Volume 10, Chapter 08 | June 2023

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A cat poses in the sunlight against two regal looking portraits of other cats

Image by Erica Marsland Huynh
Dear writers, readers and friends,

This month’s issue is dedicated to community. Community and connection have many benefits for us humans and this is particularly true for artists and writers. Somehow, amid the noise, we find ways to build communities that enable us to share our work safely and grow with our fellow artists. Whether it be a writing group with friends, a Friday night book launch or a summer retreat in a remote castle, artist-led events build vital networks and help us all to keep momentum.

When Preti, Pete and I started Visual Verse almost ten years ago, we could not have imagined the community we have today. It is diverse in every way, it is global and it is boundlessly generous. This is how I came to choose our three leads for June. All three writers are involved in running and/or attending writing groups, facilitating poetry workshops and giving their time to other community-based activities. I have seen them support each other with shout-outs on Twitter, encouraging both exploration and celebration of each other’s work. It is heartwarming and it reflects the essence of Visual Verse.

Being the month of the Gemini, we must also acknowledge the other side of the artist’s community-building efforts. Artists also seek solitude. Sometimes it’s physical solitude (a writing retreat, for example) and sometimes mental solitude (wearing headphones in a cafe). However we find it, we manage to be in the world and with ourselves at the same time. Your prompt this month, a portrait of a rather sanguine feline captured by photographer Erica Marsland Huynh, seems the perfect visual for this artistic dichotomy. Cats have a way of needing company and needing only themselves simultaneously. Somehow it works.

Kicking off our written responses is the fabulous Cáit O’Neill McCullagh (https://twitter.com/kittyjmac) , an archaeologist, ethnologist, and educator in higher education and community settings. Cáit started writing poems at home in the Highlands just a few years ago and over fifty of these are published in print and online, including in Northwords Now, Poetry Scotland, The Storms, Howl: New Irish Writing, Ink Sweat & Tears and here at Visual Verse. In 2022, she was a co-winner of Dreich’s Classic Chapbook Competition for ‘The songs I sing are sisters’ co-authored with Sinead McClure. Her first full collection will be published by Drunk Muse Press in early 2024. She continues to outrun her diagnosis of cancer identified in February 2022. You can find out more about her via her Linktree (https://linktr.ee/caitjomac) .

Andrew Stickland (https://twitter.com/AndrewStickland) lives in Cambridge, UK, where he writes poetry and fiction and also helps to run the Angles Writing Group (https://twitter.com/AnglesWriters) (more on that below). His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, and he has three previously published poetry collections. His first novel, The Arcadian Incident, was published earlier this year and two follow-ups, Escape to Midas and War Between Worlds, are due out in September, and then early next year, all from Lightning Books.

And on page 3 we present Kate Coghlan (https://twitter.com/Kate_Cogs) , a freelance writer/editor with an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths. Her work has been published by Mslexia, Loft Books, the Dulwich Festival, Spillwords and the Personal Bests Journal. This is her third appearance in Visual Verse and she is also a member of the Angles Writing Group with Andrew Stickland.

The Angles Writing Group (https://twitter.com/AnglesWriters) , based in Cambridge, has a mission to get as many of their members as possible into print, as often as possible, and we are very grateful that they regularly encourage members to try our challenge. At last count we had a dozen or so Angles members published with us. A lovely example of the tentacles of writing communities reaching far and wide.

There you have it, dear writers. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen
with Preti, Isabel, Lucie, Ashish, Zaynab and Wes

Find the VV crew on socials:
Visual Verse (https://twitter.com/pretitaneja/)
Kristen Harrison (https://www.instagram.com/kittyharrison/)
Preti Taneja (https://twitter.com/PretiTaneja)
Lucie Stevens (https://twitter.com/LucieStevens_)
Ashish Kumar (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude) Singh (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude)
Zaynab Bobi (https://twitter.com/ZainabBobi)
Wes White (https://twitter.com/archaeologyBoy)

Volume 10, Chapter 01 | November 2022

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Image by Kitty Harrison
Today we celebrate nine years of innovative, diverse, brave and wonderful writing.
Happy birthday to all writers, readers and friends of Visual Verse.
Visual Verse is nine years old today! Kristen and I, with designer Pete Lewis, launched the site on 1st November 2013 and since then (through country moves, career changes, successes, knock-backs, crises, euphoria, births, deaths, and trips to London, Newcastle, and Berlin) we have rolled with a team of guest editors and star volunteers to bring you our monthly anthology of art and words. We have not missed a single issue in nine years and have published over 10,000 pieces – an incredible achievement. Visual Verse is not for profit, run by volunteers and our contributors do it for love of the process; to inspire you, delight you and to keep the love going of wild adventures in writing. Over nine years, the worldwide Visual Verse community has grown from around 50 submissions a month to 200, with a newsletter subscription list that runs into thousands from every continent in the world.

