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 06, Chapter 01 | Writing Competition Results

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Image by Hannah Coulson

Dear writers, readers and friends,

This month, we switched things up and asked you to submit a piece of writing in just 24 hours for a chance to be selected as one of our lead writers. We received over 100 submissions and from these we could pick just three. It was intense, to say the least! With the help of our stellar judges – Bernardine Evaristo, Sam Jordison, Andrew Motion, Eloise Millar and Philippa Sitters – we managed to get 100 down to a longlist of eight, then pick the final three. We would like to thank all of those who submitted such a spectacular array of work and congratulate both the winners and the long- and shortlisted writers:

Winners
Christopher John Eggett – It was decided to fold up my town
Renee Fisher – Twisted Bridges
Suzanne Ushie – Envy

Shortlist
Rishi Dastidar – Spectacle
Emmanuella Dekonor – In the Pink Wash of British Accra
Sharon Jones – Rememberings
Frank McHugh – Elculo
Andrew Strickland – F-Words

Longlist
Valerie Bence – Shades of Pink and a Lighthouse
Alexandra Davis – Is This a Diaorama?
Pat Edwards – Cut Out
Elizabeth Gibson – Leaving Manchester
Motl Lazarus – Misdirections
Hiromi Suzuki – The Quintet of the Holiday Inn Cafe
Jordan Trethewey – Collage Town
Carole Webster – I Opened You Gently Like Paper and Your Skin Made Sense to Me

About the Winners
Our headliner, Renee Fisher, grew up in New Zealand and the UK, studied English Literature and Visual Arts (ideal combo for Visual Verse) and has spent the last few years living in Moscow and Riga, teaching English to children and adults. She now lives in Prague with her partner and baby daughter. Of her writing, Renee said, ‘It has mostly been confined to diaries – a furtive and relentlessly private pursuit – and it’s only recently that I’ve begun to shape it into stories and poems, though they still borrow heavily from my diary habit. I’ll forever be in thrall to first person narratives; journals, travelogues, letters, notes scribbled on scraps of paper, confessions and dreams.’ We are thrilled that the judges have chosen writing from someone who is only just starting to put her work into the world.

Our page two lead is Christopher John Eggett, a writer and poet from Cambridgeshire. He will send you poetry every Friday in his literary newsletter Etch To Their Own (https://medium.com/etch-to-their-own) , where he scratches away at literature’s subtext. Chris is working on a full length collection of poetic essays including Essay on Falling {insert poem here} (https://softcartel.com/2018/08/06/essay-on-falling-insert-poem-here-what-we-can-see-from-here-by-christopher-john-eggett/) , and occasionally writes short stories about accidentally having a lobster for a boyfriend (https://burninghousepress.com/2018/03/30/the-boyfriend-pinch-by-christopher-john-eggett/) . His work has appeared in Euonia Review (https://eunoiareview.wordpress.com/2018/07/07/you-are-good-for-poetry/) , The City Quill (https://medium.com/cjeggett/poetry-featured-in-the-city-quill-455ab0a7c688) and Furtive Dalliance and can be found upcoming in Bone & Ink and Human Repair Kit. He tweets as @CJEggett
(https://twitter.com/CjEggett) and you can read more about him on his website https://cjeggett.co.uk/

And on page three we are delighted to publish Suzanne Ushie, who was born and raised in Calabar, Nigeria. In 2012, she was awarded an international scholarship to undertake the MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, where she made Distinction. Her work has appeared in OZY, Saraba, Fiction Fix, Conte Online, Lunch Ticket, Brittle Paper, Gambit: Newer African Writing and elsewhere. She has received support from Hedgebrook, Writers Omi at Ledig House, Ox-Bow School of Arts and The Whiting Foundation. She lives in Lagos, Nigeria.

About the Judging
The long-longlist was made from a day of reading through over 100 submissions, getting that down to a longlist, and then a shortlist of eight. The shortlist went to our judges over the weekend, and we made sure they were judged blind, without bylines. When we got the results in, most of the judges had overlaps in what they chose, with slight variation. With a very scientific points system, we tallied up the winners. And if we had published four pieces, or five, our two very close runners up would have been in there – In the Pink Wash of British Accra by Emmanuella Dekonor and F-Words by Andrew Strickland – you can read them on the site now.

Our judges were extremely impressed by the quality of the writing. Philippa Sitters from DGA literary agency said:

“These submissions were so accomplished, I find it hard to believe they were turned around within an hour. They’re a display of genuine talent and it was incredibly fun to read such an array of pieces inspired by the single visual. Congratulations to all those who entered.”

Sam Jordison from Galley Beggar Press said:

“I was impressed by these submissions. More than that, I enjoyed them. There are serious ideas and intentions behind them all, but the thing that most struck me was how good it is to see writers having fun with the language and ideas. There are creative sparks flying around their words… The three Galley Beggar choices exemplified that spirit of adventure. They felt fresh and exploratory. They were also written with wit and humour and grace – and because of that the emotional punches they packed were all the stronger.”

All of your writing this month is in response to a wonderful, quirky collage by London-based Scottish artist Hannah Coulson (https://www.hannahcoulson.co.uk/) , an illustrator who loves experimenting with shapes and colours. When she’s not busily illustrating, Hannah teaches at the Royal College of Art in London. She made this work without any intention and we love that it has come full circle on Visual Verse, where we ask you to respond without any intention.

So, dear writers, with so much excellence still to publish, we’re so glad to be five and thank you very much for being part of the amazing community that is Visual Verse.

Happy Birthday! The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen, Preti, Lucie
(And welcome to our newest team member, volunteer Editorial Assistant, Luke!)

Volume 06, Chapter 01 | November 2018

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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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