctural. It’s getting late, what better time to start?

Awaiting your words: www.visualverse.org/submit

Preti and Kristen

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Volume 03, Chapter 05 | March 2016

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Image by Zata Banks
Guest Editor: Eley Williams

Dear writers, readers and friends,_x005F
After an exceptional month in February, with over 160 submissions published, we have pushed the Visual Verse format to new limits and present to you our first piece of concrete poetry (https://visualverse.org/submissions/anosmia/) , by Zata Banks. What a thing of beauty it is, sitting alongside this strange, furry image by Alejandro Carol.

Banks’ piece seems to mirror the contradiction within this image – that it is both starkly obvious and full of mystery all at once. What exactly is this creature? Why are we so close to it? Is it real or fake? Is it wild or tame? Help us to understand what we are seeing, dear writers. _x005F
And, as we have pushed our own limits, we challenge you to push yours too. We challenge you to write something outside of your comfort zone or choose a style you haven’t tried before. Our lead writers this month have set the bar high with innovative writing and we are thrilled to feature them.

Zata Banks (https://twitter.com/zoltarmaga) ‘ writing has been published in numerous anthologies, magazines and featured on BBC Radio 4, while her creative work has been used for courses at institutions including The Royal College of Art, the Poetry School, and the National Film and Television School. In addition, she is the founder of PoetryFilm (http://poetryfilm.org/) , a practice-based project that aims to celebrate experimental text/image/sound-screening, and explores semiotics and meaning-making within the art form.

Kate Potts (http://www.katepotts.net/) ‘ debut pamphlet Whichever Music (tall-lighthouse, 2008) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for a Michael Marks Award. She received an Arts Council award towards her first collection Pure Hustle (Bloodaxe, 2011). Kate currently teaches for Oxford University and Royal Holloway, and is completing a PhD on the poetic radio play.

Annabel Banks (http://www.annabelbanks.com/) ’ work is published in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies including The Manchester Review, Litro, 3:AM and International Times, is forthcoming in Under the Radar, and is included in Eyewear’s Best New British and Irish Poets 2016. Recently she received three nominations for the 2016 Pushcart Prize (two for fiction and one for poetry), plus nominations for the Queen’s Ferry Press Best Short Fictions 2016, Blazvox’s 2016 Bettering American Poetry and the 2016 Derringer Awards. She is also on Twitter, @annabelwrites.

Nick Murray is a live literature producer, writer, musician and founder of Annexe Press, based in London. As a writer, Nick’s work has appeared in publications such as Lives Beyond Us (Sidekick Books), The Bohemyth and Belleville Park Pages. He is on Twitter, @terratrouve.

This is perhaps the most challenging image to date, in our opinion, so let’s see what you make of it.

Awaiting your words at www.visualverse.org/submit.

Preti, Kristen and Eley

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Volume 03, Chapter 04 | February 2016

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Image by Grant Wood
Guest Editor: Eley Williams

Dear writers, readers and friends,

This month we are preoccupied with the Trump-a-thon. Donald’s quest continues and we find ourselves wondering: how is it that one man’s strange ideas are able to form a whole belief system? How is it that such a strange system can intoxicate so many believers? And who, exactly, are these believers?

With this weighing on our minds, there was only one possible image for the February issue: Grant Wood’s ‘American Gothic’ (part of the Chicago Institute of Art (http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565) collection). This 1930s work of eerie wonder has become an icon of American art, not least because it is beautifully painted and fabulously creepy all at once. We bestow this image upon you, our writers, to bring forth your words.

This month we are thrilled to welcome a new guest editor, British writer Eley Williams (http://www.giantratofsumatra.com/) . Twice shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize, Eley also edits Jungftak, a journal for contemporary prose-poetry, works for independent publishers Copy Press, and was recently appointed co-editor for fiction at 3:AM magazine. She has sustained three dictionary-based injuries so far this year, but regrets nothing.

Eley will edit Visual Verse for the next few months and kicks off her commissions with a group of the UK’s most exciting poets, writers and artists:

John McCullough (http://twitter.com/JohnMcCullough_) , whose first collection of poems, The Frost Fairs, won the Polari First Book Prize in 2012. It was a Book of the Year for The Independent and The Poetry School, and a summer read for The Observer. His second collection, Spacecraft (http://www.johnmccullough.co.uk/index.php/Spacecraft) , will be published by Penned in the Margins in April 2016.

Scottish writer Helen McClory (http://twitter.com/HelenMcClory) had her first flash fiction collection, On the Edges of Vision, published by Queen’s Ferry Press in August 2015 and won the Saltire First Book of the Year (http://www.saltiresociety.org.uk/awards/literature/literary-awards/scottish-first-book-of-the-year/) . There is a moor and a cold sea in her heart.