Thank you, readers, writers, volunteers and all our supporters: HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Not many of you might know this, but co-founder Kristen “Kitty” Harrison (https://twitter.com/CurvedHouse/) is herself an artist, as well as being a writer, publisher and producer at The Curved House (https://thecurvedhouse.com) , an independent publisher working at the intersection of books, art and education. I am thrilled to debut her work on Visual Verse this month, with a piece called ‘Letter Home’. Kristen recently relocated back from Berlin to be nearer to her family in Australia and that’s what has inspired this month’s birthday image. It’s the first time she’s sharing her art with us, and we love to see it.

I stepped back from regularly curating the site about a year ago, as it’s been a big year for me. Over the last two years I’ve been busy writing my second book, Aftermath and it was published in early 2022; just last month I was astonished to find it had won the UK’s Gordon Burn Prize (https://newwritingnorth.com/gordon-burn-prize/ ) . I am thrilled to return to curate our birthday issue and very proud to welcome back the profoundly important words of Sandeep Parmar (https://twitter.com/SandeepKParmar/) to lead. Sandeep first wrote for Visual Verse as lead in Vol.1 Issue 2 (December 2013): that early poem now appears in her latest collection F (https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sandeep-Parmar-Faust-p470007726) aust (https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sandeep-Parmar-Faust-p470007726) , published by Shearsman this month.

Sandeep is Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University. Her research is primarily in modernist women’s writing and contemporary poetry and race. Her groundbreaking article ‘Still Not a British Subject: Race and UK Poetry (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/not-a-british-subject-race-and-poetry-in-the-uk/) ’ was published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other essays and reviews have appeared in the Guardian, The New Statesman, the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement. In 2017, she co-founded the Ledbury Poetry Critics (https://twitter.com/LedburyCritics/) scheme for poetry reviewers of colour. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Sandeep’s books include Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman, scholarly editions for Carcanet Press of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees and The Collected Poems of Nancy Cunard, and Threads with Bhanu Kapil and Nisha Ramayya, as well as three books
of her own poetry: The Marble Orchard, Eidolon, winner of the Ledbury Forte Prize for Best Second Collection, and Faust (Shearsman, 2022).

We are also really excited this month to collaborate with the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize (https://www.wasafiri.org/new-writing-prize/) , which I co-judged this year. The Prize, run by Wasafiri (https://www.wasafiri.org/) magazine, supports writers who have not yet published a book-length work, with no limits on age, gender, nationality, or background, and rewards work in three categories: Poetry, Fiction and Life Writing. The three winners join us this month…

Hasti Crowther (https://twitter.com/youarehasti/) is a poet and writer living in South East London. A member of the Southbank New Poets Collective and the Ledbury Poetry Critics, they are the recipient of the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry, and have recently published poems in bathmagg, zindabad, and The Willowherb Review. They have also co-written short sci-fi film Digging (https://www.channel4.com/programmes/film4-foresight-shorts/on-demand/70987-001) , produced by Film4. Hasti has created shows for Montez Press Radio and also hosts monthly open mic and poetry night Fresh Lip.

Sylee Gore (https://twitter.com/BerlinReified) is an Indian American writer based between Berlin and Oxford. She received the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Fiction (UK), the 2022 Bird in Your Hands Prize (US), and a 2021 VG Wort Neustart Kultur fellowship (DE). In 2022/23, she co-heads a literary partnership between Kelly Writers House, Philadelphia, and Rothermere American Institute, Oxford.

Nadine Monem (she/her) works in hybrid forms of non-fiction, memoir and theory. Her work has been supported by the Tin House Summer Workshop and the Catapult Books memoir workshop for writers of colour. She is the winner of the 2022 Wasafiri New Writing Prize for life writing, and runner-up for the 2022 Sewanee Review (https://thesewaneereview.com/) Nonfiction Contest. Nadine teaches writing and critical theory at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Hasti, Sylee and Nadine’s prize-winning pieces will be published in Wasafiri 113, published Spring 2023, and accompanied by an illustration by Aude Nasr (https://cargocollective.com/audenasr) .

As we head into our 10th year of publishing we hope you enjoy this month, and look back over our archive (https://visualverse.org/images/) to read the work of the last decade’s most exciting new and established voices practicing across continents and themes.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…

Preti Taneja
with Kristen, Lucie and Isabel

Special thanks and welcome to Zaynab Bobi (Nigeria), Ashish Kumar Singh (India) and Wes White (UK) who join the Visual Verse team this month as volunteer editorial assistants.

