Volume 07, Chapter 03 | January 2020

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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Volume 04, Chapter 02 | December 2016

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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