Helen Ivory (http://twitter.com/nellivory) is a poet and visual artist. Her fourth Bloodaxe Books collection is the semi-autobiographical Waiting for Bluebeard (May 2013). She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears and is tutor and Course Director for the new UEA/Writers Centre Norwich creative writing programme. Fool’s World (http://www.gatehousepress.com/2015/12/fools-world-a-tarot-helen-ivory-tom-de-freston/) , a collaborative Tarot with the artist Tom de Freston, is out now from Gatehouse Press and she is working on a book of collage poems for Knives Forks and Spoons Press.

Prudence Chamberlain (https://twitter.com/PrueChamberlain) is Poet in Residence at Surrey University. Her work has been published in 3:AM, Poems in Which, HYSTERIA, By&By Magazine and Jungftak, while her collection I sit on your face in parliament square is forthcoming with Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. She is currently working on a Disney collaboration, House of Mouse, with poet SJ Fowler, and writing a book on empathy for Copy Press (http://www.copypress.co.uk/index/) .

Wendy Choi was born and educated in Korea, currently reading English at University of Cambridge. She likes to pickpocket words and thoughts from texts around her and exploits the difficulty of writing in a second language.

So there it is. Read, look, ponder, write. Not necessarily in that order.
The image is the starting point, the rest is up to you.
Kristen Harrison and Preti Taneja
with Eley Williams

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Volume 03, Chapter 03 | January 2016

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Image by Ville Miettinen

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to 2016 and to a fresh new edition of Visual Verse to kick off your writing. As you all know, we are a truly global journal with contributors from many countries; nevertheless all of us dream of some kind of escape. Maybe that’s what has inspired our new image from Finnish entrepreneur and photographer Ville Miettinen (https://www.flickr.com/photos/wili/373624474/in/photolist-z1Vxh-xStbd-cQyKH-qCeGpJ-98THYY-8PPonW-7xQJ78-5Ty6yf-5PDhAg-4pzojK-4mYNSS-4jVftj-z6rF1-7AfMeH-yrbAC-xvKf6-54vHaN-qUQdwL-kG2A7h-jMgRZF-e3jN2n-e2zuWE-dWcJzU-dQEGDE-bQZXgz-biHjhK-bgt2rt-bePKQp-babBbr-aLEEMn-9d4xA3-7smgQo-7rTMEX-6WrTrV-qtuh6M-qxSGhL-brb22f-bhzxC6-anh3kj-7vMzpm-5TRBSR-5S57XJ-5S2V8C-5REaP9-5QHQzX-5QfGpm-5Qb2e9-4Hc5Yr-4CYmRb-4ozC7J) , with its evocations of strange guardians, golden sunsets and the ebullience of youth. This image is all about witnessing a moment of change.

Our lead writer Alex Pheby captures this perfectly. Alex’s most recent novel, Playthings, is available now from the legendary independent publisher Galley Beggar Press (http://galleybeggar.co.uk/store/books/playthings) . We’ve read it, we love it, and we are thrilled to have him on the site. He lives with his family in London, where he lectures (http://www2.gre.ac.uk/study/courses/ug/eng/w801) and runs the wonderful annual Greenwich Book Festival (http://greenwichbookfest.com/) .

We are also excited to bring you the work of British-American poet Robert Peake, who lives near London. He created the Transatlantic Poetry (http://www.transatlanticpoetry.com/) reading series, bringing poets together from around the world for live online readings and conversations. He also collaborates with other artists on film-poems, and his work has been widely screened in the US, UK, and Europe. His latest collection The Knowledge is now available from Nine Arches Press.

Last but not least, is Patience Kyenge, a young spoken word poet from Democratic Republic of Congo. Now living in Belgium, Patience performs at club nights and writes and sings Congolese blues with her troupe of musicians – she’s electric to watch and we are proud to say this is her first published piece.

New year’s resolutions? Who needs them. Let this one be an evolution, not a revolution. The image is the starting point: the rest is up to you.

Happy New Year!
Kristen and Preti

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Volume 03, Chapter 02 | December 2015

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Published in collaboration with Limehouse Books
Image by Philipp Keller

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Prepare for lift-off as we launch into December – a month when the days are darker but the lights are brighter. We have gone a little space-crazy this month as British Astronaut Tim Peake (http://principia.org.uk/) prepares to embark on a historic mission to the International Space Station. What better way to celebrate than with this incredible image of a Medaka fish on the ISS by Philipp Keller, featured by NASA in their Flickr Gallery (https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasamarshall/) . What will you make of this luminous creature, dear writers?

