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 06, Chapter 01 | November 2018

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 02 | December 2017

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 04, Chapter 05 | March 2017

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 03, Chapter 05 | March 2016

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

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 01 | November 2015

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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