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

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