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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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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