Volume 07, Chapter 02 | December 2019

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Image by Mae Mu

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to the last issue of 2019 – a year in which so much has happened upon our planet. Never far from our minds is the reality of our changing climate and the questions around it, and our future. It has been an inspiration to watch, over the course of this year, as young people rise up and confront an issue that has long been denied, silenced and ignored. As a small homage to this mighty movement, we are proud to provide a platform from which you – our amazing, global writing community – can use your art to have your say.

This month’s image is an antidote to the winter setting in for us Northern hemisphere folk. It comes to us via Mae Mu who specialises in food photography and still life.

On page 1, we have New Zealand writer Paul Ewen (https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/paul-ewen) whose books include London Pub Reviews (Shoes With Rockets) and Francis Plug: How To Be A Public Author (Galley Beggar Press) which was listed for awards including the UK Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize. His second novel Francis Plug: Writer in Residence (Galley Beggar Press) was shortlisted for the 2019 Bollinger Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Paul’s writing has featured in the NZ Listener, Dazed & Confused, Five Dials, and until recently, he was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Greenwich, London.

Next is Shobha Rao (https://twitter.com/@ShobhaRaoWrites) , author of the short story collection An Unrestored Woman and the novel, Girls Burn Brighter. She is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, and her story “Kavitha and Mustafa” was chosen by T.C. Boyle for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2015. Girls Burn Brighter has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a finalist for the California Book Award. She lives in San Francisco.

On page 3, we present Rosamund Taylor (http://www.rosamundtaylor.com/) , who won the Mairtín Crawford Award for poetry at the Belfast Book Festival in 2017. In 2019, she was a recipient of a Words Ireland mentorship and placed third for the Ginkgo Prize for Eco Poetry. Her work has recently appeared in Agenda, Banshee, Channel, Magma, Poetry Ireland Review, and on LambdaLiterary.Org.

And finally, Tom Denbigh (https://twitter.com/@tom_denbigh) , resident of Bristol and owner of “an obscene number of books”. Tom is the first Bristol Pride Poet Laureate and a BBC 1 Extra Emerging Artist winner. He has a PhD on plant roots and crumbling soil and works on climate change policy. In his debut collection “…and then she ate him” Denbigh holds up a distorted mirror to the world to portray the bizarre and brilliant in the everyday. The book is out now with Burning Eye Books (https://burningeye.bigcartel.com/product/and-then-she-ate-him-by-tom-denbigh) and in all good bookshops.

So, dear writers, here is your last chance for the year – get your writing boots on and wade through the fake snow in your mind. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…

Happy December, wherever in this crazy world you are.

Preti, Kristen, Lucie and Luke

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Volume 04, Chapter 11 | September 2017

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Image by Alberto Garduño

George Spender is currently guest editor for Visual Verse. George is the senior editor of Oberon Books (https://www.oberonbooks.com/) , an independent publisher in London specialising in theatre and performance.

Dear writers, readers and friends,

It’s been three months since I began my guest spot with Visual Verse, and I’m keen to end on a high. I’ve had enormous fun in commissioning some of my favourite writers, and want to thank everyone who’s taken part for going outside their comfort zones and scaring their brains into writing something.

This month’s image, El sarape rojo, is by Mexican artist Alberto Garduño, probably painted around 1918. There’s a cinematic quality and a dry, piercing mischief to this image that should inspire some great responses.

Leading the September issue, we have the inimitable David Quantick. David is an Emmy-winning television writer, author, radiobroadcaster and journalist who’s written for over fifty different publications, from the Daily Telegraph to The Dandy. He and I met at the launch of a collection of absurdist writing by the gone-but-not-forgotten-and-more-people-should-know-about-him playwright N.F. Simpson, and published the marvellous writing manual How To Write Everything. He should be supreme inspiration to writers everywhere that there’s no such thing as writer’s block. As well as his off the wall contributions to Smash Hits, he’s written some of the best television of the past few decades, including Veep, The Thick Of It, Brass Eye and Harry Hill’s TV Burp.

That same night I met David, I also met Martha Sprackland (http://marthasprackland.co.uk/) , then assistant poetry editor for Faber & Faber. Twice a winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, she was also the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and was longlisted for the inaugural Jerwood–Compton Poetry Fellowships in 2017. Her work has appeared in Poetry Review, LRB, Five Dials, New Humanist, Magma, Poetry London and many other places, and has been anthologised in the Salt Book of Younger Poets, Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam, Best Friends Forever, Vanguard, Birdbook, and the Best British Poetry series. Her debut pamphlet, Glass As Broken Glass, was published by Rack Press in January 2017, and she is currently working on a full-length collection. A non-fiction book on sharks is forthcoming with Little Toller Books in 2018.

Finally, we have Dan O’Brien (http://danobrien.org/) , an internationally produced and published playwright and poet. He and I met after his extraordinary play ‘The Body of an American’ played at the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill. His many awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama and Performance Art, the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, the Horton Foote Prize for Best New American Play, the PEN Center USA Award for Drama, and, for poetry, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Originally from Scarsdale, New York, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

All that’s left to say is thank you, farewell, and remember – the image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

George
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