Our lead pieces this month are in collaboration with London publisher, Limehouse Books (http://limehousebooks.co.uk/) , bringing you a selection of work from some radical voices. First up is Sophia Blackwell (https://twitter.com/@SophiaBlackwell) , performance poet and novelist. After My Own Heart is her first novel with Limehouse and her new collection The Fire Eater’s Lover will be published by Burning Eye Books next year. ‘Sophistication Incarnate’ as her website (http://www.sophiablackwell.com/) describes her – we couldn’t agree more.

On page 2 we have Sophie McCook (http://twitter.com/scriptreader) , a reformed TV and film scriptwriter, now author of Thinkless, a novel equivalent to Peep Show for women. Just what we need to brighten up the month!

Next is North Morgan (https://twitter.com/northmorgan) , who has been described by the Independent as ‘a bitterly funny satirist’ and is author of Exit Through The Wound and Highlights of My Last Regret. If you haven’t come across this writer yet start with his Tweets (https://twitter.com/northmorgan) .

Finally, huge thanks to Bobby Nayyar, writer and publisher at Limehouse Books itself. Bobby will be launching his debut poetry collection Glass Scissors in January, he says, (probably). Follow Bobby (http://www.twitter.com/bobbynayyar) on Twitter too, and enjoy the excellent Limehouse (http://limehousebooks.co.uk/) list.

So, we are feeling the love for all of you this month having just celebrated our second birthday. Thank you to those of you who could make it to Waterstone’s Piccadilly on Saturday. We celebrated with our dear friends at WordFactory (http://www.thewordfactory.tv/) , enjoying readings from John Boyne, Cathy Galvin, SJ Naudé and Kirsty Logan. For those who missed it, Preti read poems by David Rain and Andrew Motion from chapters of Visual Verse, and we toasted all of you writers, readers and followers who have made the last two years such a wild ride. One of our best birthday presents? Coralie Bickford-Smith, whose image from her new book The Fox and the Star featured in our November edition (https://visualverse.org/images/coralie-bickford-smith/) , has just been announced winner of the Waterstone’s Books of The Year 2015 (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/01/waterstones-book-of-year-coralie-bickford-smith-the-fox-and-the-star) . Impeccable taste, Waterstones, and so
well-deserved.

Wishing you a happy December, dear writers, with all that it might bring. For us, we simply wish for more great writing, more submissions and a very creative countdown to 2016.

The picture is the starting point, the text is up to you (https://visualverse.org/submit/) .

Kristen and Preti

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Volume 03, Chapter 01 | November 2015

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Celebrating our 2nd birthday.
Image by Coralie Bickford-Smith

Dear Writers,

Welcome to our 2nd birthday edition, and the beginning of our third volume. How far we have come! In April 2013 we came up with a mad plan to celebrate the inter-collaborative process of writing and art. We wanted to create a contemporary digital platform for cross-pollinating visual arts and literature and we had two rules: 1) there would be set generative constraints, and 2) the site had to be elegant, reflecting traditional book design. Kristen is a publisher of beautiful books (http://www.thecurvedhouse.com/) , Preti is a writer (http://www.preti-taneja.co.uk) , Pete Lewis is a designer (http://www.mrpetelewis.com/) of the highest order… and so in November 2013, Visual Verse was born.

When we first launched we were publishing about 30 submissions a month. A watershed moment came in March 2014, when Denise Nestor (http://www.denisenestorillustration.com/) ’s pencil drawing of birds alongside Adam Marek’s The Factory Explosion (https://visualverse.org/submissions/factory-explosion/) in the lead caught your imaginations. Overnight submissions exploded and we had 80 wonderful pieces on the site. In October this year, for the first time, we published over 100 amazing pieces.

Every day that we publish you, we feel delighted and honoured. As the site grows we are refreshed by your commitment, your imagination and your energy. A look at our writers reveals familiar names such as Stella Duffy, Adam Foulds and Nikesh Shukla; and names who we published as they were becoming ‘names’: Eley Williams, Nisha Ramayya, Sandeep Parmar, Sophie Mayer, Declan Ryan, Hedley Twiddle – the list goes on. We have contributors from across Africa, the USA, UK, Indonesia and more… Visual Verse is now a chorus of global voices.

We couldn’t have got this far without our patrons: writers Andrew Motion, Ali Smith, Cathy Galvin and Bernardine Evaristo, and photographers Mark Garry and Marc Schlossman. Thanks go to them.

Now, to meet the party and begin our third year. As a nod to our love of, and respect for, beautiful book design we feature an image by one of the UK’s leading designers, Coralie-Bickford Smith (http://cb-smith.com/) . Coralie is responsible for many of the stunning Penguin series that grace our shelves including the Great Foods series, the clothbound classics and the exquisite F. Scott Fitzgerald series. This month, Penguin imprint Particular Books have published The Fox and the Star – written, illustrated and designed by Coralie herself. This magical book embodies all that Visual Verse stands for – that moment went words and images wrap themselves around eachother so perfectly that you could never imagine them being apart.

