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

Connect with us
@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse?lang=en)
@maryjean_chan (https://twitter.com/maryjean_chan)
@noosarowiwa (https://twitter.com/noosarowiwa)
@crossmansusanna (https://twitter.com/crossmansusanna)

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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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