Follow us on Twitter
Visual Verse Preti Taneja Kristen Harri (https://twitter.com/pretitaneja/) son/The Curved House (https://twitter.com/curvedhouse/)
Sandeep Parmar (https://twitter.com/SandeepKParmar/)
Hasti Crowther (https://twitter.com/youarehasti/)
Sylee Gore (https://twitter.com/BerlinReified)
Nadine Monem (https://twitter.com/nadinemonem/)

Volume 05, Chapter 11 | September 2018

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Image by Penny Byrne

Dear writers, readers and friends,

September! How we love this month. To celebrate the turning of the seasons, we’ve handed the curation of Visual Verse over to writer and performance poet Carmen Marcus. Together with Carmen, we are proud to bring you one of our finest images alongside one of the finest selections of form-breaking prose we’ve had the pleasure to publish.

Our featured image this month is by Australian artist Penny Byrne (https://pennybyrneartist.com/home) . This piece, called Fukushima Symphony, is the epitome of what we love about Byrne’s work: it’s aesthetically seductive (even a little quaint) while being politically charged and thought-provoking. We hope it inspires the best of your words.

Carmen Marcus (http://Carmenellen2013.wordpress.com) , our guest curator and lead writer, is from Saltburn in North Yorkshire. Her debut novel How Saints Die is published with Vintage in 2018. It won New Writing North’s Northern Promise Award and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. She is an advocate for working class voices and set up the No Writer Left Behind (http://www.nowriterleftbehind.wordpress.com) website to share the journeys of under-represented writers. She has written and performed poetry for The Royal Festival Hall, Durham Book Festival and BBC Radio. She’s currently working on her second novel and her poetry project The Book of Godless Verse, funded by Arts Council England. She strives to live up to the words of her first critic and primary school teacher: ‘minus one house-point, weird’.

Carmen’s selection of writers begins with Kathy Hoyle (http://www.kathyhoyleblog.wordpress.com) , a recent Creative Writing graduate from The Open University. She writes short prose fiction, flash fiction and creative non-fiction. She has been both long- and short-listed in various competitions and her work has appeared in several online lit mags such as Ellipseszine and Spelkfiction. In 2017 she was highly commended for Spread The Word’s inaugural Life Writing prize for her piece ‘Scab’. She is currently working on a novel Kingfisher Blue, a coming of age story, set against the backdrop of the 1984 miner’s strike. She says she will work for chocolate…

Next is Iain Rowan (https://www.iainrowan.com) , a writer who lives in the north-east of England. In 2017 he was shortlisted for the Bath Novel Award, and in 2018 he won a Northern Writers’ Award. Iain is also Director of the Sunderland Festival of Creative Writing, which we urge you all to check out.

Our fourth piece comes from Lisette Auton, a disabled writer, activist, spoken word performer, theatre-maker and creative practitioner. She is a Creative Future Literary Award winner for poetry and her children’s novel has gained her a place on Penguin RHUK’s #WriteNowLive programme. Friend Lisette on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/lisette.grout) to find out about her wordy adventures, particularly since she specialises in working with people whose voices are not fully represented in the mainstream.

Douglas Bruton (http://douglasrdb.blogspot.com) throws words together. Sometimes they make sense and sometimes they even make stories. He sends those thrown-together words ‘out there’ and every now and then that makes sense, too. He has been published in many nice places, including Northwords Now, New Writing Scotland, The Delinquent, The Vestal Review, Interpreter’s House, Flash Magazine, The Irish Literary Review, Fiction Attic Press, and in an Edinburgh anthology by Freight Books and most recently by The Fiction Desk. His first novel for grown ups will be published in December 2018.

Astra Bloom (https://twitter.com/AstraBloom) writes poetry fiction and creative non fiction for all ages. She has been shortlisted by Bridport prize, she won Bare Fiction poetry prize, was runner up and Sussex winner in the Brighton Prize, was shortlisted by Live Canon Poetry and has been published by Magma poetry magazine and Under The Radar journal. She’s recently been commended by Brittle star and longlisted by Mslexia International Novel award for two novels. Astra has a short story forthcoming in A Wild and Precious Life, an anthology on the theme of recovery from mental and physical illness and addiction, which featured on the For Books Sake site as their Weekend read. She is one of the 16 new writers selected by Kit De Waal for the Common People anthology of working class writing and her novel has been selected by Penguin Random House for their Write Now Live initiative.

So dear readers, there we have it – a selection of some of the best voices in the game to inspire and delight you. Send us your 50 to 500 words, written in the space of an hour in response to the image. We publish one piece per writer and only around 100; submission deadline is 15^th September.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…

Carmen, Preti, Kristen and Lucie