We are absolutely thrilled to be celebrating and leading this month with a piece by Ivan Vladislavić. Born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1957, he now lives in Johannesburg. His acclaimed fiction includes Double Negative, The Restless Supermarket and 101 Detectives. His work has won many awards, including Yale University’s prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize in 2015, for which writers receive an unrestricted grant of $150,000 to support their writing. His classic novel The Folly (http://www.andotherstories.org/book/the-folly/) , a sophisticated yet funny book about the power of suggestion and castles in the sky, is published by And Other Stories on 11 sNovember 2015. You read it here first!

Our second lead is the poet Helen Mort, whose first collection ‘Division Street’ was published in 2013 and won the Fenton Aldeburgh prize. She is a Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow at The University of Leeds.
And to celebrate properly, we have commissioned three pieces from longstanding contributors to the site, whose work we admire every month. Rishi Dastidar is a member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. A runner-up in the 2011 Cardiff International Poetry Competition and the 2014 Troubadour International Poetry Competition, his work has featured in the 2012 anthologies Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins) and Lung Jazz (Cinnamon Press / Eyewear Publishing), and most recently in 2014’s Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe). He tweets @BetaRish.

Myrto Petsota was born in Athens, Europe. Places of residence during her formative years include countries that no longer exist, countries that are about to disappear and others that are yet to be, namely Czechoslovakia, Italy, Greece and Scotland. She now writes from Paris, where she also teaches, practices literary criticism and exile. She is immensely fond of the quarterly French literary review L’Atelier du Roman, where she publishes some of her critical pieces of writing.

And last but not least, Hazel Mason, who describes herself thus: ‘Proud to have been a sister in the NHS, now a happy opsimath in Norwich who has stumbled on the panacea of poetry, postal critiquing and vibrant literary group discussion, wallowing in words.’ She tweets @hazelmason10.

So dear writers, we hope you’ll be inspired to keep submitting, keep tweeting us, keep reading each other and talking about what you like about each others’ work. And we hope to see you all at our second birthday party, in conjunction with The Word Factory and the VS Pritchett short story prize, at Waterstone’s Picadilly on Saturday 28^th November, 6-8pm. Book here: http://www.thewordfactory.tv/site/events/ – we hope to see you there!

In the meantime, amidst all the celebrations, don’t forget what it’s really all about… the image is the starting point: the text is up to you.

Happy 2^nd Birthday Visual Verse!

Preti and Kristen

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Volume 02, Chapter 12 | October 2015

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molly baber

Image: Molly Baber

Dear writers, readers and friends,

As summer yields to autumn, our thoughts turn quiet and we invite you to ‘travel to the land of malady, and back again,’ (a line from our October lead, Susana Moreira Marques). This month we’re all about memory, weight, the things we leave behind. Of course this leads to discovery – coming across treasures in the attic, faded but potent – what stories will they tell? What secret histories are woven into old blankets, and whispered into the wood of abandoned chairs?

Susana Moreira Marques’ extraordinary first book Now and at the Hour of Our Death (http://www.andotherstories.org/book/now-and-at-the-hour-of-our-death/) , translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sanches, was published by & Other Stories (http://www.andotherstories.org/) in September. It won an English PEN award for its beautiful musing on turbulent lives coming to an end in Planalto Mirandês, Trás-os-Montes – a remote region in the northeast of Portugal. Reminiscent of Anne Michaels’ disturbing and moving Fugitive Pieces, we can’t recommend Susana’s raw, poetic work enough.

We are also delighted to publish one of our Visual Verse patrons, the journalist and poet Cathy Galvin. Cathy founded the Sunday Times EFG short story award and Word Factory (http://www.thewordfactory.tv/site/) , our favourite UK literary salon and promoter of short fiction. Her beautiful sequence of sonnets, Black and Blue (http://melospress.blogspot.co.uk/) , is published by the Melos Press – be prepared to call your mothers after reading… and if you can’t – well, this ‘crown’ of works will remind you that you aren’t alone.

Our third spot this month is filled by Dimitra Xidous (http://www.dimitraxidous.com/) , whose poems have appeared in Room, The Stinging Fly, and The Penny Dreadful. She was a finalist in the 2014 Malahat Review Open Season awards, and her poetry was shortlisted for The Bridport Prize (2013). Her musical, immersive collection Keeping Bees is published by Doire Press (2014). Originally from Ottawa, she currently resides in Dublin.

