Volume 05, Chapter 09 | July 2018

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Image by Namroud Gorguis
Guest Editor: Richard Georges

Dear writers, readers and friends,

We do get around. Words circle and come back. Lives and geographies and time fold and touch. We talk and we talk and we talk. Back in May, our editor was delighted to take part in a panel for Bare Lit (http://barelitfestival.com/) , the UK’s literary festival featuring writers of colour working in every genre you can think of. Over chats about mythology and monsters, Preti met poet Richard Georges, who is from the British Virgin Islands. They got talking about colonial territories, and Preti invited him to curate Visual Verse for July. Richard is the author of the poetry collections Make Us All Islands (Shearsman Books) and Giant (Platypus Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prelude, Smartish Pace, The Poetry Review, wildness, Wasafiri, decomP, The Rusty Toque, Reservoir, L’Ephemere, The White Review and elsewhere.

About his Visual Verse selection, Richard says, ‘I am delighted to compile work for Visual Verse solicited exclusively from some of the most spellbinding poets I know who also happen to be citizens of colonial spaces. Ana Portnoy Brimmer from Puerto Rico (an unincorporated territory of the United States), Arturo Desimone from Aruba (a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands), and Chris Astwood from Bermuda, Erika Jeffers from Montserrat, and myself from the British Virgin Islands (all British Overseas Territories).’ We are delighted to have Richard’s own work in our lead spot, followed by this brilliant selection.

Ana Portnoy Brimmer is a Puerto Rican poet whose work has been published or is forthcoming in Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, Puerto Rico en mi Corazón, Kweli Journal, Poets Reading The News, Project Censored, Centro Journal, Moko, and elsewhere. For more on her work, visit her website (http://anaportnoybrimmer.com/ ) .

Arturo Desimone (http://arturoblogito.wordpress.com) is an Arubian-Argentinian writer and visual artist. His articles, poetry, and short fiction have previously appeared in CounterPunch, Círculo de Poesía, Moko, Drunken Boat, Acentos Review, and New Orleans Review. His translations have appeared in Blue Lyra Review and Adirondack Review.

Chris Astwood (http://www.chrisastwood.com/) is a Bermudian poet currently residing in the UK and completing a PhD in creative and critical writing at the University of East Anglia. His writing has recently appeared in sx Salon and Caribbean Quarterly. A pamphlet of linked poems entitled JANE DOE is forthcoming from Gatehouse Press.

And finally, Erika Jeffers (https://www.erikajeffers.com/) – a poet and book reviewer whose writing has appeared in Kweli, Callaloo, sx salon, Wasafiri, Adrienne, and Moko; she’s also a reader for Frontier Poetry. Currently based in Brooklyn, she’s at work on her first full-length poetry collection.

All of them have responded to an image so full of stories, potential, surveillance, entropy and nostalgia – captured by Namroud Gorguis via Unsplash. And so to the long month of July, with all of its potential. Let’s make these worlds of words speak to each other. Looking forward to your submissions dear writers – the image is the starting point, the text is up to you. _x005F _x005F

Richard Georges (Guest Editor)
with Preti, Lucie and Kristen

Volume 04, Chapter 06 | April 2017

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Image by Oliver Burston (aka Spooky Pooka)
Overall winner of the 2017 Wellcome Image Awards.

Dear writers, readers and friends,

It is April, and it is around this time each year that the Visual Verse team come together to hatch new plans. We drink, we eat and we talk about how much your writing inspires us to keep going, and to do more. This year our chats are focussed on how we will create the first printed anthology of Visual Verse and what shape it will take. And, of course, how we will fund it properly to ensure it’s the best it can be. We hope to announce these plans before the summer so stay tuned.

In the meantime, we are thrilled to have our first collaboration with the Wellcome Trust, whose work we so admire. This month we present the winner of the annual Wellcome Image Awards as your writing prompt. These awards showcase science imaging in the form of photography, illustration, data visualization and any other visual media. The technologies and ideas used to visualize organisms, disease, bacteria and scientific data are becoming more sophisticated each day, and are having a huge impact on how we understand our world. And, in the case of the winning image, how we understand individual experience of illness. Illustrator Oliver Burston (aka Spooky Pooka) (http://www.spookypooka.com/) has won the award with this haunting image embodying the physical and emotional impact of Crohn’s disease, a condition he lives with. Visit the Wellcome Image website (http://www.wellcomeimageawards.org/) to find out more.

In response to this image, our first two pieces this month are rather special. They were written as a series by friends Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, who co-run the website SomethingRhymed.com, which celebrates female literary friendship. They are also the authors of A Secret Sisterhood: The Hidden Friendships of Austen, Brontё, Eliot and Woolf, which will be published, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood, in June 2017. Emma’s novel Owl Song at Dawn was recently named BookHugger Book of the Year, Emily is a winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize and they both teach at New York University, London. So much amazingness.

Our third lead is by Amanthi Harris (http://www.amanthiharris.com) , a writer and artist who studied at Central St Martins and Bristol University. She won the Gatehouse Press New Fictions Prize 2016 with her novella Lantern Evening which is published by Gatehouse Press. Her short stories have been published by Serpent’s Tail and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as Afternoon Readings. She is part of the V22 Artist Collective and works in 3D and drawing. She runs StoryHug (http://www.storyhug.com) an Arts Council England funded art and storytelling project.

And, to cast you off, we present new words by James Clammer (https://twitter.com/JamesClammer) , a writer based in Sussex, England. His novel for young adults, Why I Went Back, has been longlisted for the Branford Boase Award, and his short stories have been published by Galley Beggar Press. He writes, nightly, in a winterproofed shed at the foot of a cliff.

So there, dear writers, is your spring selection (for those in the northern hemisphere) or autumn inspiration (for those south of the equator). Before we let you go we also want to thank Lucie Stevens (http://www.luciestevens.com/) , our guest editor, who does such an immense job of helping us to bring your work to the site each month (while also writing her own novels). Thank you Lucie.

Enjoy, be inspired and don’t forget: the image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Love, Kristen and Preti

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Volume 03, Chapter 04 | February 2016

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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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