All our writers come together to respond to a dramatic and dishevelled image by British artist Molly Baber (http://mollybaberphotography.weebly.com/) . Molly lives and works in a small town in Brandenburg, just outside of Berlin, so it is no surprise that her recent ‘Abandoned’ series (from which this image comes) feels like some kind of post-modern archaeological dig. It uncovers a history that is rugged, fraught and beautiful all at once and we are so excited to see what you will make of it.

So dear writers, if you live in a part of the world where the leaves are going red, or if you live in place where summer is on its way – now is the month to pause and reflect on the past, take stock of the present, and try to imagine whatever is coming next.

Awaiting your words at www.visualverse.org/submit.

Happy writing.

Preti and Kristen
https://www.visualverse.org

Volume 02, Chapter 11 | September 2015

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Published in association with the London Borough of Waltham Forest (https://www.walthamforest.gov.uk/Pages/index.aspx)

Dear writers, readers and friends,

We are thrilled to launch the September issue of Visual Verse in partnership with the London Borough of Waltham Forest, drawing on their rich archives to present an image of London’s past.

This unique borough is in the grip of swift gentrification – from Hackney and Leytonstone to Walthamstow and beyond. Change at this pace can sometimes be unsteadying, but this is where we see initiatives emerge that are especially designed to keep communities bound tightly. One such initiative is the Poetry Room in Leyton Library, launched this year to offer a place for local writers to meet each other, share their writing and work in a supportive environment.

To celebrate this, and the borough’s present and past commitment to arts and culture, we invited four writers with local ties to lead this month’s issue. Our visual prompt comes from Vestry House Museum and depicts a holiday scene from years gone by – when the world was still big and mysterious. We are thrilled with the diversity of responses this beautiful image evoked in the writers.

We kick off with Linda Mannheim (http://www.lindamannheim.com/) whose most recent book, Above Sugar Hill (Influx Press), was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and was a #readwomen2014 pick of the year. Linda’s stories are widely published, and she is also the author of the novel Risk (Penguin).

Bren Gosling (http://www.brengosling.com/) recently completed his first novel, The Street Sweeper. Represented by MBA Literary Agents, Bren’s work has been published in many anthologies and magazines, including Decongested Tales and Words and 4’33” Magazine, and has been performed by Liar’s League Hong Kong.

Ruth Goldsmith (https://ruthgoldsmith.wordpress.com/) is working on her first novel. Her short stories and their characters often take her by surprise.

Runner-up in the Hysteria Writing Competition, Clare Archibald (https://twitter.com/archieislander) was chosen to read at Edinburgh International Book Festival’s Storyshop for emerging writers in 2014. Clare is currently working on a novel, as well as a number of cross-arts collaborations. Her audio/text installation in the Project Afterbirth art exhibition, which opens in October 2015, will tour internationally for three years.

Throughout the month we will feature more Waltham Forest locals including Ana Brothers, Graham Clifford and Bill Foster. In the meantime, dear writers, what will you make of our image this month? Will it ignite a memory in you, or draw out your sepia tones?

Awaiting your words at www.visualverse.org/submit.

Preti and Kristen
with Josephine Regis, Cultural Programme Officer for Waltham Forest
https://www.visualverse.org

Volume 02, Chapter 10 | August 2015

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kimberley richardson writers visual prompt visual verse

Image: Kimberley Richardson

Dear writers,

This August we have come over all hobo-ish, captivated by an image of a wandering traveller and his guitar, taken by the talented young visual storyteller Kimberley Richardson (http://kimyrichardsm.tumblr.com/) . He looks alone but of course there is someone else there – the photographer. And you: observing both. Displayed on the Visual Verse website the image almost sinks into the background, emerging like a wave.

As for our lead writers, this month we are delighted to have a bona-fide ‘Not the Booker’ nominee in our lead spot – Paul McVeigh (http://paulmcveigh.blogspot.de/) , whose debut novel The Good Son has made the Guardian’s longlist (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/27/the-magnificent-70-guardian-not-the-booker-prize-longlist-announced) . You can vote for it till Sunday night, and clearly we think you should. Not only that, Paul is Director of London Short Story Festival and Associate Director at Word Factory, the UK’s leading short story salon. He was born in Belfast where he began his writing career in theatre. He moved to London where he wrote comedy shows, some of which appeared in London’s West End. Since turning to prose, his short fiction has been published in journals and anthologies, been commissioned by BBC Radio 4 and read on BBC Radio 5.

On Page 2, we present poet, writer and editor Helen Tookey (https://helentookey.wordpress.com/) . Her work has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Best British Poetry 2013 and 2014. Her first full-length collection Missel-Child was published by Carcanet in 2014 and shortlisted for the 2015 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry prize for first collections. She teaches creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University; we suspect her wonderful piece might inspire many of you this month.

If you’re on twitter you might have seen the #readwomen hashtag – this was started by writer Joanna Walsh (http://badaude.typepad.com/about.html) whose books include Fractals (Blue Pavilion Press), Hotel (Bloomsbury) and Vertigo (Dorothy, A Publishing Project). Her writing has also been published by The Dalkey Archive (Best European Fiction 2015), Granta, Salt (Best British Short Stories, 2014 and 2015), The Stinging Fly, Gorse, and others. She reviews for The Guardian, The New Statesman, and The National. She is fiction editor at 3:AM Magazine, and runs @read_women (https://twitter.com/read_women) , described by the New York Times as “a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers”. This is a sneaky preview of her writing – her new book ‘Vertigo’ will be out later this year and is gaining some brilliant and heavyweight buzz: Kirkus starred review for Vertigo.

Check out these three wonderful writers and be inspired by the vagabond spirit of Kimberley Richardson’s image – time to get to it: the image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Happy summer,
Kristen and Preti

Visit www.visualverse.org (https://www.visualverse.org/) to see, read and submit your writing to this month’s Visual Verse: Anthology of Art and Words.

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Volume 02, Chapter 09 | July 2015

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Jordan McQueen Unsplash Visual Verse writing prompt

Image: Jordan McQueen

Dear writers, readers and friends,

July’s Visual Verse (https://www.visualverse.org) is a tribute to summer, to the heat of imagining, to the land. Our image is by photographer Jordan McQueen (https://unsplash.com/jordanfmcqueen) and as we bask in its midsummer glory, we also question what land means to us and how we think about it – politically and poetically. This question is becoming more and more important as new states come into being, climates change, and borders, cultural and political, are being redrawn. For some, our July image might represent a future utopia or the escape of holidays, for others, nostalgia – the land is part of all of us, inextricably linked to our sense of who we are.

We are thrilled to lead this month with work by Nikesh Shukla (http://www.nikesh-shukla.com) , whose new novel Meatspace, has been lauded by the Guardian, the New Statesman, BBC Radio 4, The Independent on Sunday, and the Daily Mail. Which, as he says, is funny, because they usually hate immigrants. Nikesh’s debut novel, Coconut Unlimited was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2010 and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2011. His writing is moving and provocative, just what we need to keep us from a summer stupor; this piece attests to his skill in making art out of politics in a postcolonial age. His short stories feature in Best British Short Stories 2013, Five Dials, The Moth Magazine, Pen Pusher, The Sunday Times, Book Slam, BBC Radio 4, First City Magazine and Teller Magazine. He has written for the Guardian, Esquire and BBC 2. He has, in the past, been writer in residence for BBC Asian Network and Royal Festival Hall.

Our other lead writers are short story writer Janet H Swinney (http://www.janethswinney.com) and poet Seán Hewitt (http://www.seanehewitt.com/) . Janet was born and brought up in the North East of England, and in a previous incarnation, she worked as an education inspector. Her story, The Work of Lesser-Known Artists, was one of two runners-up in the London Short Story Competition 2014; The Map of Bihar was editor’s choice in the Eric Hoffer Award for Prose 2012, and appeared in Best New Writing 2013 (Hopewell). She has also had work short-listed in the Fish International short story competition. The Queen of Campbeltown, about a little lad’s struggle to be re-united with his mother, was a finalist in the Earlyworks Press competition 2014 and will appear shortly in the EWP anthology. Her stories often play out in a landscape that features poverty, thwarted aspiration, personal resilience and black comedy. She is currently awaiting the publication of her first collection of
short stories by Circaidy Gregory Press.

Seán Hewitt (http://www.seanehewitt.com/) has been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review and PN Review, amongst many other magazines. He was awarded Arts Council England funding in 2014 to work towards a pamphlet collection. He is one of the Aldeburgh Eight, 2015 and you can hear him read at the Aldeburgh Festival in November.

In literary news this month, Kumkum Malhotra (http://www.gatehousepress.com/2015/06/gatehouse-new-fictions-1-kumkum-malhotra-by-preti-taneja/) , the debut novella by our editor, Preti Taneja, is published by Gatehouse Press and has already received much deserved praise for “its beautifully sculpted surfaces” (Maureen Feely) and for being “Inclusive and deeply engaging” (Stella Duffy). Please diarise 13th October at Heffers Bookshop in Cambridge and joins us for the launch. In the meantime, the Resurgence Eco Poetry Prize (http://www.resurgenceprize.org/) launches this month at the Curious Arts Festival in the UK on July 17th. Perhaps the inspiration for your entry will start with our July image?

What will you make of our image this month? What will it inspire in you and in your writing? We can’t wait to see.
Visit www.visualverse.org (https://www.visualverse.org/) to see, read and submit your writing to this month’s Visual Verse: Anthology of Art and Words.
https://www.visualverse.org
Preti and Kristen

Volume 02, Chapter 08 | June 2015

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Sigrid Calon for Visual Verse

Image: Sigrid Calon
Guest Editor: Kate Nic Dhomhnaill

Dear writers, readers and friends,

June’s Visual Verse celebrates digital storytelling. How does living in our oh so digital world affect or influence the ancient ritual of telling stories? Our image this month is a departure and will certainly challenge writers to test their visual literacy skills in interpreting this image. After reading our fantastically imaginative responses from our lead writers, we are so excited to see what you all come up with.

Our image this month comes from Dutch artist Sigrid Calon (http://www.sigridcalon.nl) , who builds her artistic language out of pure and geometric pattern. She is motivated by the desire to make new connections and to look differently at what we take for granted. Endlessly curious, her work reveals a wide-ranging curiosity and continuing research into questions of identity. Currently, Calon has turned to publishing, with To The Extend Of / | & -, which has brought her to Art Book fairs in London, Basel, Milan and Berlin to institutions such as MoMA and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Our lead writer this month is Kit Lovelace (http://www.romanticmisadventure.com/) , a writer and journalist from London. He is the author of Romantic Misadventure – an interactive Choose Your Own Adventure story about what a terrible hash he consistently makes of his actual, real-life love life. He also runs a live storytelling night, the similarly titled Romantic Misadventures, where people are invited and encouraged to discuss their love lives.

Our next writer this month is Alan Trotter. Alan comes from Aberdeen and is the winner of the Sceptre Prize for emerging writers. He has been published by McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and New Writing Scotland, and recently completed the first draft of Muscle, a novel. Hiswebsite (http://greaterthanorequalto.net) is far more interesting than you might expect.

Next up is Mary O’Donoghue. Mary’s short stories have been widely published in the USA and Ireland: Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Irish Times, Stinging Fly, Dublin Review, and elsewhere. She recently completed her first short story collection. One of its stories was long-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. She is currently writing her second novel. Her first novel, Before the House Burns, appeared from Lilliput Press in 2010. She serves as Fiction Editor at the journal AGNI.

Our fourth writer is Angela Readman. Angela’s stories have won The National Flash Fiction Competition, and The Costa Short Story Award. Her story collection Don’t Try This at Home was recently published by And other Stories and was long listed in the Frank O’ Connor Award, and short listed in The Saboteur Awards.

So, dear writers, whatever will you make of our image this month? What will it inspire in you and in your writing?

Kate Nic Dhomhnaill (Guest Editor)
with Preti Taneja and Kristen Harrison
https://www.visualverse.org

Volume 02, Chapter 07 | May 2015

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Megan Archer for Visual Verse
Megan Archer

Image: Megan Archer
Guest Editor: Kate Nic Dhomhnaill

Dear writers, readers and friends,

May’s Visual Verse (https://visualverse.org/) is a special edition dedicated to the human condition: our nature, behaviour and minds. We have invited three contemporary thinkers to respond to our image, using their analytical, critical and philosophical backgrounds. In their respective professions, this month’s lead writers interpret the big questions and ideas that men and women have been asking for centuries, and now they bring this thinking to Visual Verse.

British academic philosopher, Simon Blackburn (http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/people/teaching-research-pages/blackburn) , who is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, half-time Research Professor at UNC Chapel Hill, and Professor at the New College of the Humanities, has written our lead piece this month. Simon is known for popularising philosophical theories and making them accessible and engaging to a wider audience. Having published a long and varied list of works, including Think, Truth: A Guide, The Big Questions: Philosophy, and most recently Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self Love, Simon is one of the most exciting philosophers of our time. His website (http://www2.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/) is also very entertaining.

Our second lead writer, Richard Kearney (http://richardmkearney.com/) , is an Irish academic philosopher and public figure, who holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College. He also currently holds the Chair of the Institute for Critical Philosophy at The Global Center for Advanced Studies. Kearney’s work looks at the philosophy of the narrative imagination, hermeneutics and phenomenology. He is the author of over 20 books on European philosophy and literature, including two novels and a volume of poetry. Among his best known works are The Wake of the Imagination, On Stories, Poetics of Imagining, and Debates in Continental Philosophy.

Next on our list is Fariyal Wallez (http://www.letyourbodytalk.uk.com/blog.htm) , writer and creativity coach. Fariyal publishes a monthly blog on her personal website, where she writes on creativity and the psycho-somatic relationship within the context of familial, societal and cultural narratives. She lives in Lyon, France and is currently writing her first novel.

Our wonderful image for May comes from Berlin-based painter and illustrator, Megan Archer (http://cargocollective.com/meganarcher) , whose personal works aim to be visually seductive but oddly disconcerting, vacuous or even repulsive in terms of subject matter. Her interest in the human form, animals and colour has informed much of her work and provided her with a starting point for most of her paintings and drawings. Her fascination with 1970s and 80s fashion and lifestyle photography has been a continual influence on her aesthetic, beginning in art school. She also has a long-held interest in portraiture.

So, dear writers, whatever will you make of our image this month? What will it inspire in you, and in your writing?

Visit www.visualverse.org to see, read and submit your writing to Visual Verse: Anthology of Art and Words.

Kate Nic Dhomhnaill (Guest Editor)
with Preti Taneja and Kristen Harrison
https://www.visualverse.org

Volume 02, Chapter 06 | April 2015

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Image: Georgina Cope
Guest Editor: Kate Nic Dhomhnaill

Easter falls early this year, just in time for the launch of April’s Visual Verse. Whether you go all out for the traditional post-lent roast lamb or keep it low key with take-away, Easter is a time to gather, relax and feast with family and friends. In keeping with this, our April edition of Visual Verse is an homage to the art of eating and the rituals that come with it. With family in mind, we want to share and celebrate our April editions with our Visual Verse kin. Without the inspired, instinctive words of all our writers, we would have nothing to publish. So, dear writers, this very special edition of Visual Verse is dedicated to you.

This month’s lead pieces come from four of our most dedicated writers. First up is Avalina Kreska, a flash fiction writer, comic maker and poet living on a remote island in the North Sea. Her ongoing novel The Adderstane fits “somewhere in the middle of everything.” Next we have Amsterdam-based Scottish writer, Flash Fiction Editor for Litro Magazine and a Senior Judge and Contributing Editor for Mash Stories, Jennifer Harvey. Joining them is Susan Gray, a Science Fiction playwright and poet, who is in her third year of a Creative Writing PhD at Royal Holloway. Her play SUM and monologue collection Notes from Other Worlds were published by Playdead Press in 2014. Last but in no way least we have new writing from Luciana Francis. Born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Luciana graduated Goldsmiths University, specialising in Anthropology & Media and now lives in East London with her two muses, her artist husband Anthony and their five month old son Tiago.

Our image this month comes from foodie photographer Georgina Cope (http://www.georginacope.co.uk/) . Georgina’s simple approach to photography is to communicate well, be creative, be constructive and of course, have fun with the project; principles we think align perfectly with ours at Visual Verse. Georgina has worked on projects with Jamie Oliver, University of Hertfordshire and Lorica Independent Insurance Brokers to name a few. Outside photography, Georgina is interested in food, cooking, design and printing processes.

So, what will you make of our image this month? A hearty meal, a dysfunctional family, an awkward silence?

Preti and Kristen
https://www.visualverse.org

Volume 02, Chapter 05 | March 2015

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Dominic Goodman Photography Visual Verse

Image: Dominic Goodman
Guest Editor: Kate Nic Dhomhnaill

In honour of the infamous St Patrick, celebrated on March 17th, we dedicate this issue to Ireland and its enticing list of extraordinary emerging writers. Our lead author, Sara Baume (https://sarabaume.wordpress.com/) , is arguably one of Ireland’s brightest literary stars, having won the Davy Byrnes Short Story Award in 2014 and named Hennessy New Irish Writer of 2015. She has recently released her debut novel spill simmer falter wither with Tramp Press. Joining Sara are fellow Ireland-based writers Róisín Agnew, Claire-Louise Bennett and Daniel Gray. Irish Times journalist, Róisín Agnew, is editor of Guts Magazine, a new and brilliantly designed litmag out of Dublin; Claire-Louise Bennett’s collection of flash fiction, Pond, will be published by The Stinging Fly in April 2015; and Daniel Gray is a journalist and editor at large for Totally Dublin.

This month’s visual prompt is a wonderful, irreverent image from artist Dominic Goodman (http://dominicgoodman.com/photo/) . Goodman is a Fine Art graduate from Central Saint Martins and works in a variety of media covering photography, film, music and art while also co-running music labels YYAA Recordings and Hallso. His photography often focuses on unoccupied spaces, raising questions over events that may have occurred, or perhaps will occur, outside of the confines of the image. Perfect for you, dear writers.

So, what will you make of our image this month? A lonely ass and an empty pool – can you see beyond the confines of this image, just as our artist intends?
Visit www.visualverse.org (https://www.visualverse.org/) to see, read and submit your writing to this month’s Visual Verse: Anthology of Art and Words.

Preti and Kristen
https://www.visualverse.org